While I'm working on finishing up Quarto's admin interface, I thought I'd toss out this unfinished little mini-tutorial and let the world throw some commentary its way.

For lack of a real title, I've called it "I've Got This Little Site…"—it's supposed to be geared toward the casual website creator who is thinking about putting a bit more effort into their site. It's four pages of snips and tidbits and things I've learned along the way.

Two-forty-five. A raging case of insomnia if there ever was one, and oh, what a night to have it. The soothing cup of tea and my most recent read were both finished two hours ago. The ink that's flowed out of my pen for the last thirty minutes has formed itself into words centering mostly around the idea of 'forgiveness.'

After finishing up on code work for the night, I did something silly. Utterly stupid, in fact. Something that I know better than to do, and yet I did it anyway: I looked at the sites for other bits of journaling software.

Given that mySQL and I have decided that we are each equally stupid (link), maybe I should stop both coding and talking about coding and do something else for a change.

Self, to Brad: Oh yeah, massive ugly brain death today. I can't even get stuff that WORKS on the command line to work in PHP. So much for my soaring glorious code-fu of yesterday.

Brad, to self: My troubleshooting suggestion: go read a book or watch a movie. Or pet your cats. :)

Must you all be so obnoxiously right all the time? It's really annoying…

I had two code-related goals today: get the database-backup page working properly and set up the edit-yourself page so that when you change your own password, an email is automatically fired out to the address on record.

There's something inherently wrong about being a geek, and yet cackling gleefully at the flaming heat death that is WorldCom. The underlying twinge of guilt has something to do with knowing that many of the employees were normal geeks (look, just avoid the oxymoron and run with it, ok?) like the rest of us, putting in the hours to pay for houses and kids and college debt and trips home to see Mom.

The twinge of guilt has something to do with knowing that, given only slightly different circumstances, those anonymous 'Affected, Downsized Employees' could just as easily have been people I cared about. Twingey bits aside, you know what I said when I first read the news? "Hey, maybe this will make house prices a little more reasonable out in the D.C. area…"(That sound you hear is Heather and Andy cackling.)

Work on Quarto progresses.  Having firmly re-saddled myself a day or two ago, I settled in and got some real work done today.  Hence, the lack of entries (did you get lonely in the meantime?).  Probably most cheerworthy is the stunning fact that there is now something to actually <em>test</em>&mdash;in addition to user authentication and logging functions, I now have full user editing capabilities set up.

Most of the regular readers of this site know that domesticat's web server was down for a few days due to a very bizarre set of circumstances. Fewer of you know that I maintain a Hotmail drop box, which I use to protect my real addresses from spam.

Since I had a bit of warning that the server was going down last week, I sent out an email to friends saying that they should use my Hotmail dropbox until my @domesticat addresses were usable again.