About Tribolum
Stuff no one really needs to know.
What is Tribolum?
Tribolum is short for triboluminescence.
Triboluminescence: Luminescence (light) triggered by mechanical energy or electrical energy from a mechanical action such as friction.
When choosing this domain it was clear that triboluminescence.com would have been too much of a handful, especially where to put the i's and e's.
Why Triboluminescence? I started this blog in February of 2000, during a bout of fever from which I had thought would have killed me. Suffering from back spasms and feeling both extremes of hot and cold at the same time, I was unable to crawl across campus to seek medical aid. It was Martin Luther King weekend, and the dorms were empty.
Unlike what most people would have done in my situation, I chose that precise moment to pick up HTML and made myself a website. The original design still lives no longer lives.
So this is the story of triboluminescence, an instance where something good came out of the difficult times in life - a making of light through friction if you will. And it is my hope to share the times of my life, both good and bad, with you in the hope that something good might be created.
Who
Born and raised in Singapore, an island in South-east Asia for those of you interested enough to pull up an atlas.
I'm about a third of a century old, though there are times I act a tenth of my age. It usually happens when chocolate is involved.
I currently work the web at The Ministry of Education in Singapore. Feel free to contact me if you encountered some technical glitch on the site, or if there's information you were looking for but couldn't find. It's my job to make that site work for you.
That said, my writings here are my own and do not represent that of my employer.
I started Websg.org, a site dedicated to covering news on the web scene in Singapore. It is also the launching pad for a web standards group in Singapore.
Site
This site is coded in valid XHTML and CSS. The separation of content and presentation means that you can switch the aesthetics without any compromise in content.
Tribolum.com underwent a major redesign in October 2003. The CSS was streamlined and proper hierachical tags were put in place throughout all elements of the site.
Layouts prior to 2001 were table-based and graphics-intensive, relying a lot of slice-and-dice methods still used by many large web-design houses today. In order to achieve the look I wanted, I often used nested tables and spacer gifs. My then-girlfriend complained that the blog took too long to load, which spurred the transition to a CSS based-layout.
She married me in July 2003. That has got to be proof that CSS is worth implementing.