So it is not surprising that I will spend time to choose the right fonts. What is surprising is that I just found myself selecting non-standard fonts that are not available out-of-the-box on the platform or environment I’m using the fonts for.

It started because a friend bought a font. That was for a Samsung Galaxy S II (SGS2) Android smartphone. Until then, I had not seriously considered buying a font. But this got me interested in exploring fonts on my SGS2. The default choices included was very limited. There are more free ones available, and there are also paid options. They don’t cost much per single font, but of course, the cost adds up pretty quickly if you want to buy a bunch of them.

For me, choosing fonts is both easy and hard. It’s easy, because I can filter quickly based on some of my “mandatory requirements”. For me, fonts for general text must have several characteristics:

1. I really, really, want typefaces where the ‘I’ (capital-eye), ‘l’ (small-ell), and ’1′ (number one) are easily distinguishable. These are usually the most problematic ones. Sometimes, the ‘O’ (capital-oh) and ’0′ (number zero) also look-alike, or the ‘j’ (small-jay) looks too much like the ‘i’ (small-eye).
2. I have a strong preference for serif fonts, at least for body text. They are easier to read. Serifs usually look good in print and on-screen when you have a high resolution display (i.e. enough pixels for each character). It might be a bit different with small text on a small display when you don’t have enough pixels. So, for example, I would go with a sans-serif font on my SGS2.
3. This is a difficult characteristic to describe. I like to see “more”, which may mean that the font needs to be compact. Yet at the same time, I want to see clarity and separation in the strokes. This may mean the font needs to be more “spacious” and “roomy”. I think, basically, what is needed is some moderation.

When I apply these “rules”, the selection of available fonts gets narrowed down very quickly. I won’t have too many to choose from. Herein lies the problem. The “rules” narrow down the selection till there’s nothing left. So now, I have to work in the reverse direction: relaxing my “rules”, see what I’m willing to compromise, until something comes up for consideration. At that point, I realize, whatever I compromised on, well, I don’t really want to compromise that.

Then, the cycle repeats. It’s really frustrating.

So on my SGS2, after much tedious effort of buying and refunding on Android Market (now called Google Play), I sort of decided Felbridge was it. However, there was a problem. There was too much inter-line spacing such that in the Android Agenda Widget, Felbridge could not display as many lines as I would like it to. Tahoma, a free font that I could download, did much better in showing more lines. But Tahoma was a little “congested”, and in my opinion did not look as good as Felbridge. Sigh, dilema. Tahoma won. Free doesn’t cost money, so I’ll make do with Tahoma.

Fortunately, it seems the display problem in the Android Agenda Widget could be a bug, because I noticed in an app update, Tahoma could now show even more lines than before! Ok, so I put back Felbridge, and while it still did not show as many lines as Tahoma did, it was good enough.

Felbridge is beautiful. It is designed for online use, and also renders well in print. The designer describes Felbridge as “straightforward sans serif with strong, clear letterforms which would not degrade when viewed in low resolution environments”.

You should take a look at it. Here’s a screenshot from my SGS2.

A new font can make the Android interface on the SGS2 so much more beautiful and nicer to look at. I know, I can just imagine some of you out there are thinking right now, “it’s just a font, what’s the big deal about it?” Well, I think this is like art. Some people appreciate it, some other people might not. Felbridge is gorgeous to me.

So anyway, it got me thinking about fonts for the web again. Could I do something with my blog site?

Previously, for my blog site, I had settled on Georgia for the main body text. It’s a font that is available in all modern web browsing environments. This is important because it ensures the most consistent look for the blog site whether you’re viewing it on Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or whatever, on whichever platform. I chose to go with it instead of the de facto Times New Roman.

Now, I’m looking beyond standard fonts provided out-of-the-box from the web browser environment. Why not consider web fonts? Modern web browsers are supported by Google Web Fonts, so it seems I can still somewhat guarantee the rendering consistency across various web browser environments.

So what I’ve now come up with is the Droid Serif font. It satisfies all my requirements. Its metrics are close to Georgia’s, which makes the latter a good fallback font in the event the Google Web Font magic fails to work. This is the description of Droid Serif from Google Web Fonts:

The Droid Serif font family features a contemporary appearance and was designed for comfortable reading on screen. Designed by Steve Matteson, Type Director of Ascender Corp, Droid Serif features slightly condensed letterforms to maximize the amount of text displayed on small screens. Vertical stress, sturdy serifs and open forms contribute to the readability of Droid Serif while its proportion …

Notice the keywords “comfortable reading”, “condensed letterforms”, “maximize the amount of text displayed”, and “open forms”. Just the sort of things I look for. Here’s a zoomed in screenshot of a paragraph from above.

