Author: Teel

So, I worked a long day’s night on the coding, and I do believe that I’ve made some good progress. Note: the following paragraph is fairly technical, though vague, so just skip to the next one if you don’t want to read the jargon.

I figured out (by trial and error) what two fields I needed to add to my data array to get things working, which you don’t know means that instead of just changing the front end, I have to change about twice as many templates as I would otherwise have. Still, when I’m done everything should work better. I’m also thinking of doing a total database migration from BerkleyDB to MySQL, and if I can get that to work, I may be able to remove my entire data array system and just learn how to query the data directly from the MySQL. Except I don’t really know SQL or MySQL or Perl, and I think that for what I want to do I’d need to learn some fairly advanced techniques, so I probably won’t go that far.

Anyway, I’ve got the guidelines I drew up before streamlined into a new version that will reduce the server load even further. Which means pages will load faster and you should get less errors using the site. Unfortunately, the new design scheme I’m putting together (I am discovering as it reveals itself to me) does not appear to allow for the user-selectable colors. I’ll think about that for a while and see if I can come up with a way to continue using color as an informational dimension of site navigation and a user-definable aspect. Or maybe not. Do you use the alternate colors?

I may not get it done this weekend. We’ll see. Depends on what else happens. I’ve already seen two of the three movies that opened this weekend that I wanted to see, so it’s just Drumline left. Then there’s that Christmas party Sunday night. Other than that, nothing to keep me from working nonstop but inertia and a pressing desire to see this place cleaned up finally. We’ll see.

Okay, I took some time off tonight to watch Star Trek: Nemesis and Maid in Manhattan, but now Taken is back on, I’m sitting here, and I’m working on ME again. I think I’ve got it figured out. I think I’ve got everything down on paper that I need to know before I get started rebuilding every single page of ME. I’ve got sketches of the page layouts, descriptions of the templates that will make up the back end, and an idea of how it all goes together on the back end. The new design should be just about as easy to navigate, perhaps easier. A great man once said that you should try to make things as simple as possible but no simpler. The current design of ME was built around my desire to make an interface simpler than possible. I feel like I succeeded; there is so little to it that no one can find anything. The new one should be more intuitive in it’s reduced simplicity. Hopefully I can get the required templates all built tonight. Then there’s some dull, repetitive clicking and cutting and pasting to do for the now over 30 different information spaces that make up ME, to get all the templates in place and get all the old templates out of place. You may end up seeing the site act a little funny over the course of time it takes me to get everything updated. Hopefully everything will be in place and working by Monday. We’ll see.

Okay, so before I started messing with the actual site templates for the rebuild, I oh-so-cleverly just did a backup of everything on all Moveable Type controlled ME-hosted sites. I’m going to start a total site mirror right after I finish this post (which I certainly don’t do frequently enough these days) and go to bed and hope it works. I’ve got sketches of the new site interface, and I just spent several hours working with the new search functionality built into MT so that when I go to put search fields on every page, they’ll work the way I expect them to. Unfortunately, the thing I wanted to be able to do with it most is not an option in the current version of the software, even with creepy Teel-workarounds, without completely re-writing the Search module of MT. Still, it will allow you to search through everything on ME, including (after I go through and manually update every single comic-related entry on the site) text in comics.

Here’s a fun thing: if you type something like “so much pressure” or “writing a novel” into the search field on the Main FYTH page, it will only give you results from my entries here on FYTH. But from the Search Results page, search entries for the same phrase, and you’ll see that it finds results across everything all over ME, including the one comic I updated. Neat, eh?

Anyway, I think the new design will be easy to use, and will not tax the servers as much as the current design, reducing the risk of errors (I hope). I’m thinking of making it backwards-compatible with older browsers, too, though I don’t really have any way to test that with my current setup. The first version may or may not support the color switched styles of the current version of ME, but a version certainly will eventually. Depends on how things go.

Now, I’m off to double-backup, and hopefully off to sleep. I’m supposed to meet Art to see Star Trek Nemesis at 4:10 at the Centerpoint in Tempe. I hope I wake up in time. Zoe, you’re welcome to join us, if you’re not on the other side of the world at the time. Heck, anyone’s welcome to join us. It’s not like we rented out the theatre.

So Colin Quinn has a new show, Tough Crowd, where he and four other comedians sit around and try to discuss four “issues”. The idea is that ‘normal’ TV shows wouldn’t be as up-front about the issues as comedians, and maybe they’ll say what everyone is thinking but are too politically correct to say. Or something like that.

Tonight on the show the first issue they were discussing was whether or not the retarded should be executed. Now, they discussed this for about ten minutes, but for the eight minutes at least, I didn’t realize that what they meant to be discussing was whether the retarded who have committed crimes that would normally result in capital punishment should be executed. It didn’t occur to me that whether special considerations should be made about how to punish people who break the law based on their capacity to learn, or even that people were considering doing such a thing. I thought they were discussing negative eugenics. I think a couple of the comedians weren’t clear on that either. I think we thought we were discussing executing the retarded because they were retarded, not whether the retarded should be allowed to live for the same reason despite committing crimes that would end the lives of others.

Also, Jerry Seinfeld apparently did not understand what the show was supposed to be like. Instead of saying anything real, he just repeated near-topic jokes from his existing repertoire.