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Well, it’s Christmas time once again. I wish you all a very Happy day with the ones you love and may all your 2007 wishes come true …

It’s Christmas once again .. and I’m working. I wouldn’t consider designing as work, but I think many would think that I should do something else on Christmas Eve and Christmas day than tweaking layouts and scripts. I love this, so I think it was another well spent holiday.

For some weeks I had in mind a huge re-design for my first site, Dojo.ro. This was my first site and I started loving design after working on it. It’s been 5 years already … Well, as time goes by, so my expectations get higher. Dojo didn’t have the looks I wanted for a site anymore and it was the time for another “face”.

I started working on the layout few days ago. As opposed to my “normal” routine, this time I kinda took my time. Didn’t rush into design, just worked on the colours, images … After 2-3 days the mock-up design was ready and I started the design. Dojo is on Etomite (the main site), so I created a new template based on my design.

But I wanted to have a directory too. So I downloaded phplinkdirectory once again and worked on the template to make it look as the main site. The forums are on IPB, so .. you guessed: re-creating a template, working on the colours, the buttons and images.
Yesterday I was lazy … had to make the new buttons .. but I was just sick of design. I spent 10-13 hours on the site and in the evening I just didn’t want to work anymore. So I waited till today to “release” the new layout and make the final changes.

As you can guess I am also tired now. I think I’ll watch some “The 3rd Rock from the Sun” episodes and just relax. Enough with work .. it’s Christmas in the end

Since so many people already make fun of me that I have no life, I think it was the time to prove them right once again. I have initiated a new project in the Dojo Design network and this is for the Romanian web designers. I don’t know if I have a niche on this, never cared about them to be honest. But still I didn’t find a good Romanian web development community and some of them (those who are online) are filled with people who like to mock at newcomers or make some disrespectful comments when a site is not quite top notch and the owner asked for a review.

In the end Invatam Net is meant to be a Romanian mirror of Wtricks. We’ll have most of my articles here translated for our members there, the post exchange project, the market place and most of the things that made Wtricks special all this time. I really like how our members here treat the newcomers in the forums and how they offer feed-back. I wish I’ll be able to have the same friendly community on Invatam Net.

I have used MyBB this time in order to get used to this script too. Outside the box it’s a good script. I see two main downsides to it:

1. the template system (I am used to the .tpl files on phpBB and the div only layout kinda gave me some work to do). I solved this by creating a new “wrap” layout and put the forums into it.

2. lack of mods and themes. Well, never cared that much for themes since I make my own, but the features are needed and some don’t have a modification made yet. It’s normal for a new script though, I just hope they’ll keep on creating them and adding them.

Invatam Net is on a “pre-launch” period right now. I wanted to have 1 month to play with the script and initiate some topics before the “launch”. We’ll have it “open” from January 1, even if the forums can already be used and joined.

Google seems to have started getting us the initial traffic and this is a good thing. It looks like the famous search engine found us in only days since the forum start, I hope this will get better in the next months.

Few days to the lauch … Let’s hope it will be a good project in the end