Zzot!

Here are two psychotic things I’ve thought about doing on my site, both related to the look (and both, it could be argued, abstract beyond the point of it being worth explaining them to my therapist):

1. Replace the 268 byte background image (the blue-to-white gradient) with a slow color shifting one (i.e., less than one frame per minute, small difference between frames).
2. Generate a favicon.ico for each character in the title graphic, and rotate them somehow (presumably from cron — there’s almost certainly no such thing as an animated .ico, and if there is, some widely deployed version of MSIE probably accidentally deletes all the 3’s out of every file on your hard drive if it tries to render it).

By the way, I wonder why this entry’s title isn’t a category here yet.

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Do people just not know how ridiculous they look? Do they know and just not care? Do they know and (mistakenly) think they are doing something about it?

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I’ve been working on this, off and on, for a while now. In theory, it shouldn’t be that big of a thing to make a simple roommaker. Reality, of course, is another matter. Here’s a screen cap of my prototype, and some related details the image doesn’t really convey:

• The data is stored in a custom XML markup language.
• The tool I’m designing would be incapable of reading or writing LPC — the
  mudlib takes care of that (or, if you want to extend the loader object, you
  just inherit the XMLRoom object).
• It is designed as a web application that directly handles the XML markup.
  Because of this:
  • The read/write gateway (a server-side PHP script) will need to do some
    validation (it doesn’t yet).
  • It requires a modern-ish browser with an implementation of
    XMLHttpRequest and JavaScript enabled.
  • There’s no SOAP or XML-RPC going on — it is just a simple REST API.

If anyone wants to know more, let me know. At the moment, this more closely resembles a mock-up than a prototype, so there’s nothing anyone can interact with yet. The corresponding markup is in the extended entry.

Update: No, it isn’t. What was in the extended entry got lost somewhere, so I deleted the mess that remained.

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I only noticed this today (chasing links to an article on today’s problem), but apparently it is gone. Mitchell Baker is working on getting access (and rights) to the content. She suggests that the demise of DevEdge before the Foundation was authorized to take over the content was simple miscommunication.

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Once, in a meeting, my boss said to me “now you’re just being pedantic”. At least I’m keeping up on that.

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I edited most of the posts from the last couple months over the weekend to account for me having changed the encoding of the site and my MT install. Oh, and I changed the encoding of my site and my MT install. It looked like that beyond that, messages didn’t need correction (which correlates with changes in my toolchain) — let me know if you find anything to the contrary.

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I think it would be overstating the case to say comments are “working”, but it is at least possible to insert one into the system now. I changed the URLs for all the CGIs today, but I expect that only effects me (anyone else would probably be clicking a link, and those should all be updated).

In a related matter, trackbacks were never working, apparently; I had never put anything behind the CGI’s URL, and that made it difficult to invoke the script in question. That should be working now as well.

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