A sudden sense of quiet...

Ever wondered what goes on in the head of someone who maintains a personal site of this size?

Currently on my plate: the big evil project I've been sitting on for a few months. Namely, back-entering all of my old entries into greymatter. This is long, boring, tedious, and mind-numbing work. (Did I mention boring and painstaking?) As soon as that is done, a couple more items from my wishlist can fall into place. The reworking of the archives means that all of the archive pages will be html 4.0 compliant.

To explain how I'm doing the rest of the site, you have to remember that each page consists of two pieces: the text itself, the skeleton of each page—and the skin, which is what you see. I've done the tidying up that allowed the skeletons of about 98% of the pages to be html 4.0 compliant. The default skin is currently 4.0 compliant, as well.

As soon as I get the archives redone (sigh—must get back to work on that later today) then I will work on, one at a time, getting the other skins compliant as well. It shouldn't take long; despite how complicated my pages may seem, my code isn't that obfuscated.

Parallel with the reworking of the archives is the reworking of my stylesheet code. While driving down to New Orleans I had a blistering little revelation: I've been doing this the hard way. There's a neater, cleaner, and simpler way I could've done it. So, as I work on a page to make sure it's HTML 4.0 compliant, I'm changing it to reflect the simpler stylesheets that will go into effect soon.

Other cleanup work: the nautical skin currently functions, but only in IE (and with a javascript error at that). I need to find code that makes it run right on both IE and mozilla. Once I find that, then I can implement the beauty/grace skin I've had in the wings for about a month now.

I've also got another skin in development—the ice/winter skin. But that's still at the toying-with-ideas stage. It could be another month before it sees the light of day.

So, please bear with me if you don't get another good, meaty domesticat entry for a couple of days. I've got plenty of notes from this past weekend—the clown we met, the penguins, New Orleans in general, and the remarkable nature of coincidence—but I've been putting off some of this structural stuff for a while, and I'm trying to get some of it done while I've got the stomach for it.

Add to that, the fact that it's quite possible that Rick and Jessica (his fiancée, not Jessica-starlady) will be staying with us for an extended weekend. Then there's the usual Thursday night shenanigans, plus the Friday get-together at Geof's, then the weddings we've got to attend on Saturday…

…and so it goes.

Life, as always, interferes. Cheers.

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