Well, over the past few days, I’ve been working on a new layout for robokira.com.  It’s just a second version of the previous layout - I still kept the cupcake image, but I cleaned everything up and made the sidebar wider (which was my main beef with the old layout - that tiny sidebar pissed me off!), and as an added bonus: everything is XHTML validated!  Hell yeah!   Who cares about that?  Well, I do.  Because I am a geek.

The art page still isn’t up yet, but I’m working on it.

Once I get all this boring website stuff up and running, then I can begin focusing on actually using this as a blog.

So, last night while attempting to fall asleep, I flashed on an idea about robokira.com.  I was depressed because I love this site, and I hardly use it, so I was thinking of ways to make better use of my web space.  Since I really don’t do much art anymore, it makes little sense to me to have this be primarily an art site.  I think I’ll actually be turning this into more of a blog site.  I’ve always hated blogs, but I thought: “Hey.  I am a (relatively) hip teenager living in Hawaii, aren’t I?  Couldn’t I write about how that goes?”

I would love writing about what it’s like growing up as an Asian American in Hawaii.  I would promise to make it 102% interesting.  Of course, that would require me making a new layout that’s much more suitable to being a blog (the tiny navigation bar to the right is killing me!), but frankly I am a lazy ass without a working FTP program, so that will have to wait.  Of course, I’ll still keep all my art and photography on display here, but they will be in the backstage.

Fun stuff!  Now I just need to think of what to write about.. but that should be easy, because, uh, I never shut up.

So, as you can see, this layout is almost annoyingly cute. I’ve had a lot of problems with it, as it’s been a bitch to code. The original version of this layout was much more interesting, but I had problems trying to code the sidebar on the left. So it’s basically the same layout as dreadpirates.org, just with a different image. Boo. I suck, I know.

I think the hardest part was installing this stupid blog. You guys don’t know how many hours I spent trying to find a suitable blog/news publishing program. After many hours of searching, I first tried TextBook, but I had problems with that. So then I tried WordPress, which is what you’re seeing right now. :) I’m kind of disappointed that the blog entries are id numbers instead of actual page names (like in TextPattern!), but it’s been a little bit easier to use. Still annoying, though. I had to recode the entire layout to make it work with WordPress. Geez.

Anyway, I hope you all appreciate my hard work. There are still a lot of things that need fixing, so I’ll be working on that in the coming week!

So, in an effort to make my site more interesting to me and to you, I’ve been working on a new layout, more content, and.. uh, less art. I know the primary purpose of robokira.com is to be my art site, but I realized that is the reason that I barely update it. It’s just an art site.

Now it’s going to be so much more! Using this new news system (man, I love saying that) powered by textpattern.com, I’ll be posting a lot of updates that may or may not have to do with art.

Like I said, I’ll also be adding more content: I’m planning on opening a photography section, a graphic art section, a music section, and maybe even a snooty comic book review section… who knows! I’m excited, though.

So, just to be social n’ all: I’ve been playing a lot of Granado Espada lately. It’s an amazing, innovative Korean MMORPG that I’ve been dying to place since 2004. I was approved to be a closed beta tester, which means I get to play it and you guys can’t. :) Yet.— Kira Okamoto