2012-09-15 - Top

Lately I've been thinking about a way to set up certain posts as semi-permanent, meaning they don't get cycled out. This could be useful for announcements or really important posts (I’ve been thinking about doing this because I want to post one such item), ensuring that they stand out but still appear after other things have been posted. The easiest way would have been to just insert the items into the index directly but that breaks the automation design philosophy I've been going for and it also makes it hard to convert the top posts back into normal posts when they are no longer important. So I decided to just use a different file name (replacing top for post) and then setting up the archive and index pages to also check for files with that name. This makes the process automatic and it also means that a file name change is the only thing required to demark an item. If all goes well this should show up as one such item for a little while.

2012-08-12 - Validation

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading through a series of articles called The “Web Standards Curriculum” which is basically a set of tutorials on web languages. Most of the stuff I already knew but the thing I found exciting about these articles is that they talked about the standard and best practices way of doing things. So I figured I’d take the time and update my site so that it validates using the online standard checkers. You may have noticed the new footer at the bottom of the page with several badges stating that the site is now valid by those standards. It should be noted though that the HTML5 one is not a badge and does not mean that the site is completely valid HTML5. For one thing I haven’t gotten around to fixing up all the issues on every page and for another the HTML5 validator does not give out badges. I made the image myself based on the others just so I could easily validate any page on the site. It was an interesting experience, as I worked to fix things I found better ways of doing those things that solved other problems. For example I changed the way that the left and right columns are styled so that I no longer have to use a special CSS hack to get things to show up right in Firefox. It also seems to look better in older browsers and just generally works better.

Now most of these changes (If I’ve done things right) shouldn’t be apparent. The actual layout should stay the same with only the underlying structure changing. What you may notice is that a bunch of the images have changed. As I mentioned a while ago the images template files were lost when my hard drive broke so I’ve had to recreate them from scratch. I could have just left them but it’s better for consistency if I have a template file to work with. If in the future I need a new button I can just go back to that file and make a new image that fits in with the rest. The big thing though is the penguin. While I was recreating the buttons I also finally got around to redoing the penguin. I know it doesn’t look as good but I’d rather the logo be a penguin of my own creation than a copy of someone else’s. It’s also probably better for legal reasons; don’t want any angry Linux people attacking me.

2012-08-05 - Strangeness

During the winter months it's cold and dark and all you want is some sunlight. When summer comes around you close the blinds and sit in the dark because it's too hot. Life is strange.

2012-07-10 - Hard Drive Fall Down Go Boom

So a few weeks ago the main hard drive on my computer decided to crash. I was watching TV and when I got up to turn the computer off I found it complaining about how it couldn’t boot. I did some investigation and found out that the hard drive had gotten some serious sector errors and was pretty messed up. So I installed windows on the secondary hard drive to ensure that there were no other problems with the computer and ordered a replacement drive. I then had an interesting week where I had a computer but didn’t want to do much with it because anything I installed would just have to be reinstalled when the new drive arrived.

It wasn’t a total loss as I was able to recover a fair amount of data from the old drive. There were important things that were completely lost and there were useless things which were perfectly recoverable. The template images for this site were one of the things which I couldn’t recover so you might notice a change as I need to partially recreate them. I’ve been meaning to try and make my own penguin anyways, it’s always better to have everything be an original creation.

I should point out that the drive only took a week to arrive and that the reason I didn’t post in June is more because I’m lazy. There probably won’t be many posts in July either because it’s freaking hot and this computer is a furnace.

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