Orangescale Studio

Last week, we were mentioning about our MOO mini card delivery status here in our blog. The next day, we got a letter from MOO Staff (Daniel Morrow).

I've just seen your posting on orangescale and wanted to apologize for the delay with your cards. Recently we have discovered that it is taking about 6 weeks for customers in parts of the far east to receive packages from the UK. Please bear with us and hopefully it will arrive in the next few days. In future we are recommending that customers further away from us should take advantage of our express shipping service which is trackable and guarantees delivery in just a few days

Apologies once again and best regards from London,

Daniel Morrow
Service Agent - MOO

Wow! I did not expect to have a personal email like that. I mean, I never thought that I would get response from them. But, they did that. REALLY appreciated, MOO!

So, how's our MOO delivery status? We finally got it! After receiving a letter from MOO, we just waited. We're understand that it takes time to deliver. So, if we have to wait -- even until 6 weeks! -- we're find with that. Why? Because we're actually got our card for free after upgrading to Flickr Pro. On July 5th, I found an envelop on my desk. And it was from MOO. I did not wait any longer to open that. Once again, thanks MOO!

Hey, we have uploaded more than 1,000 photos to our Flickr account! So far, we're happy about it. There are many Flickr users that have more than 1,000 or more, but for us... it's an achiement. :)

Anyway, when we upgraded our Flickr account to the pro version, we got an offer to get some printed cards from MOO. Two weeks ago (June 19th, 2008), Lala use this offer. And she already got the email confirmation, saying that the order had been processed. But, it's already two weeks and we haven't got our MOO. I'm not blaming MOO. Probably, there is something wrong during the delivery. May be it is related to the postal service. Or, it is related to the post office, here in our city.

Now, we're waiting for our MOO. Hope we can get it soon.

Last week, we did some actions for Fashionese Daily (FD). There are some changes applied for this high-traffic website. What are they?

First, we're helping Hanzky -- hey, congratulation for the new baby! -- upgrading the server and also the forum. All processes were done without major problems. After having a discussion, Fashionese Daily came into decision to upgrade the server. It has more RAM now. After the upgrades, the website (especially the forum) run smoothly even on peak hours. Anyway, according to vBulletin forum statistics, there were 541 online users.

After upgrading the server, vBulletin also released its latest package: vBulletin 3.7.0. So, we decided to upgrade. Why? Because this release offers many great features and it will be great if we make it available for FD forum.

Even the features are there, but we made some recommendation first for FD. Just to make sure that it's safe to have them in the forum -- server-friendly is a must. And because there are many changes on the templates, we reverted the template to default template for 3.7.0 for the upgraded template. It took less than an hour to complete the whole process.

Selama hampir setahun menggunakan theme yang sama untuk cinila.com, Wordpress (blogtool yang saya gunakan) tidak berhenti berkembang. Dari perbaikan security hole, penambahan tagging system, sampai yang terbaru (Wordpress 2.5) dan yang paling dirasakan oleh pengguna Wordpress adalah perombakan design dashboard.

Jadi dengan banyaknya perkembangan dan pembaruan di Wordpress itu, cinila.com benar-benar membutuhkan theme baru yang lebih sesuai.

Theme kali ini sebenarnya sama dengan theme sebelumnya, Snail Theme, tiga kolom layout dengan dua sidebar di kanan. Yang berubah adalah pengurangan plugin untuk layout, yang kini bisa dengan mudah kita capai dengan tag baru Wordpress. Contohnya tag clouds (yang dulu saya menggunakan category clouds plugin), dan juga aside yang dengan mudah bisa dicapai dengan query_posts.

After being with Movable Type for the last three -- or longer, I think -- I decided to move to other platform. Now, my blog (not this blog!) is powered by WordPress. That's our first news. :)

Another news, Lala also made a new design for her blog. This time, her blog is using Stitches Theme. As always, a cute design.

If you follow us reading this blog, we are still helping Fashionese Daily. We are standing behind a great and busy website: Fashionese Daily. Last week, we silently upgrade its forum to the latest vBulletin. We tried to keep the process as fast as we can. And, we did it. It took for about 20 minutes to upgrade and we made sure that everything should work properly. Looks good now.

Right now, we're working on a new site. And, it's a photo-related site. I'll tell you about this later. Some works are waiting... See ya!

Last month, there is a new mass transportation model launched in Yogyakarta. It's Trans Jogja. Right now, we will not go further writing about how this i-think-good-solution works. We would like to share about how we built the website. :)

It was started because I found it hard to get the information like bus routes, fare, and other technical aspects. When this bus operated for the first time -- during the trial period -- people will try to find out about it, right? But, there was only limited information. I know, we can read newspapers and found information from the internet. I was unlucky.

So, together with our friend Yan Arief, we got an idea to build the website. The concept was simple: provide as much information as possible about Trans Jogja. Not only for us, but -- hopefully -- the information would be useful for those who use internet as the information resources. And we did it. On the early days, we struggled with some platforms to build it. At first, I was thinking about WordPress. It was good, but since we want to have more features, we finally went to Drupal.

We wanted to have the site ready as soon as we could. Providing basic information like routes, general information about the Trans Jogja mechanisms, etc. And, the most important thing was providing the updated information.

These are some initial actions we did:

• Provide information about Trans Jogja, and we kept them well-organized.
• Yan Arief created a group at Flickr.
• I configured Drupal. Adding modules and set them, tweaking theme
• Lala joined the ship and provided more information too

So far, we see more visitors came to the website. We also got positive feedbacks from website readers. And last but not least, big thanks to all people who contribute to the website and enrich the information day by day.... Anyway, Trans Jogja's website can be accessed at http://transjogja.net/

Mbak Ninit ternyata tak hanya jago nulis buku, tapi juga jago bikin kejutan.

Beberapa hari yang lalu kami merasa beruntung menerima sebuah paket pos dari Nyonya Aditya Mulya ini. Isinya kaos. Beberapa hari sebelumnya mbak Ninit memang sempat menanyakan ukuran kaos kami, kami pikir mbak Ninit akan mengirim kaos dari toko onlinenya, Zaralde.com. Tapi Zaralde.com hanya menjual kaos/clothing untuk bayi. Jadi yang kami bayangkan adalah kaos dengan tulisan lucu yang menjadi trend mark Zaralde seperti "Supercute" atau "Heartbreaker" atau "50% mommy, 50% daddy, 100% adorable" namun dengan ukuran untuk dewasa.

Jadi ketika paket kiriman dibuka, wah kejutan... ternyata kaosnya lain. Nggak kalah lucu sih tulisannya, dan uniknya kaos ini berpasangan. Ya benar sekali, kejutan lainnya kami tak hanya menerima satu tapi dua kaos sekaligus, alias sepasang. Kaos pertama dengan tulisan "Nobita" dan satunya "Shizuka".

Hahaha lucu ya? Jadi ketika sama-sama memakai kaos ini, kemana pun kita pergi orang-orang akan tahu kalau kita pasangan.

Thank you, mbak Ninit! We love it! Tambah sukses dengan Zaralde.com-nya.

Our Flickr account is about to reach its limit. Right, we're still using the free version. So far, we love it! I mean, we love the service, but we have the limit. ;) Of course, upgrading will be an option later.

For now, again, we're really happy with our Flickr account. So, if we think that we really need the Pro Account so bad, we probably will upgrade ours. Or, anyone want to send a Flickr's Pro Account gift for us? Hehehe...