Day two, Quarto coding extravaganza.  We are coming to you live from the same chair that 98% of most cat.net entries are typed from; the only difference is that today I've spent most of my waking hours in this chair and not doing actually productive things.

Jeff wins the Write Amy An Import Script So She'll Shut Up™ award; we tested it tonight against the entries of geek-chick.net and guess what?  It worked.  No complaints, no quibbles - once I remembered to tell it the correct server paths to grab the files from, it imported in less than twenty seconds.I'm just...flabbergasted.

Tomorrow begins the Great Big Odyssey.  I can import the entries as I feel like it, but that's just the backend.  I can dump as much info into the db as I want, but no one is going to be able to see any of it until I work on the display pages that actually pull the information out, format it, and make it available for reading.

Therefore, tomorrow will be the day that I take the prewritten templates for those pages and make them look like a good little geek-chick should.  I suspect it's not going to take nearly as long as I'm afraid it might.

As said to Gareth:  "Right now I'm just trying to get all my ducks in a row, or some nonsense like that."

His response:  "horizontally aligned quacksicles == good"

Something like that, yes.

Once the display pages are formatted nicely, I'll set up a test version of the site and let everyone play for a while.  After that, it'll be one last wipe and reimportation, and then geek-chick shall be gently nudged to Quarto.

...and then...and then...I guess I can say that my goal for Quarto is achieved.  The only goal I've ever had for this software was for it to serve as a dynamic backend for domesticat and geek-chick:

I don't care if I never release this code.  I just want the flexibility that will come from having all my cat.net entries databased and the resulting pages fully dynamic.  I don't care if nobody else ever sees the code or uses it.

Mostly, I want to prove to myself that yes, I'm capable of taking a code project like this from start to finish&mdash;not for material or social gain, but because it was <em>something I wanted and felt would be useful to me.</em>  I'm aware that a lot of the code I need to write is, truly, beyond my capabilities at this point in time&mdash;but how will I learn if I don't challenge myself?

(from 'Something I wanted,' April 2002)

I'm just about ready to move from 0.7 to 0.8 - I realize that there is nothing scientific about the milestone, but I will have made more changes between 0.7 and 0.8 than at any other milestone since getting started.  The difference between 0.8 and 1.0 won't be big - bugfixes, more cleanup, more display functions, and a user-interface makeover.  In comparison to what's been done so far, it's almost (dare I say this?) inconsequential.

If you'll excuse me, I think it's time to pet the ducks; I should at leas t<em>try</em> to keep them orderly between now and tomorrow.

(Lest I forget - another new feature enabled today.  Registered commenters will note that the links at the bottom of their comments have changed - there is now a users page that displays information on the registered users, where you can see bits like an index of all posts by that user, and the ten most recent comments by that user.)

(Some of the information on there (IM info and the like) will probably eventually be available only to registered users.  Me, blatantly suggesting you register?  Naaaaah, I'd never do anything so crass as that!)