I’ve decided to keep other san-serif fonts on this site using Arial for now. The Droid Sans font doesn’t seem to render very nicely in Chrome on Mac OS X. (Firefox and Safari on Mac OS X is okay, as is Chrome on Windows 7.) It’s a pity that Google’s own web browser doesn’t work all that well with their web font service.

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The last week, I’ve been on a roll – writing one post per day. It just happened that there were things to write last week. It’s not a posting rate that is sustainable now. Maybe, I could target an average of one post every two days. That had been my goal a long time ago, but there were many months that went by without achieving this goal. Writing takes time. Actually, the writing itself doesn’t take that much time. What takes a lot of time is when I need to do some research for the post. Some of these research does take a lot of work, but they aren’t so apparent when you read what finally gets posted.

I’ve just recently embarked on implementing some integration between my blog and Facebook. Yup, everyone’s on Facebook. It seems you get a lot more readership posting on Facebook. It would be such a neat thing to capitalize on Facebook’s reach to draw audience to this blog. So I turned to Wordbooker, a neat WordPress plugin that integrates Facebook into a WordPress blog.

This isn’t my first time trying out Wordbooker. The last time I tried, I faced some usability issues. I don’t remember what it was right now, but it was something not good enough that I abandoned it. I was just merely curious about Facebook integration at that time, and I didn’t really mind it that there wasn’t any integration. So I let the idea pass.

Now, of course, my perspective has changed. I want the integration. There didn’t seem like there was any other solution out there quite as complete as Wordbooker. Wordbooker seems to do just about all the basics that you could ask for. Posts in the blog get posted to Facebook. Comments in the blog can be cross-posted to Facebook, and similarly, comments from Facebook brought back into the blog. You can have the posts published in your own Timeline, on separate pages, or both. There are plenty of customization options. If you’re looking for some WordPress-Facebook integration options, check out Wordbooker.

The next thing I did was to set up a Facebook page for the blog. I don’t know why yet, or have a very good reason, but it just seems to be a good idea to keep my personal Facebook presence separate from the blog’s presence on Facebook. Yeah, other blogs are doing that too. I suppose the separation comes in pretty useful when people want to follow the blog page, but not my own life. (It’s not a matter of privacy, since it is possible to manage that without having to create as separate page.)

If you find it easier to follow this blog via Facebook, just “like” the page: www.facebook.com/zitseng.com.

I didn’t realize till I was almost done writing this post that I’ve already published 1000 posts on my blog. This will be the 1001^st post. Granted, some of the posts here are really short (called “asides”) and are only a little more elaborate than a tweet at most, this is still a somewhat of a milestone. On to the 10K milestone next! Oh wait… that’ll take like another 27 years even if I post an average of once per day.

Blogging is a hobby that I do in my spare time, although I have been hoping that I might be able to monetize it, or at least be able to reap some cool benefits out of it. At one time, Google Adsense was working well for me… but well, for various reasons, I’m not with using Google Adsense anymore. But, slowly, I’m hoping to get other engagements that will spin some benefits for me. Yup, I’m working on that.

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Did you know you can get yourself a stack of Facebook business cards, free of charge? Oh well, you do have to pay for shipping, which is a reasonably nominal charge. The business cards are really free, no gimmicks, courtesy of Moo. You can order a box of 50 business cards from a convenient link on Facebook. Then you’re sent off to Moo’s website to customize your card, provide delivery details, and pay for the delivery.

Moo’s offer for the free box of 50 business cards is conveniently integrated into Facebook. First, you go to your Timeline, then click on About, then look in the box on Contact Info. There is a small little icon that looks like a business card right up next to the Contact Info title. Click on it, then in the pop-up box that appears, click on Print Cards.

The free business cards have a certain standard template. The front has the look similar to the new Facebook Timeline header. Yup, the wide panorama picture at the top with your face photo inset. Moo automatically pulls these photos from Facebook to build the template. They also pull other data automatically to pre-fill some of the information for your business card.

What’s rather interesting with Moo’s business card printing is that each of your 50 business cards can potentially be different. What happens is that Moo pulls up to 50 cover photos from your Facebook Timeline, and uses them for the large photo on the front of the business cards. If you don’t have that many cover photos, whatever you have will simply be repeated. (In my case, all I had was one cover photo, so all my 50 business cards had the same photo.)

