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A while ago, the folks over at SkinStyler sent me a couple  of their Apple logo mod stickers for me to try out. Well today I was sitting around the house with my sister and looking at her ancient iBook G4. Suddenly I remembered these classic Apple stickers and asked if she wanted to try it out. She was pretty reluctant, but they were just stickers so we could peel it off if she didn’t like it. Well, here’s what it looked like:

I have to say that the classic rainbow Apple does look a lot better on the white plastic than it did on my aluminum PowerBook. And unlike the previous mod on my PowerBook, this rainbow logo was just a clear sticker that is applied to the exterior of the iBook case. Easily applied and easy to remove.

My sister was afraid people would think she was “full of pride”, but as far as I know it’s still stuck on her iBook.

Early this morning, I put up a new iteration of First Star Print .com. This is the website of a family-owned printing company based in Toronto – my Dad’s actually! As the resident computer dude in the family, the website project was put onto my shoulders. The site is now powered by WordPress which is a far cry from the static html pages I had written up back in 2005.

Snapshot of the redesigned firststarprint.com

Design Decisions

A couple weeks ago, I started working on this FSP web project again. Web design and coding is not my forté (see snapshot of old page on right), so I knew I wanted the new site to be powered by some sort of content management system (CMS).

I tried out an install of Drupal and was playing with the configuration and settings over a number of weeks. Drupal is great. It’s an open source project, so there is a plethora of modules and add-ons for the system. It’s very powerful and is built to support community-based websites with many users. Although using Drupal seemed like overkill for a small website project, I was attracted to the ability to add new modules and new functionality whenever required. Maybe FSP would need an e-commerce system later, so I wanted to be prepared.

Over time, I began to notice one thing – despite its positive attributes, Drupal was SLOW. It seemed that calls from Durpal to the database on our host, iPower, were extremely slow (sometimes 3.6 sec per request). I tried performing some repairs on the database, but the results were still not optimal.  I’m not sure if it was my configuration, or some combination of the company’s web host set up, but I just couldn’t get Drupal to speed up.

In the meantime, I was also playing with an install of WordPress. WordPress’ simplicity and familiarity were good points. It also has a collection of plugins and themes that would allow for customizations. Although e-commerce would be out of the picture, WordPress seemed to suit out needs for the time being. Mainly, I needed something to serve a few pages and be easy to add new content. Although it was a little slower than having static html pages, it was no where near as slow as Drupal. So WordPress it is! Currently, the content on the FSP is a bit sparse, but that can easily be added over time. There was an urgency to get the outdated material out, and emphasize a focus on custom apparel printing.

FanExpo was happening this past weekend in Toronto. Its a Sci-Fi/Anime/Horror/Gaming Con all rolled into one. And it attracts a fair share of genre celebrities. Like… LEONARD FREAKIN NIMOY!!!  I was actually going to miss FanExpo this year because we had a camping trip on the same weekend at SandBanks provincial park. But due to the pouring rain, we had to leave the morning after we arrived at the campsite. But the weekend wasn’t all lost… [Flickr: FanExpo 2009]