Saturday, 4th June, 2005

Changes

Right, think I'm nearly there I've been struggling with a lot of things in relation to this weblog over the past few days — ever since Erin spat out her hard disk as if a donkey had defecated on it.

I'm annoyed that I've lost siobhansplace.co.uk, but not dismayed — I was spending less and less time doing stuff with it, and to be perfectly honest, having to tweak two sets of code every time I wanted to try something new was becoming a pain in the arse

So, what have I changed?

1. The weblog is no longer held in a database, but rather in single text files, all structured according to their date. This makes it a lot easier for me to (a) write, and (b) edit them.

   Before, if I screwed something up (invariable) I had to either jump into the command-line, or fire up CocoaMySQL which although was a Godsend on occasions, has little quirks that meant I occasionally screwed things up even more

   Now, all I have to do is use vi from wherever I happen to be One of these days, I'll hack the sample Text Editor that ships with Apple's Development Tools and write a sexy front-end to the whole thing...

2. The RSS feed is now the whole gubbins, rather than a short snippet. A certain friend of mine will perhaps remember a little debate we had back in February over the pros and cons of doing this — my argument against it was that I didn't necessarily want readers to be able to read my garbage without visiting the site, but I have to concede that it does rather annoy me when other sites only have a snippet. And I'm making a conscious effort not to get so obsessed about my webstats...

3. The URLs for everything are now shunted through a RewriteRule so that (as soon as I've written it) I can make them a lot more meaningful.

4. Um, I don't think there's a fourth thing

So yeah, a bit of a change-around Hopefully it all works, although knowing my luck there'll be bugs to iron out. Do feel free to send me an email-based slap if I've cocked up.

I suppose the only really obvious change is that little calendar thing at the top left. It's something that occurred to me to do late last night, and I coded it in a bit of a rush.

It's just a series of nested <div>s — each one with a different transparent PNG as a background-image. The code just works out what month and day to display, then pulls the relevantly named image from a folder:

$ical = mktime(0,0,0,$m, $d, $y) ;
$icalm = date(M, $ical) ;
$icald =str_pad($d, 2, "0", STR_PAD_LEFT) ;

<div style="    background-image:
                    url(/image/ical/empty.png); 
                width: 128px; 
                height: 128px; 
                margin-left: 20px;
                ">
<div style="    width: 128px; 
                height: 128px; 
                background-image:
                    url(/image/ical/<?php echo $icalm ; ?>.png);
                ">
<div style="    width: 128px; 
                height: 128px; 
                background-image:
                    url(/image/ical/<?php echo $icald ; ?>.png);
                ">
</div>
</div>
</div>

It is, perhaps, a bit cheesy/naughty to be nicking one of Apple's icons and using it like that. I haven't decided to keep it yet — it may go away...

Right, now if you'll excuse me, I have a backlog of emails to reply to, and a few dresses that are crying out to be worn...

Pre-Doctor Who Pun

I will probably regret this, but it just occurred to me that the past few days have been a CSSdRSSing Adventure.

/me hangs head in shame

"PSSSSSSSSSS"

...the sound of a nation of Doctor Who Bad Wolf theorists wetting themselves as The Doctor notices the name of the proposed nuclear powerplant in the centre of Cardif

(via bbc.co.uk/doctorwho)

Not, my favourite episode so far, I have to confess I am, as I'll explain in a minute, not altogether excited by the Slitheen. I didn't really feel it had the grippingness of the previous two episodes.

Nevertheless, I almost shat myself when I saw the trailer for next week's episode. I've been a little cynical of the talk of a Big Brother episode of Doctor Who — fearing it to be a little crass and, well, bandwagony — but that last snippet?

I need to buy a new sofa.

...

(My Thing™ with the Slitheen, BTW, is that they seem to be the 'pet' aliens of this series. I bought a couple of the novels last week, and they bloody cropped up in the one I've read so far. Now, maybe I'm demanding the Moon On A Stick™ here, but I want to see Cybermen dammit )

seems strangely dated

Yeah, I know what you mean. It's like "hey guys, making 'you are the weakest link' jokes stopped being funny about five years ago"

I'm trying to remember what it reminds me of — this "pop culture reference" thingy...

...

Expanding on my "I don't like the Slitheen" grumblings...

They're not scary. Monsters are supposed to be scary dammit

Let's compare shall we?

Scary	Not scary

See what I mean? Those big, black, doe-eyes, the pouty mouth... Slitheen are cute — like little flatulent puppies

Perhaps, perhaps. I'm certainly salivating right now...

(pops off to play in PhotoShop...)

Now that's scary