Seems that I blog about my forth aquarium earlier than my third aquarium. How come?

Well, after my mini planted aquarium (which is my second one), I decided that I’m ready to start another planted aquarium at bigger scale. So there it was, I’m blogging about my “third” aquarium.

Remember my first aquarium? I have guppies, neon tetra and panda corydoras in, where I transfer them all to my matured “community” mini planted tank. So my first tank is empty now, and I was thinking of getting new fish.

Went to the nearby fish shop. Bad thing about these small fish shop is that, they don’t have the label telling the name of the fish. It’s no use also to ask the owner, as they will start giving “kampung” name to the fish, like ikan muka kuda (cichlid), ikan DBKL (pleco), ikan tulang (glass catfish) and plenty of other funny names.

I just happened to be attracted to that ikan muka kuda, and get a few of them, and place it in my first aquarium. With the help with the fish species book that I bought long time ago, I finally managed to identify the fishes that I just bought. Oh my. All of them are cichlid.

Cichlids are very aggresive, and very territorial. My small first tank wouldn’t be suitable at all to put cichlid in. I saw them quarrel a lot. This is when I decided to get another aquarium, which I will setup first before I started another planted aquarium. So I was getting this cheap aquarium and tank (without the top).

So this one becomes my third aquarium now, and the previous one that I blog (used to be third) now become forth aquarium.

Different from my community aquarium before where I can virtually mix any species of fish that is peaceful, cichlids are advised not to be mixed with other species. So people call this species tank. And here is my new cichlid tank.

Cichlids that I have are Malawi species, which naturally came from a rift lake in East Africa (Lake Malawi) that is very much alkaline, pH 7.5 to around 8.8. Good. Rocks that I put inside has helped to make the water alkaline.

And what happened to my first tank? Here how it looks now, really empty.

I have a plan already. I will turn aquarium to goldfish tank. I never had goldfish before. Been reading a little about goldfish – very sensitive fish, prone to disease, not suitable to be mixed with other species. Sounds fun. So stay tuned to see the development of this tank.

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This is really a quick one. Merdeka day is just around the corner. Went on the internet earlier to seach for a nice Merdeka flash greeting card, but to no avail. Then decided to design it my own then.

Search for flash Malaysia flag on the internet, and I end up at this URL – http://www.national-flags.com/. That’s really a cool site. It has lots of animated country flags, done using flash.

Then downloaded the Text-Osterone software from http://www.verticalmoon.com/ to do that text effect.

Arranging all together in Macromedia Flash, and this is the end result. Pretty plain as I’m not a computer artist, but this will do for my template header change this time.

View my past template headers at
http://www.mohdimran.com/_blog_header_/

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Dato’ K will be depositing his MONEY into CT-bank tonight.

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Yesterday, after signing to my blogger, there’s one link of the sidebar with the word beta in. I am really a beta junkie. I’d like to try new things, even they are still in beta. It happened to be that Blogger now has a new version Blogger in Beta.

Without further ado, I converted my blog to beta. There’s a warning, if you converted your blog to beta, you won’t be able to go back to your old blog. Hell yes. I’m ready for it.

Anyway, to convert to Blogger Beta, you need a Google account. If you are Gmail user already, it already means that you already have Google account. Nice. At last, Blogger has been integrated into Google account and become a part of what I called Google Suite ;)

After the conversion, I tried visiting my blog. Oh. It’s not accessible at the moment. Tick tock.. tick tock… I’m waiting for the confirmation email.

Yay! After 5 minutes, I received an email telling that the moving to the new Blogger is complete. Man. I can’t wait to see what new things that Blogger has in store.

Upon logging in, the Dashboard has a new look. That’s nice. At least I see something new. And when I go to the Posts Listing, it has a new look too.

Now you can see how many comments that you have for your post right from this page. You can also filter what to be listed – all posts, draft posts of published posts. Very handy indeed for me to find draft posts that I did long2 time ago, but never had chance to finish and publish it.

One major thing that I notice it, no more publishing. Yay! I believe other blogger user that constantly change the template has to go through the process of republishing the whole of the posts. This is no longer a case in Blogger Beta. Once you published you post, it’s there already. If you change something in the template, changes are applied to all the posts without the need to republish the whole blog.

One of the drawback that many find about changing the way their blog that use Blogger should looks like is the raw HTML template editing. Not many rather want to go through the learning curve of learning HTML language. Furthermore, every elements are dumped into a single file, not like Blogdrive where it has been seperated into components – header, sidebar, links etc.

Will this change in Blogger Beta? Well. I tried going to the template setting of my blog, and I’ve been given an option to upgrade if I want to customize my template.

But wait. Before I go on, let me backup my current template first, even though it says that the copy of my current template is kept automatically.

Nice. Very nice indeed. Not blogger template is made up of different elements, and you can arrange the elements just by doing drag and drop using your mouse. Just click edit if you want to edit that element.

You can also add new elements to your template. There are several 2 elements that interest – labels (now you can categorize your post using label) and blog archive (nested tree view of your post).

But the bad thing as for now is, you are bound to use the templates that have if you would like to use this kind of layouting. I tried edit the template, but the raw template editing is not available yet at the moment.

But I see a bright future about this. Later, I have a strong feeling that there will be an API where people can create custom page elements, the same as plugin concepts for those who are using WordPress before. This is going to be really interesting.

Lastly, do you ever think of using Blogger as you diary? I do, but it’s not a good option. The fact that anyone can go and read your blog entry, I rather not to write something that is too personal in my blog.

Blogger Beta makes this possible. Now, you can assign who are allowed to read your blog. I tried making my other experimental blog (the one that I use for template experimenting, and test entry) private.

Then, I tried visiting the blog. Walla! The blog is unaccessible, and I have to login first before I can enter the blog. Sweet!!

I’m so glad that I’m using Blogger as my blog, and I’m eager to see what more Blogger has to offer its user. Blogger teaming up with Google in the past has set me in this vision to see Blogger to become a very powerful blogging platform to choose.

I’m waiting with a hopeful heart….

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Dato’ Effendi ucap tahniah kat Dato’ K, katanya “Khalid, you untung dapat pakai CITY baru. Aku pakai TIARA secondhand je.” Datuk K jawab “Pi lah jumpa Chef Wan kot – kot boleh pakai SERENA baru”

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