Pahinga

I rarely write about my personal life in this blog, except maybe to add some anecdotal flavour to my posts. I try hard to keep Keetology a technical blog most of the time–a references of sorts that you’ll want to read if you want to learn more about a particular topic. However, I’m crossing into my personal life in this post for the sake of clarity and because it affects most of the things I do.

To put it bluntly, I’m taking a break. I was trying to find a word to describe the break, but found the common words lacking; vacation seemed too pleasurable, sabbatical sounded as if I’m going to some far off place. And then I realized that there was a perfect word to describe it in Tagalog: pahinga. Technically, it means “rest” or “a break,” but if you ask anyone who speaks Tagalog, they’ll tell you the root word is hinga, which means “breathe.” So yes, I’m taking a break to catch my breathe.

As usual, breaks in a person’s life means changes. And that my friends, is the reason for this post.

The Background

For the past few months, I was given the chance to work with amazing people in a new project. I cannot express how grateful I am to be given the chance to work with such an amazing product, and I’ll forever be in-debt to the people I worked with for the trust and the experience.

But a few weeks ago, something happened that drastically changed my life. I will not go into detail about what this event is, as it’s too personal to really divulge, but the point is that I’m not the same person that I used to be before all of this. To say that I am sad would be an understatement: I was left frustrated and depressed after the ordeal, and now I’m trying to get back on my feet.

I’ve always believed that while we are free to make our choices, life has a way of steering us into interesting directions–and it has certainly led me to several interesting ones over the past year. However, the most recent turn has made me question a lot of things, especially whether I’m really happy with what I’m doing. I honestly feel stretched, too thin and always worried about everything.

Which is why I’m taking this pahinga. This break is a quest for rediscovery. I want to try out new stuff, I want to not worry about small details so much and I want to know just what made me choose this career path in the first place.

Exploration and Keetology Week

While my main goal for this break is really to pull myself out of the somber mood I’m in, I also want to rekindle my love for code and for my personal projects.

There are a few things in my local repositories that really need to get documented, tested and released, and I plan to do that through this break. I’m setting up the Labs page of this site for that, and expect some really cool new toys that I’ve been developing on and off for the past year to appear in the next month.

This leads us to Keetology Week. Keetology was actually started as a small tumblr site around November 2008 due to the urging of another site owner who asked me to write a guest article. After a while, I decided to turn it into a full site and registered keetology.com on March 27, 2009.

So next week, starting from the 21st (a week starts on Sunday, didn’t you know?) to the 26th, is Keetology Week. There will be several things happening then: the last 3 parts of the Up The MooTools Herd series will be posted on the 21st, 23rd and 25th (Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday), and the first “project” will be publicly released (hint: think a group of cards).

This of course leads us to the 27th, the first-year anniversary of Keetology, when I’ll be announcing a very special project for the MooTools Community. I’m very excited about that project and I’m trying to finish up all the preliminaries to get that finally official, but it’s gonna be one big surprise!

New Design: Likabôk

And finally, you might have noticed that the site has been redesigned. While I was thinking of launching the new design on the anniversary, I thought of doing it today because I need the reminder that this is a new phase in my life. And so I took a few hours off from feeling dejected and forced myself to code some HTML and CSS.

This new design is called Likabôk and it’s a fusion of the elements from the past two designs (Anachromanticism and Fineprint). I decided to keep the general layout from the Fineprint design and add some elements from Anachromanticism. But I also wanted to keep it somber yet fresh, so I chose a muted brown and gray color scheme mixed with a beautiful san-serif typeface. You’ll also see hints of subtle shadows and a very basic matte gray background.

For the technically inclined, the site uses HTML5 underneath (you can check–I have <article> and <section> elements!) and it works on all major browsers (surprisingly, including IE). The headers and the navigation elements are set in Titilium 800 and 900, a very beautiful and open-source typeface from Campivisivi. Because I don’t want to deal with cross-browser support too much, I decided to stick with Cufon, the fantastic font-rendering library from Simo Kinnunen. I also ditched “lighter.js” for this design since it was bloated and troublesome.

Overall, I like this new design but I do want to hear comments from you if you’re experiencing any trouble or if it’s borked in your browser of choice. I didn’t have time to test every browser quirk, so I’ll see if I can do anything.

Moving On…

So that’s it! To recap: I’m taking a break, there are exciting things coming and there’s a new theme. You’re welcome, “TL;DR” generation.

Again, for news and updates, you can subscribe to the RSS feed and follow me on Twitter (@keeto). You can also email me if you have any question–my address is listed on the about page.

There’s a line from a song I love that goes like this: “Who can say if I’ve been changed for the better… but I have been changed for good.” I’ve taken quite a few risks this past year, and while they have paid off in one way or another, I’m just tired. Hopefully, this break will do me good and help me rediscover the things I’m passionate about. It’s not another risk for me–it’s just my way of moving on…