If you didn’t know it yet, I announce it to you: We’re at the end of the year. And it seems that everyone is doing their “Top five stuff of 2004″ so I won’t be different. But to be a “little” different, I’ll use Top 3’s.

Top 3 - Discs I bought in 2004

1. Les Trois Accords - Gros Mammouth Album Turbo
2. Sum 41 - Chuck
3. Yellowcard - Ocean Avenue

Top 3 - Bands I started listening to in 2004

1. Duran Duran
2. Beau Dommage
3. The Smashing Pumpkins

Top 3 - Best movies of 2004

1. Spider-Man 2
2. I, Robot
3. Dans Une Galaxie Près De Chez Vous, le Film

Top 3 - Blogs I read the most in 2004

1. SimpleBits by Dan Cederholm
2. kottke.org by Jason Kottke
3. Photomatt by Matt Mullenweg

Top 3 - Best web browsers of 2004

1. Mozilla FireFox
2. n/a
3. n/a

Top 3 - Best web applications of 2004

1. WordPress
2. del.icio.us
3. Deviant Art v4

Top 3 - Best webzines of 2004

1. Esthetika
2. A List Apart
3. Digital-Web

So that’s it. If you have something to say about those Top 3’s or if you have another Top 3 to suggest, say it in the comments.

I found this list of links at DeviantArt. Some days ago, a huge earthquake made over 80,000 victims in Asia. Please consider making a donation to help victims’ families.

• American Red Cross International Response Fund
• AmeriCares South Asia Earthquake Relief Fund
• Direct Relief International International Assistance Fund
• Médecins Sans Frontières International Tsunami Emergency Appeal
• Oxfam Asian Earthquake & Tsunami Fund
• Sarvodaya Relief Fund for Tsunami Tragedy
• UNICEF South Asia Tsunami Relief Efforts

Thank you.

Matthew Mullenweg and all the WP community released bbPress, a new forum software. Open-Source, Free, Simple and Usable.

The goal of bbPress is to bring some weblog and WordPress sensibilities to forum software. It’s never going to have a tenth of the features of phpBB or vBulletin, but that’s a feature itself.

I didn’t test the software yet, I’ll probably do it this afternoon, but I bet it’s great. I don’t know how Matt could create a ‘bad’ software ;)

Update: I tested the software on my local web server and it had some features I couldn’t test, like the registration, that involves the use of the mail() function in PHP, which cannot be used from the IP address 127.0.0.1. Anyway, I can say without testing it that “Simplicity” is used at its maximum…

Yes, I got injured by doing snowboarding, yesterday night, at Le Relais. Now I heard you saying “Oh! I bet he was doing a 6-feet-high jump while doing a tail grab, and then he fell on his back!” … No. I was on a “very difficult” rated track. I was riding at a quite high speed and I didn’t see the huge icy spot I was riding on. So, I fell right on my face, on the ice. It was pretty painful and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a headache in my life.

So this it it. That’s the biggest injury I got in snowboarding. And no, I didn’t break my new goggles.

Martin and Pepijn will be happy: fizzy is back for an entry! I thought it was a good idea to show you how fizzy (and iFiz) evolved during the pasts years and months. But before, let me bring you back a bit of history. I started fizzy in July 2003. I changed its URI to ifiz.net in February 2004 — but the name was still fizzy — and I changed it to iFiz in April 2004. So now everyone knows the story, here are the styles that have been used.

Blackedout

This is the “original” one. The one that helped me to get known in the Winmod community. I built it with metapad, which is a pure text editor, with extra non-HTML functions. The design was using tables since I wasn’t aware of the existance of CSS. Of course, I was using CSS for elements styling (eg. bold text, tables border) but that’s the farthest I was using it. And also, I wasn’t aware of the existance of standards compliant browsers. In fact, I didn’t know what were standards… Hey! I was 16 years old! Anyway, that style means a lot for me, because I never got so much positive feedback for a creation of mine.

iFiz.net 1.0

Oh! The alternate stylesheets! The power of switching stylesheets! It was the perfect occasion for me to show my hard CSS skills in… tables styling. That’s almost the only thing that was changing through the different styles. Tables colors, and the main logo, which were created in Photoshop, and which I was really proud of. But at that time, it was not very frequent to see a website in which you could chose up to 5 styles, 6 in you include the raw layout. With the blue stylesheet, the #616F8A blue became the official fizzy main color. You can notice that the gray grid on a white background was still used to preserve the old good taste of fizzy.

iFiz.net 2.0 (cloudy reality)

