Geof reminded me today:

"Question: how do you eat an elephant?"
"Answer: one bite at a time."Thus, today, I've been nibbling away at the elephant that is the sum total of my old cat.net entries. I'm trying to get them moved into greymatter format and to make them play nicely with my new ones, but I have to be honest. It's just not happening, and I'm starting to get really frustrated.

Oh, dammit to hell.

I am so close. I wanted to finish up the skin code for the site tonight and to call it a weekend and walk away. But, instead, I'm stuck with half-working code (the half that works is courtesy of Gareth) and a sick spouse who will probably beg out of our movie plans tomorrow.Lesson: what I attempt to do in thirty lines of code, Gareth can do in twelve or so. Ouch. Guess I got a bit of a reminder of why he's a coder and I do graphics stuff.

After working outside, the dragons of web design have reared their head again. The dilemma: what to do about standards?

I've gone back and forth about the dichotomy between web standards and aesthetic design so many times that I'm loath to write of it all again. Yet I find myself coming back to it, because there are some aesthetic problems with this site due to my determination to stay standards-compliant.

Brad announces that he's getting ADSL soon. That means I have to get back to work on domesticat.

What many of you don't see is that Brad's been responsible for me doing many of the cool things to domesticat that I've done over the past year. The friendly design rivalry between us extends back for almost the entire time I've known him.It began as a geeky game of one-upsmanship: upon seeing what one person had done to their site, the changes inspired the other to make similar changes to theirs—and then go a step further.

Thus domesticat went from a static page to a dynamic one. PHP and strict style sheet usage got thrown into the mix. Song lists were shown. Favicons. Daily entries. Better graphics, quicker download times, more cohesive themes. Search functions. Webcams (I swear mine will return soon).

Okay, for those of you using Netscape 4.7x to read this site, the Easter Bunny has a present for you: you can now read all pages on domesticat.net again. After weeks of pondering what I could do to make the site both HTML 4.0 compliant and have workarounds that would make the page readable in Netscape 4.7x….

I had a momentary flash of brilliance.

I've also been doing a bit of work to domesticat that I wanted to mention. Some of it won't actually appear on the site for some time, but it'll make for a big splash when it does.

Brad kindly proffered a snippet of PHP that would allow me to add some functionality to the list of music artists that I serve up directly from my winamp playlists. The end result is that you can click on the artist, and it will do a Google "I'm Feeling Lucky" search.