For the thousands of persons following the development of the amazingly incredible website vitorenes.com, I have some news. I decided to totally and completely abandon ANY CMS for the time being, since what I intend to publish in the site won’t be so challenging (maintenance-wise) and I don’t really have the time to go through all that hard work of suiting a theme to my taste or needs. So, what’s gonna happen now is… everything is being hand-coded, using all the appropriate standards, as everyone should (NO tables, all CSS, bit of AJAX principles and dynamically changing HTML to keep those dreadful page loads to a minimum) and I’m back to my old habit of using a text editor (Notepad++… cool tool) to do my web work. Drupal is an excellent tool, it’s just not what I need at the moment, and using it would be overkill. So, site will be up and running soon… hahahaha… I hope…

Well… things have been getting complicated lately, so site development was significantly slowed down for a couple of days - as well as blog maintenance… It’s difficult to plan with so much uncertainty around… hehehe… more news soon.

So you like PDF magazines? In search for some inspiration for your work? Simply like to marvel - and, well… sometimes not so much… - at the work of others? Then, by all means, don’t miss this web site. And let me warn you: prepare for some loooooong hours downloading…

Loved a post? Hated it? It is with great pleasure that I announce than comments are now available at this blog, so now you can express yourself here! Still, a catch: all comments will be moderated. Which means that before your comment gets published, it must be approved by an administrator. I’m only doing this to fight “google bombs”, a form of comment spam, and to keep out offensive and undesired material out. No other form of censorship will be applied to the posts - you can rave or rant whatever you want, I promise I’ll publish it. Even those comments with inadequate material or of an offensive nature will be noted, even if its content is blocked. So, from now on, if you have an opinion… express it!

I have seen pretty amazing things. The kind of Things that make your jaw drop while you stare in utter amazement, basking in that nice feeling resultant from a mixture of admiration and jealousy… and then today, when visiting John C. Dvorak’s blog, I came across what I believe is one of the most amazing human creations, a combination of art, design and pure science that left me wondering whether this guy Theo Jansen is the product of alien bioengineering. This dutch “artist” makes THE most incredible, almost “living” kinetic sculptures you could NOT imagine (and you have to SEE them to understand what a kinetic sculpture is) he likes to call, aptly, “animals”. As he states in his website, Theo “wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives”. An artist, a scientist, an amazing designer AND a philosopher. Is this guy for real? … Don’t miss the videos in the “film” section of his site. Guaranteed jawdroppers.

Site development for vitorenes.com is resumed, after a brief hiatus yesterday for “musical reasons”… I’m fully committed now to the customization of Drupal, and I have to tell you, this thing rocks! Everything is so well documented. And since I had no clue about Drupal’s theme thing, I decided to follow the developers’ advice and build up on the most bare bones theme there is: Zen. Since version 5, Drupal based its themes on the PHPTemplate engine, an already well documented piece, so everything is running veeeery smoothly. If things keep working this way, I’ll have the site up very soon. Back to work.

Well… so it is decided. “Production” for my website, vitorenes.com, is starting today. Since I expect the site to be in constant update and I don’t really have the time to “get my hands dirty” with everything I want to do there, I decided to install a Content Management System, and base the whole thing on it. After trying out a couple, nominally Joomla and Drupal, I decided on the later. Joomla is cool, has very nice modules, but the content management isn’t that great, and Drupal is way more complete, so drupal it is. Hopefully, I will have enough time to get it running soon, and fully customized. More news as the project develops!

As a way of keeping the peace and since, after all, this place is not a democracy, comments in this blog are moderated, and will require prior user registration and administrator approval before publishing (I promise I’ll try to be as unbiased as possible and I will only censor offensive material and people who think I’m ugly… wait… no, then no one will comment…). I don’t really care who you are, or whether you came here to bash the posts or truly contribute to the content - as long as you identify yourself somewhat; even is you tell me you ARE James Bond, that’s fine by me. For the while, comments and user registration are disabled, until I’m certain the feature is not gonna give me any problems - as soon as it is relatively proofed, I will enable it. Thanks for understanding, and if you don’t, well… I am really sorry.

Once in a while you stumble upon the work of someone so good at what he/she does that it makes you think whether you chose the right profession. This is the case of me finding out about the work of Mário Belém, a portuguese graphics designer/illustrator whose tasteful and exquisite work makes my mind green with envy. Take a peek at his site - it’s worth every second it takes to download all those samples. Great stuff, mate!

Well, first things first: welcome!
As you probably noticed, this blog is very much in its beginnings, translation is still under way (so far, only english and portuguese available, spanish coming soon…), and I’m using one of those wonderful canned themes that the Wordpress community so generously publishes freely all over the Web (will do my own thing someday… when there is time… lol). And… it doesn’t contain useful information or whatever… but hey, it’s a start, and I just got the thing running yesterday! So please, by all means, do come back, since I will try to get this one running smoothly and keep it updated with stuff for everyone interested in anything visual or, at least, just plain interesting.

Meanwhile, I would very much like to thank Robert Koch, from araneahost (formerly blautek) for their fine hosting and superb support. If you are looking for great service and features, check these guys out! See you soon!