Do You Believe In Santa Claus?

Do you believe in Santa Claus? The Macys asks you to prove it by turning yourself into Santa and spread the Christmas cheers around the world. Evan already has his proof, take a look.

Now he wants to spread the Christmas cheers to all of you. View his Christmas Greeting there'll be instructions to make your own e-card (you'll need to upload a picture). The result can be emailed to friends, posted on Facebook or embeded on a webpage. Unfortunately, the embed code didn't work when tried here, so if any of you know how to make it works, please kindly inform us.

The one below was my desparate way using Photoshop to show how fun it is, but it's nothing compare to the original with all the animations and Santa's famous "HoHoHo" and "Naughty or nice". Just try it.

So to all of you who believe in Santa Claus, it's time to grow up prove it! Be Clause and spread the cheers around the world. If you want to, you can email a copy to evan.keona@gmail.com as your Christmas greeting, Evan will love to see it :)
Happy holidays every body!

Decorating My Blog for Christmas

Now that I'm finished trimming this blog, I need to list all things I 've done to my template also give credits all sources whose works are used here. Some sites require me to do this, some don't, but I'll include them anyway, in case I will need it later. Here's the list.

UPDATED on Dec 17, 08: I updated this post to add more details.
Honestly, when I made this post I never thought that many people will be interested in this post even when this post is already not on my front page (now it's stuck on top of my popular post!) They had to be dissapointed when reading this since this was only a list of things I had done to my template. Nothing more, no tips or tricks. So I'm sorry guys if this is not what your looking for.

• New template. The new template I use is called The Professional Template. It is claimed by the designer as their best template ever produced for public use so far. Its original colors were grey and black, so as to give it a Christmas-look I changed the colors to green and red.
  
  UPDATE: In the original article some readers reported to the author that they found problems using the template even after it was revised. For me the only problem I found in the revised version was the comment-author at the comment section overlaped the comment-timestamp. It was due to the negative value of the comment-author top-margin, so I located this code at the HTML page:
  .comment-author {
  margin: -15px -15px 0px -15px;
  And deleted the first minus sign of the margin:
  margin: 15px -15px 0px -15px;
  Done, it's fixed.
  
  FURTHER TWEAK:
  Since I used a picture as the background of my blog, I needed to make some of my columns become transparent so my background become visible. Simple steps to do this are find the section you want to make transparent then add /* */ to its background line. For example this is what I did to my lowerbar. At the HTML page look for this section:
  #lower-wrapper {
  Then add /* */ to its background line to disable it:
  /* background: $lowerbarbgColor; */
  Done.
  


• Latest Blogger features. Somehow when I was editing my template in the Edit HTML menu, I accidently hit “revert widget templates to Blogger default”. As a result, I LOST the built-in Read more..." feature and the Label Cloud widget that I had previously added. The good thing is the latest Blogger features such as the embedded comment form, star-ratings and reader’s reactions are now available on my blog, cool! Do you want these new features on your blog too? Then try what I did Google for better tips ;)
  
  UPDATE: Although it was fun to have the star-ratings and reader's reaction features, they did nothing but slowing down my page loading time, so I disabled one of them: the star-ratings.
  
  Reminder: these 3 features did not come with the original template. Should you want it, you have to manually add them or do what I did. If you try to enable the embed below post comment-form at the setting tab without adding the HTML code, it won't work! And later if you decide to disable it after having the code on your template, you also need to delete the code, otherwise there'll be an empty box below your post-footer.
  


• Christmas header and banner. We can either Google for free Christmas banner/background images or look for tutorials to make one of our own. I did the later and followed tutorials from Eli Burford and Visual Design Core. Then I used this tips to put my corner banner on. Btw I made it in Bahasa saying "Soon it will be Christmas".
  


• Christmas icons. The cute Santa RSS icon on the left sidebar is created by Garcya. The Christmas social bookmark icons are from Fast Icon and I put them at the bottom of every post (honestly, I’m not sure if my readers ever gonna use them, but doesn’t it look cute in there?) Small icons at my menu bar and my bullet lists are from Deviant Art.
  


• Snapshots for comment author. As now I use the “embedded below post comment-form” I can’t see the commenter profile icon like in the “pop-up form”. It only displays the dull standard Blogger/OpenID icon, so I added Snapshots to make it more fun. If my readers use Name/URL to comment, Snapshot will preview their homepage. If they use Google Account, it will show their Blogger profile. Using OpenID will preview the RSS feed. Try hovering your mouse at my Top Commenters Widget list to see how it works.
  
  UPDATE: Be very careful when adding Snapshots since it will automatically generate preview of all links on your page which can be annoying. I only add them to my post section and top commenters widget.
  
  FURTHER TWEAK: I made a small change on the Top Commenters Widget. This widget is based on Yahoo Pipes and by default it will sort descending the commenters name base on their total comments. Then if it finds names with the same number of comments, it will sort them ascending by their latest comment date. I don't like the result of the second step because it makes my widget showing the same old names all the time while new names already came to leave their comments. So I changed the second step sorting method from ascending to descending. Now the widget starts to show new names on it.
  

There, I've listed them all. Do you find anything useful?

We Made A Cover

When Evan was a little baby, a reporter from My Baby magazine made a cover story about us for its July edition. Check this out.

Alright it’s a fake; it would be nice if it’s true though. Thanks to the tips from Kid Tech Guru, you can create a fake magazine covers of your own. Here are some other samples.