Friday, 23rd September, 2005

Messy Endings

As I've mentioned before, I'm an incredibly sloppy designer. My techniques are grim and inelegant — preferring brute-force approaches to achieve a quick hack rather than trimming down my code to perform some sort of intricate API-based ballet.

Take the monstrosity of my comment box for example — it's all done through web-page-scraping and regular expressions, rather than investigating and implementing the various APIs of the services.

But you see, I like things to work, and work quickly. The joy I get out of all of this is the emergence of a new feature, rather than the methodical task of Doing It Properly™

But the main issue relating to my sloppiness that's bugging me this morning, is how I always seem to approach the end of a project with millions of little loose ends to tie up. I fling myself into these projects, without a clear plan or workflow or anything, and consequently now find myself with three Great Big Websites™, each with more little niggly things to sort out than there are trees in Grizedale.

I know, I should really make some lists that I can tick off. But that's not the way I work. Dammit

Something though, that has made at least one of these loose ends a lot easier, was me discovering HTML Character Converter the other night. You might recall I was tearing my hair out trying to suss out how to get the correct character set so that all of the funny accents in the art journal I've been writing displayed properly.

Well, for the price of £6.74, all I have to do now is hit ⇧⌘7 and every single character outside of the normal set gets converted into into its HTML code

Fantastic

On Weblogging and Break-ups

Yesterday was the first time I'd seen some of my colleagues since the start of the summer, and naturally there was a fair bit of catching up to do. Admittedly, the majority of the conversation was based around my responses to the question: "What the fuck happened?!" — and thus began a long and interesting discussion about the ins and outs of relationship break-ups.

One of the things we talked about, was how just after a split, it's very difficult to look back on the time that you spent together without feeling hurt inside. Everything that you did — whether it was on your own or not — is remembered in relation to your partner at the time. As my colleague put it, "you need to wait until you've built up a bit of your own history before you can reflect on things".

The temptation, then, is to bracket off the time you were together into a neat parcel, and store it at the back of your mind, unopened, waiting for when you feel more up to looking through it. For example, these days, with enough of my own history to back up my sense of self-worth, I can look back at the things I did ten years ago, and remember them fondly — without feeling wrenched inside pver the loss of my partner at the time.

The interesting thing, from my point of view, is that having spent the past three (four) years writing about my day-to-day life, it's almost impossible to put the last year and a half aside for later. I've kinda got it next to me as a constant reminder.

Actually, not "kinda" at all I literally have it next to me. On the floor, humming contently.

It's an odd feeling, to be honest. I've got four hundred and fifty one (I just counted them) pink pages detailing the time Kath and I were together. In the past, I would have just shunted them off to the side, to be dealt with at a later date. But obviously, I can't do that.

Ack, I'm sure I had a point to this when I started writing it — but I seem to have lost it somewhere

My Blog Fancies Your Blog

Another potentially Wandering From The Point™ thought...

Mike (Sweety Darling Mike™) was pondering the other day about blog voices.

When reading these blogs, I will often imagine that they are being read out loud by their author

Now this rings rather true for me, because it relates to my little thoughts on the re-presentations of ourselves in online spaces.

I do firmly believe that this thing here has a personality. It's a personality based partly on myself (well, mainly actually ), and partly on the interactions between the conversations that take place on it and with other weblogs (for a lovely example, have a look at Becky and myself's little spat about who invented blogging)

I'd thought, in the past, that the best way to describe what I think is going on here was to liken it to 'acting' or 'roleplay'. In the very specific instance of writing a weblog as a transvestite (and therefore assuming a character that is at odds with who I actually am), I'd thought that I could detach the personality of Tranniefesto from myself.

But actually (and this backs up my ideas about Tranniefesto being an extension of my Self), I don't think I can separate the headspace I use to write this from the rest of me.

(This has slipped into the realm of Vague Fuzzy Thinking™ BTW )

Anyway, what made me think of this was, well, two things. Firstly, Becky sent me an email hug yesterday. I'd presumed it was related to my shower moment, but actually, she said it was because she'd picked up a sense of melancholy about the whole thing I'd written the other day.

Which made me think that it's impossible for me to write about things — even happy "*la la la*" things — without some part of myself slipping through the net and becoming apparent in the tone of what I write.

