Looking for a place to happen
Apple has posted a Special Message to Windows Users on their site, detailing all sorts of myths about why you should run Windows. Kinda fun. It’s odd to find myself truly considering moving to a Mac. But they really are nice, esp. with BSD in the background.
Couriered over from what do I know?
There’s a couple of really good intro articles about Content Management Systems and XML over at A List Apart right now. I’m particularly interested, seeing as I am currently authoring a CMS, which, while I make use of ‘fake’ XML internally for some data storage operations, I am only slowly moving towards outputting everything through XML. Which is fine, as I was smart and keep the output mechanisms entirely independent of the data itself, so placing the data into XML containers as opposed to the current output containers should be a breeze.
My so far most helpful use of XML? Temporary data – allowing users to preview and store data before inserting final data into the DB, where it will be live. So data is stored, via XML schema, in one large VARCHAR cell, and can be extracted from there as if from the live table itself, and proves a snap to move from temporary storage into ‘permanent’ storage
I’m currently watching the movie ‘HomePage‘, a documentary about early web gurus and homepages (precursors to the blog, if you will). It’s an incredibly intense film, focussing on a year in the life of Justin Hall, as he journeys from Swarthmore College to a job at Wired magazine back in 1995-1996. The people who inhabit this film are odd, are real, are optimistic and in retrospect, incredibly naïve about the future and the power of the web as medium. What is obvious also is that these people understand the hypertext nature of the web in a way that few seem to. Whereas I will lazily link a few key points here and there of what I write off to various other topics, they link everything – to other bits of the same page, other pages on their site, other sites, etc. It makes for a convoluted read, in the wonderful that the web should. You can get more info from The IFC
One thing I’m already missing from Greymatter : Search Archives. Now, there could be a search archives feature in MT, but it’s not in the default template and I couldn’t find any mention of it in the user manual. Maybe I’ll have to write my own. Ick. It’s been sooo long since I did any Perl work. Of course, that might be reason right there to write a search engine for this thing. I’m sure I could simply *ahem* re-interpret (yeah, that’s it) GM’s search feature, but still. This is annoying. It was always the quickest way to find old entries, was to simply search for whatever thing I wanted to find.
Want to buy a .ca domain? There are 25 000 domains that will become available on january 17th from CIRA.
My Blogger Code is:
B2d+t+k+s+ufio+x-e-l++c-
So as you may have noticed, the site looks a little different. I’ve moved the backend from Greymatter to movable type. I was perfectly happy with Greymatter, but it couldn’t do a couple of things that I wanted to be able to do that Movable Type can. So I changed. I haven’t really edit any templates yet, apart from putting my header up top and plunking in my old homepage image on the right hand side here. Over the next few days, I’ll customize the site so that it looks more like it used to. Unless I get lazy, or whatever.
Also, I haven’t created any categories, or (obviously) linked any entries to any categories. But I’ll do that sometime too. I was hoping that an entry could have multiple categories, but I hear that’s on the way.
So those of you who viewed the site this evening between roughly 5 and midnight saw a pretty ugly-looking page. My apologies, as I had neglected to keep my templates when upgrading to the new version of Greymatter.
That should now be fixed, although if you notice something isn’t working, please let me know.
Also of note is that there is a new image for the search results page, which is more appropriate and thematically linked to the rest of the site than the previous one. So have a look-see.
The NYPL has published a very nice XHTML style guide. Read it, learn it, love it, live it. While this site is still XHTML deficient, I will one day soon upgrade to the new Greymatter version, and with it, become XHTML 1.0 (transitional) compliant.