Now, the real CSS. Absolute positioning, nested divs, first experiments of XHTML. If you ever saw this style applied to ifiz, you’re a kind of lucky person, because that style has not been used for a long time. While I was modding it, I started to remove all the “main” original features of the style itself. I removed the header. I removed the rounded boxes (which were drop-shadowed, but not in the screenshot). I ended up with an ugly style with a imaged header showing never-ending mountains ranges, which I refused to take a screenshot of, due to its uglyness.

iFiz.net ifiz 3.0 (dot pixelarmy dot org)

I continued to mod the “mountain” style, and — believe me or not — I ended with this style. Weird, huh? All in blue tints. There is nothing special to say about this style, except that it seems that most people prefer it to the current exomel one…

So that was the list of the past fizzy styles. Hope you laughed a bit.

It’s been one whole week since I finished the school term. One whole month of holidays! I realized that I don’t have a lot of things to do at home, since I have only 40 hours of dial-up connection a month. Yeah, 40 hours. Usually, I don’t use all of them because I’m home 8 days a month (4 weekends of 2 days). But now I got the whole month to reach them… which I think it’s nearly done…

What can I do? I just bought this website. Isn’t it normal that I want to be absolutely sure that everything is doing well, and in meantime, post some entries on that wonderful WordPress engine!

Welcome to exomel! Exomel is my new blog/portofolio in to replace ifiz - the french-canadian english blog.

The blog is now powered by WordPress, which is actually more powerful than Cutenews, although Cutenews is pretty flexible and able to be “heavy-modded”.

Also, maybe you noticed it, I got a “real” domain name. At this time, I had to buy one, because if I want to use it as a professional website, maybe in few years, I had to buy a .com (or a .anything, but .com is nifty). I’m now hosted with DreamHost.

I had the word “melon” in my head for a couple of weeks, and I wanted it in my domain name. I chose “exotic melon” -> “exomel” because it sounds cool, and I got a very positive feedback when I said it to the people I know.

Now, for the sidebar. There is the “Fresh” section which lists all the recents exomel entry. There is also the “Linked” section which is a kind of Blogroll. The “Plugged” is a respawn of my “Daily Picks” section in ifiz. And the “Not so exotic” section displays the current weather in Quebec City.

Things to do (DONE!):

• Validate XHTML and CSS on every page…
• Redirect ifiz to exomel
• Uploading the wallpapers
• Build a complete “Linked” section list
• Fixing some weather bugs… Those damn <li> tags!
• Experimenting things with my domain ;)

Finally, please update your bookmarks, although I should ask qoa if he could make a redirection from ifiz.

So, that was the first entry.

After testing out MT, Blogger and WP, I tested out TP. Downloading the file is not a big deal, only a 160kb ZIP file. But the installation is a bit hard to start, since there’s not included “readme” file. They need a file which says that you have to open “textpattern/setup.php” to start the installation.

So, after I had installed the thing, I had some fun by playing with the several options of TextPattern. The functions are well organized. The system is not very hard to understand. I had some problem with the “clean” URI function, but I fixed, knowing a bit of Apache scripting. The template editing is quite simple to understand. You can edit whole “pages” and/or mini “forms”. All of that is working with specific tags.

But the feature I found the most interesting, is the so-much-easy design integration. In other words, integrate a blogging software to an existing layout, which was a pain to with WordPress. But in TextPattern, doing it is fun! Unlike in WordPress, it doesn’t have a very advanced “default” layout, which make it more easy to customize. E.g. I just included my ifiz style sheet to the TP main page, and it worked at 80%. I just changed some bits of XHTML and it worked at 100%.

Another cool thing is the Textile support. Textile, for those who don’t know it, is a kind of simple formatting language, like BBCode.

In fact, I have to say that TextPattern is the simpler blogging software I’ve ever tested. And, like for WordPress, if there was a “import Cutenews entries” function, I’d switch to it!

P.S. - If you have suggestion of blogging software you would like me to test, say it!

Hey! You are not in Pixelarmy website! It’s here. I found this link in my referrers, so I went to check what it was. I didn’t catch the purpose of the page the first 10 seconds I looked at it. OK. Is it a kind of compilation of nice websites? If it’s so, I’m pretty happy to see my site there! So, I repeat it, your not in Pixelarmy, you’re in ifiz! But, still want to thank gabilondo for his Blogomania.

Oh! And on another hand, just check at Modzine.net to make some hits and show pogz that we want Modzine back! Damn, this is so unique :-)

Update: YAY?