And the other thing that sparked this thought, was c'lam's comment the other day:

developing a completely inappropriate crush on someone who is a good friend of the pair of you is a great distraction from the gnawing emptiness of a break up

As a few people (a select few ) will testify, I have an enormous (and probably inappropriate) crush on someone. But just there now — on my way back from the shop — I was thinking that actually it's not the person I have a crush on, it's their weblog.

And it's not specifically me that has the crush — it's my weblog that has it.

And that I find rather interesting

A Moment of Terror

I was just walking past my bedroom there now, when I caught something out of the corner of my eye. The corners of your eyes are weird spaces aren't they? Things inside them take on new shapes and forms, and they play all sorts of tricks on your mind.

For example, when I saw this...

...my immediate thought was "Oh for fuck's sake Siobhan. You've only had that duvet for a few days and already you've spilt red wine all over it"

But it was just my nightie *phew*

Looby, you're so butch

What no duvet cover?

Ah, well spotted Jane. Yes I have a duvet cover — but as with everything in my house, it's white. "everything in my house" except the wine, of course.

Oi, Rachel — quit posting comments right in the middle of me writing stuff

Giant Pooh Sticks

photo

(via flickr.com/people/si08han)

Ha! There's a bloody great big tree in the Lune

not sure the total here on Siobhan's site

That Dave, is a very interesting question.

/me scurries off to find out...

/me slaps Alli with the Pun Stick™

Totals

OK, I've counted. Here are some figures for you.

Number of Days : 712

Number of Posts : 1080

Feeling rather smug about that for two reasons: (a) That's a heck of a lot, and you have to remember that it was as recent as July 2004 that I started doing these seperate posts each day — before that the posts were separated by a "...", so it's hard to work out exactly how many times I've actually blogged. (b) I didn't use some statistics package to find that out, I used grep and find

Now, having grepped it all into a seperate file, I might just make a clickable link to every single one of them.

In the meantime though, here's a link to a text file of them all...

Better than a bloody big loon in a tree (especially if he's armed)

Ha! Sorry, I missed that earlier Selina — I did a really stupid thing earlier (which I won't go into), and half the comments are now ending up in my Junk Mail folder, so I don't spot that they've been left. Which meant that I couldn't comment on how incredibly witty that was.

Comments and hits Lana? I didn't count those. But, being the terminaly curious sod that I am, I just did...

Comments : 2,399

Hits : 2,522,765 (This is from January this year, and excludes May because the crash at the end of May borked my logfiles for that month)

Hits though, are a misleading statistic. They're just a representation of every single HTTP GET or POST request that Erin gets — one for each graphic, include and whatnot every time someone views a page. Just accessing this page, for exampple, generates about twenty (or probably more) requests, and therefore, hits.

A more accurate reflection of Stuff™ is page requests, which for me is currently hovering just under three hundred thousand this year.

Visitors (based on unique host-names) is also quite an interesting one. I'll have my fifty thousandth visitor this year at some point in the next day or two. But again, that's misleading — sometimes it gets inflated by (particularly) AOL proxies, changing hostname for each request, and sometimes it gets deflated by other proxies. Everyone who reads this at Lancaster Uni all look the same to Erin.

*ahem*

You may be wondering why I'm telling you this BTW Well, for want of some kind of excuse, it's just so that I feel popular

I might though, if I get the (a) time, and (b) inkling, write up some kind of "How to Promote Your Weblog" ramble at some point. There used to be (I'm not sure if it's still as widespread these days) a belief amongst the General Public™ that the Web was like a TV station — if you put something on it, millions of people would instantly see it. But it's not like that at all. It takes a lot of effort, and you have to be really active about the whole thing.

But that sounds really patronising of me doesn't it? I'll wait until I'm less hungover before I write something like that.

(Sorry, I spent way too long prancing about in SL with Kei last night. I seem to recall that at one point, she was a gangster, and I was her Moll. Ooh, and I discovered the Joy Of Shiny™ )

can you have virtual hangovers????

Nope, hangovers are the one thing that follow you back into Real Life™

combined with sed and awk — quite possibly the sexiest command line tools around.

Agreed — and I drool at the thought of what I could do if I ever got my head around the concept of using them

my new blog

You have a new blog?!

but it's currently too plain to draw any admiring glances!

Unlike your old one which has pictures of nekkid chicks on it