This seems to be the new trend nowadays for people to print business cards with many different designs (or in this case, different photos). Instead of a stack of completely identical cards, you can have a great variety of cards. In this way, you can select different cards to give to different people. Or you could even let people choose which card they want from you.

I think this could be pretty useful in certain trades. For example, photographers can use their business cards as a portfolio to show to potential clients. The clients can then take away whichever card they fancy. That might help them to better remember the person.

Just some tips: Make sure your photos are good high-resolution ones. I was pleased with the paper stock (probably some 300gsm). The letter prints are crisp and sharp. However, the photos didn’t look so great on mine. I’m guessing the photos from my Facebook, while looking great on-screen, weren’t good enough for print.

The business cards are free. So go grab yours today!

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I’m wondering about it, because, at some times when I interact with various organizations, I’m asked for my Twitter username. Sure, they ask about it along with my Facebook URL too. But I’m just surprised that Twitter is regarded as being on the same level of Facebook. I never, personally, thought of Twitter that way. So, I wondered, should I keep up with a Twitter presence?

I’m not too fond to sign up with too many things. Yes, I may sign up to try out and explore. But I don’t want, or have the time, to keep active with all of them. I’ve been on FourSquare, for example, long enough to earn a decent number of badges, but I’ve left the account dormant for some time. I still get LinkedIn requests from time to time, although I’ve also decided to leave it dormant. There just isn’t enough time to distribute among all the social media “obligations”.

So far I haven’t had much issues leaving dormant the various things I’ve abandoned. Twitter is just that one exception. Is it really still useful these days?

Yes, I’ve noted with interest that in the midst of the SMRT breakdown saga last December, SMRT launched a Twitter account. Not a Facebook page, but a Twitter account. It’s yet another thing that tells me Twitter is still quite in the playing field of social media.

What do you think?

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The latest version 3.3 has made a bunch of usability improvements. The most important one, to me, is the new drag-and-drop media uploader to add content, such as photos, to a post. I always try to incorporate photos to my post, and the old interface was, at best, cumbersome to navigate to get at content in my computer. The new drag-and-drop interface makes it so much simpler and straight-forward.

The version 3.3 announcement also describes a bunch of other changes which I’m sure will be particularly welcoming and useful to new users of WordPress. When I first started using WordPress in 2007, I would not say it was complicated to use then. However, WordPress has gotten a lot more feature-rich since. To a new user, the things you could do with WordPress could be mind-boggling and overwhelming. So it’s a good thing that version 3.3 remembers about new users, making sure they are not left too far behind.

Recently, I’ve realized that when I write, I like to do so with a visualization of how the end product will look like. Yes, that’s what we’re all used to: Microsoft Word is a WYSIWYG editor. But I thought I could focus on content first, then fix up the grammar, style, layout and other stuffs later.

It turns out that while I can hammer out main points, I find myself always needed to visualize the final product. For example, I’ll be thinking about what photo to incorporate. Or how the page will be laid out.

So what happened recently was this. I was trying to write a draft of a blog post for Omy.sg in Microsoft Word, then later upload it to the Omy.sg blog site. Microsoft Word is still a visual editor right? Well, I somehow terribly unproductive. It’s not that I don’t know or don’t like using Microsoft Word. I’ve written plenty of documents with Microsoft Word. But this one was going to end up as a blog post on a website. I kept wanting to visualize how it would look like on the web.

I gave up doing the draft in Microsoft Word, and just wrote directly on the Omy.sg blog site. I had wanted to do the draft in Microsoft Word first so that I can work while being offline (i.e. disconnected from the Internet).

Back on the topic of this WordPress site, I’ve been making some theme changes recently. I’ve been wanting to do so for like a whole year already, but just never got around to doing it. Progress is still slow, but you’ll see the front page is now laid out quite differently. I’m trying to achieve a blog-magazine sort of look and feel.

This is a hand-coded theme. Just like my last theme coding project, I just couldn’t find any ready-made ones that I like. Oh, I’ve given up, at least for now, trying to code this to be generic and universal enough for the theme to be released for public download. It’s just too much hassle. So it’s sort of totally customized to my site specifics.

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For some years, we have been inundated with so many new social media platforms. Although Friendster and Myspace didn’t really catch up in a big way here (or at least not in my social circle), there were enough of others: LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. All these cloud-based services were drowning out personal blogs. Blogs as this one. Yes, I’m definitely posting in here much less nowadays than say one or two years ago. Not surprisingly, Facebook and, more recently, Google+, has been taking up blogging time.

