Rebirth!: 53m1 Becomes Novus.Volce @ novus.volce

Happy almost 1st birthday 53m1/ Canabis Day (No I don’t smoke canabis, unfortunate isn’t it? But if you do, here’s your present. Sorry I couldn’t get you a canabis)! Yes you have stumbled upon 53m1, now renamed “novus.volce”. So After almost a year, I’ve decided to rebrand everything. An evolution if you will. What’s amazing is that coincidentally, this is the 51st post.

The Identity

You may be wondering why there is a “.” between novus and volce. Well in it’s simplest form, it’s like novus by volce. In other words, a division of volce. wait, what’s volce you might ask. I guess you can say it’s my whole online identity. everything with the suffix volce will ideally be something with my name on it. But wait, why didn’t I just use my name? Well because Jonathan Solichin doesn’t have a nice ring to it, and volce gives it room to grow. If I had used Jonathan Solichin instead, the identity will be limited to me. With volce, I can collaborate with my friends to launch something. If we’re getting imaginative, you can say that volce is a company, a family, an idea, if you will, while Jonathan Solichin is a person. People dies, ideas don’t. So who’s in the family? So far we only have this Novus.Volce (The blog), and Aero.Volce (me, personally).

Now what is novus anyway? Novus is Latin for new, novel, unusual, extraordinary, news, novelty, fresh, young, inexperienced, revived. You can see why I’ve chosen it as the prefix for the blog. It is news, written like a novel, and maybe, extraordinary. It is also new and fresh, because it is a blog. Revived because it once was 53m1. Young and inexperienced, well it doesn’t really describe the blog, but it does describe me in a way. After all I’m young (a freshman in high school) and inexperienced, with the “real world”.

But why the “byvolce.com” domain? Well, apparently someone took volce already. weird huh?

The Design

How do you like the new Wordpress design? If you are using ie6, it may not be in tune. So far I’ve finished opera, safari, ie7, and of course Firefox. I’m not sure if I’m going to make it compatible with ie6 right now. Not just because I am lazy, but I am not sure if the new design is going to stay for a while. I don’t know if it’s equal, better, or worst than my last redesign. Of course there is also that thing called lazy. Also, I think the theme might be too cramped and to bland. So what do you think? Should I finish it? Also if you can, report any bugs you find please. Thank you.

The Hosting

Well after a year with 1&1, I switched to Hostmonster. Not because 1and1 sucks, I just had a reason I’m not at liberty to say. So how was it living with 1and1? Well, it was ok. I didn’t have a hard enough problem that I needed to call their customer service. Although I did have 1 night of downtime a couple weeks back. But it was resolved the next morning. So overall, I think for the cheap discounted price I got for it, it was ok.

So far my thoughts on hostmonster is ok. Although unlike 1and1, I did have problems with it. When I wanted to transfer some sql database from 1and1, I had some problems. Hostmonster for some reason didn’t give me enough privelege to be able to import a database. After an hour struggling to find the solution, I gave up and called hostmonster for help. Their customer service was pretty good actually. Not only did I call on a sunday (they have 24/7 customer service), I barely had to wait to talk to a person. And once I did talk to a person, he was very helpful. He was able to import my database without hassling me.

[Update] After a couple of weeks on Host monster, I’ve realized they’re not very good. I’ve had long downtimes. Mostly at night but sometimes creeps into the next day. Get your acts together Hostmonster!

The Transfer

The transferring my Wordpress blog was long. But alas I’ve learned stuff along the way. For one I realized I didn’t need to import Wordpress’ database. To my surprise, Wordpress has an import and export function from a lot of blog service. So I didn’t really need to call customer service. But hey, at least I learned something right?

Another problem was that popularity contest again. At first I installed Wordpress under 2 sub directory. Popularity contest had a problem with me doing that and wouldn’t work. So after hours of trying to solve the error, I finally gave up and moved it up a directory. from there everything was fine. thanks to that Wordpress 2.5 fix.

What else is new?

Well I’ve also gave my self a haircut to go with this whole rebirth process. It’s a whole completely new do. Short not long like my last one. Check it out below in the footer. I’m beginning to think I might be having a midlife crisis here. Anyways, I guess I’ll see you around. Stay classy internet.