Great. Well, I’m a bit behind in terms of technology but I have always believed that the underlying logic and principles of it…… in the past few days, I have been trying out my hand on animated banners, or should I say, animated gif files. That was not the hard part. The hard part came when I wanted to display the code on Wordpress. Surprised? Yes, Pretty In White’s website is using Wordpress. So I wanted to display the code for people to copy and paste, linking the banners, from Pretty In White’s website…… oh my, that’s when the headache started.

Ok, so I thought it would be as easy as a cut and paste operation. I normally do most of the content on Wordpress, HTML view and not in VISUAL view, so when I copy and pasted the link in HTML, the above Banner Appeared. Yay! But wait how do I display the code snippet for people to copy and paste? Oh err …

A short read read at The Wordpress Official website told me to use the [sourcecode] c0de [/sourcecode]. Didn’t work for me. Tried numerous plug-ins … some worked, but the code just went out of alignment breaking the template …. I needed to craft more CSS … not something I wanted. What I really wanted was something simple and easy and so here are my findings from my experimentation;

• Copy any code that you want to display in your page or post. Please take note that I will assume you are in HTML MODE of Wordpress.

Start Out By Copying any HTML code

• Add a new page or post and change your view to VISUAL MODE. Here, paste your code. If you do a PREVIEW of our page, you will see the following;

Now Change To VISUAL MODE

If you do a PREVIEW, you should see your code. Not The BANNER!

• Now switch back to HTML MODE. You will now see that your original code has changed. What has happened is that when pasting in HTML MODE, Wordpress changed your code characters into alternate characters that will give your viewers the ability to see your code on your page or post when you publish.

Look - Some changes to your code! No more < and >!

• Lastly, you will need to replace all the Quote Marks [ " ] with &#34. So now you need to replace all the [ " ] with &#34 …. and that’s it! If you don’t do that, when someone copies it, your code won’t work!
• You can see the final results at http://www.prettyinwhite.com.my/contact/link-exchange.html

If you have a more complicated code you want to change, here is a good source; http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/02/04/wordpresscom-blog-bling-signatures-and-writing-code/

Well, its odd to say that I don’t update my own blog often, cause I am busy updating other people’s websites … what a paradox of sorts! Anyway, I am very pleased to say that I’ve managed to complete the main website of the fashion designers after 1,641,600 seconds of research, customization, profile writing, product writing, picture editing, watermark generation, editorials, proof reading, grammar correction, link exchanges, seo, report analytics, etc ….. *phew* .. that was a whole lot of work for 1 person!!!

So ladies and gents, I am now pleased to showcase my new project for the fashion designers at their site http://www.prettyinwhite.com.my. I’ll be honest, in actual fact, I don’t really know too much about the Wedding Industry in Malaysia, and had to do tons of research on the subject matter. In fact I was very surprised that the guys and gals in Pretty In White, commissioned me, a nobody, self taught techie, to do their site! But thanks to them, I really learnt a lot!!! While doing their site, I was inspired by this Video and Song ……..

Just couldn’t get it out of my head, and I really did think the lyrics were very interesting! Please do feel free to drop me a comment about PRETTY IN WHITE’s new website!!! Oh, and I believe in giving credit and donations to all those wonderful freelance designers and open source codes out there …. I think they have done a pretty good job especially for the stuff I used on Pretty In White’s site!!! Big Special Thanks to Epicera (Brandon R. Jones)!!!

Domo Arigato, and at least I got a chance to update my own site before I continue on another new project, which is like 60 seconds away … Ha ha ha ha …

I knew I had to look for a different look and feel other than graph paper press template’s cause despite them producing very high quality templates, their look and feel is very similar. After much consideration I found a nice template online and the owners of this experiment were extremely happy and decided to adopt it.

Photo:The Lab Ratz; Point&Shoot Camera

I’m sorry I can’t really share with you the link to my works in progress, cause I promised the owners that I will keep it a secret for now (so much for that) and their completion dateline is in about 30 days time, pending all the photo shoots and final artistic direction. Well, lets see how it goes! And I do hope they will design a cosplay dress like Saber’s above!!! Hee hee .. wishful thinking as always…. hee hee

“<title><?php t0l19r24_title( ‘-’, true, ‘right’ ); echo t0l19r24_specialchars( get_bloginfo(’name’), 1 ); ?></title><meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”<?php bloginfo(’html_type’) ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(’charset’) ?>” /> <meta name=”description” content=”John W. Ishii <?php bloginfo(’description’) ?>” /><?php if(is_search()) { ?><meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, nofollow” /><?php }?>”

The internet has since progressed from it’s infancy days of just using one or two very straight forward methods for inclusion into their search engines. This time round they have started to use ALGORITHMS to decipher your website, with SITEMAPS, WEBSITE VERIFICATION, ANALYSTICS, etc …. sheesh … couldn’t someone just come out with a simpler system of getting things done?

And this META thing for the ROBOTS…. or SPIDERS …. it seems  to me that its becoming something like this …..

ALGORITHMS, ALGORITHMS again … I finally get to meet the online SPIDERS (or Robots) up close and personal!! Argh!! What’s all the fuss about asking the spider to FOLLOW or NOT TO FOLLOW. In fact, it looks to us that the spider normally does not do as it’s told!! Ha ha ha ha …… Good luck to us…. and now let the FIGHT BEGIN!!! Coding begins again …..

I met John W. Ishii one fine sunny day, while I was basking in the sun looking for food, and so he caught me, sat me down at a table with bottomless STARBUCKS coffee …. and so the merry me drank and drank, and we chatted about stuff not related to cameras, lenses or photography. How he put up with the tremendous amount of squeaking and preening of whiskers, well, it’s beyond me for now ….

Anyway, it must have been because of all the coffee and me not talking about photography (cause he is a photojournalist and professional photographer… also, ratz don’t talk, so there …) that he threw us the challenge of doing something online …. and the result is this complex equation as illustrated below …..

 Thrilled. I was truely thrilled with the end result …. PET SHOP BOYS! In fact I loved it … cause I swore a life long allegience to PET SHOP BOYS!!! In fact Pet Shop Boys + The Lab Ratz … a very interesting combination, but we are also aware there is a musical group called The Lab Ratz too …. but that’s another story ….. NEIL!! CHRIS!! Love your style and lyrics!

So what do you get when you put a photojournalist and me together? What funny equation will that be? We will illustrate ……

What you really get is BANKSY …. the famous and celebrated graffiti artist, whose works of art is highly sought after, and if you realized, we are actually talking about BRITISH Artist’s here … when John is an AMERICAN …. hoo! hoo!  In fact there is a really great social message in much of BANKSY’s works and we will adopt a similar vein for this project., in telling John’s photos as a photojournalist. We will also begin to chronicle our project works on John’s online presence ….. you can view our  #03 Experiment at http://johnwishii.com.