For some people, they have simply taken their blog postings to Facebook, or other similar social web platforms. Some others have simply changed the way they share, long posts (i.e. anything over 100 words) have been reduced to just a few sentences, often even less.

I’m just wondering how the social web landscape will change in the next year or two. The myriad of social web platforms are probably going to consolidate. Just Facebook and Google+. Or maybe, well, predominantly Google+. Or perhaps we will continue to see fresh waves of niche services spring up, before they are once again consolidated by some big-name player.

Personal blogs are on their way out. Or they need to re-invent themselves. Perhaps, to re-integrate with the current trend of the social web.

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It’s even more so when you consider that the deal also includes a free Positive SSL certificate from Comodo that would have cost you US$9.95 to get separately.

Well, it turns out this offer doesn’t apply to domain name transfers. It’s only good for a brand new domain registration. But anyhow, since I’ve already started writing about domain transfers from GoDaddy to Namecheap, I’ll just tell you all about it.

If you want to transfer your domain out of GoDaddy, remember to do these things:

1. Make sure your domain is unlocked: Click on My Account, then Domain Manager. Click on the domain name you want to transfer under the My Domains list. On the Domain Details page, look on the left side under the Domain Information heading. The Locked field should read Unlocked, otherwise click on the Manage link to unlock it. It may take a few minutes to unlock the domain.
2. Further down the above list, look for Authorization Code. Click on the Send by Email link. You will receive an email from GoDaddy giving you the Authorization Info. This code is more accurately called the EPP (Extensible Provisioning Protocol) code.

Once you’ve received your EPP code, you can go to Namecheap and start the process to transfer your domain. Go to Domains, then Transfer a Domain. There is a big text box to enter the domain name(s) to transfer. Type your domain name, a comma, and then the EPP code. You also have the opportunity to enter the EPP code later, if you prefer, but you can do it right here. On the next page, click on Add to Cart, then just follow through to checkout. It should be pretty self-explanatory.

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You can read my GreenGeeks vs Bluehost review. There were a few good things going for GreenGeeks, but once my priorities were sorted out, Bluehost was clearly the winner. (Different people have different needs, and obviously some people will find GreenGeeks is the better choice.)

I’ve signed up a 3-year plan, but with anytime money back guarantee, there’s basically no real contract involved. After so many years running my own website, taking care of every detail of it from data centre co-location to server administration, I’m now letting a web hosting company sell me a service that I know perfectly well how to do myself. I hope I won’t be disappointed.

In the last month or so, I’ve been evaluating a bunch of Internet services, the sort of services that enable me to have a website, have my email, and generally have my presence on the Internet. For a start, I’ve started to change my domain name registrar to Namecheap. I’ll move my domains progressively as and when their current registrations expire.  Subsequently, I’m also exploring DNS hosting services.

I’m even thinking about email hosting… such as moving to Google Apps.

Cloud services are finally beginning to win me over. I’ve been slow to adopt hosting services. It’s because I know how to run all the services myself. I have the infrastructure to run the services myself. I don’t need to outsource. But, it’s beginning to get tiring, inefficient, and expensive to do it myself. Expensive isn’t necessarily in monetary terms, but more so in terms of effort.

I’ve been hesitant to trust the cloud or hosting services. You might have heard about the recent AWS outage (see more). That there was downtime was just a minor inconvenience. What was worrying was data loss. Yup, so much for redundant data storage.

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Now, you get to see the products of the 10 finalists, and vote for your favourites. The effort put in by the students is phenomenal. The final product is a one minute video. As you might know, there are 25 frames in one second of video, so there are 1500 frames in the final product. It’s quite a painstaking process to build the entire 1 minute video. The results are all amazing. The animations are really good, and the story lines behind the animations are pretty touching too, especially the… erm, okay, you go view them yourself, I shan’t try to influence.

Here’s how the voting works. You get to vote once on each of 4 platforms: the full website at nemation.sg, the mobile website (at the same URL), on the Facebook page, and SMS. Each time you vote, you need to pick 3 favourite clips. Vote by 6th February. If one of your vote turns out to be the winning entry, you stand to win prizes… like an iPad. More details on the website, of course. There are just 10 clips, each about a minute long, so including think time and clicking time, it won’t take you more than 11 minutes to get through all of them.

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