vanderwal.net

Comment tease

Yes, the ability to comment coming. The reason the comments are coming finally will be posted on Saturday or Sunday. I am working on coding and three articles at the moment.

Minor site updates

This evening the left navigation bars have changed. They have moved to left aligned and to a fixed font size (I am not a great fan of fixed font size, but there are a few exeptions to that rule here). The home page was modified (more change is coming to the homepage). I have also modified the orange color in the H2 headers so that there is greater contrast with the navy background. Also in the works is a comment system, which should debut in the next day or so. I am getting closer with the comments. Had I not got a flat on my way home this evening I think I would have knocked them out completely.

I think is it finally time to put together an edit entry tool for this tool. I have been using the MyPHPAdmin provided by my site host to go in and edit the entries when there are errors or updates needed. This has not been a great method when I lacking on sleep, as I have been here in Austin.

There are most likely going to be some small to moderate changes to this site in a few weeks. I have started working with modifying the left navigation bar to add more local and global elements (area of the site specific or applies to the whole site). The front page is also in dire need of re-contenting and possibly a small redesign. There is a CSS problem with font sizes here in Off the Top that I really want to address also. I may implement the comment system here soon, which has been running in test mode quite well. There will be a central photo page added in the very near future. A book list page for developers will also be added soon. The largest change will be to the links page, in that it will be changed from a hand built page to a content management system generated page.

I think is it finally time to put together an edit entry tool for this tool. I have been using the MyPHPAdmin provided by my site host to go in and edit the entries when there are errors or updates needed. This has not been a great method when I lacking on sleep, as I have been here in Austin.

There are most likely going to be some small to moderate changes to this site in a few weeks. I have started working with modifying the left navigation bar to add more local and global elements (area of the site specific or applies to the whole site). The front page is also in dire need of re-contenting and possibly a small redesign. There is a CSS problem with font sizes here in Off the Top that I really want to address also. I may implement the comment system here soon, which has been running in test mode quite well. There will be a central photo page added in the very near future. A book list page for developers will also be added soon. The largest change will be to the links page, in that it will be changed from a hand built page to a content management system generated page.

The solution to the = in the link is to use  in its place. This may require a solid tweak to my home-rolled weblog application so to sniff, parse, and replace the symbol prior to inserting into the database.

I have added two pages to help provide a guide for metadata usage. One page sorts categories by number of times the metadata definition has been used. The other page is an alphabetical listing of categories with their count. These two page builds took very little time to knock together (half an hour or so) and the value to me is much greater than that half hour used.

Things are going to get a little Apple-centric here for a little bit. I should have my non-human object of lust in the next week or so. This means gathering information about Web resources that are available and finding software and script repositories that will help move the transition/inclusion of another OS environment into the home office environment. If you have good Apple resources (books or sites) drop me an e-mail. I am going to be rebuilding my link pages here to include more Apple/OS X resources.

Moving to XHTML and general updates

There are some changes around here. The links page has been updated with some new links, updated links, and a few removed (ones that I was not visiting for various reasons or had gone dead).

The links and about pages are both converted to XHTML and are validating, for the most part, to XHTML Transitional. The next step will be to get this section, Off the Top, to validate. This will be a little more effort as it will require making some edits to the templates and internal code validation. Not a monsterous task, but a task none-the-less. A large part of the conversion in this section is creating compliant output from non-standard input. Much of this section does not use starting paragraph tags (<p>), which will take some work to ammend.

This means that this site is finally moving toward being standards compliant. This means that it will be easier to display information across browsers (standards compliant browsers, which most are becoming), ease of maintenance, and information reuse.

I am working on a rebuild of my links page. The new and improved would provide better classifying of the links, seeing all links or just subsets, having the ability to turn on descriptions, and adding categories (hmmm like Apple or Mac).

There is nothing like starting the New Year coding a time rollover code to pull the current information out of your weblog. This means I now have fully functioning code for month and year change overs in my personally built weblog tool. This also means I still love PHP more than any other scritping/Web coding language.

It is getting to be time to pull the code out of the PHP templates and make it more modular/object based. The site is built on a handful of templates that reuse about 75% of the same code to build the pages. From this stage it is time to pull out classes and functions and have each page point to the proper elements. This enables me (or who everelse is getting this code) to be able to make modifications in one place rather than many.

Why modular/object-based? This is how the world works. This is how things are done efficiently. This is the non-foolish way of building applications. (Looks like I am starting this year on a testy note).

December has brought some new changes to v/d Wal Net. The Off the Top section now has view "previous month" links at the bottom of the main page and the essay, journal, and weblog pages. The Archive page provides new options. I have tested most of it, but there may be "features" still lurking. Let me know how these changes work for you.

The Off the Top main page will get a little bit of behind the scenes work this weekend. I may only provide 10 days at one time on this page then point back to the archives. This will keep the first day or two of the month from being empty, or rather empty on this page. This modification will also speed up the page build through out the month. There may also be some modifications on other pages in the Off the Top section.

On the vanderwal.net blog tool update plans are adding an RSS output and an AvantGo readable output. Also in the works is adding a calendar and efficiency tuning the page builds for the main blog which is a catch-all page. I need to start testing the monthly change over and ensure that it works. I would really like to add functionality to easily go back to the next set of older posts.

Posts may be sporadic of the next few days as my main computer gets an upgrade of OS. Going away is the piece of garbage MS ME. Having the system run out of resources with two browsers, e-mail and textpad open with 384MB of RAM and 64MB of SDRAM on the graphic card is beyond pathetic. I will be staying in the Microsoft family for the time being, but I am saving to switch to a more capable OS in the hopefully near future.

I still have a backlog of entries to post in the Weblog section. I have ironed out a few bugs here, which are making this even easier to use. I do need to make the admin tool that builds this a little more appealing, but for now it is only me. There are now just about 100 categories entered for me to choose from to classify the information. The trouble is I keep finding other interests that are not covered by what I have added. In a couple months I will review and see what I have not used and weed those out.