Emdash-palooza

Right.  So.  Another day of coding, y'see.  Did you know that after a day of messing with things like timezone conversions in PHP, your brain takes on the consistency of mashed potatoes?  It's pretty impressive, in a frightening and appalling sort of way.  Much was accomplished today.  Quarto is intended to be based off of GMT (ok, ok, UTC), but I wanted to convert the GMT timestamps to whatever the administrator chose as 'local time.'  The only place that I'm leaving dates in straight GMT is in the usage log.

Originally, I think I had a reason for this.  Right now, if forced to give a reason, I'd probably stick my fingers in my ears, squinch my eyes shut, and bawl something along the lines of "becauseI'mnotgonnadoitandyoucan'tmakeme!"

Hey, it's as valid of a reason as you're likely to get at this point.

I spent a good bit of time this afternoon spiffing up the add_entry page a bit.  There are now fifteen thoroughly silly smileys to choose from (one of which had an oddly hypnotic effect on Jeff) and eleven HTML buttons:  bold, italics, underline, strong, emphasis, ordered list, unordered list, list item…

…and then there are the two that are just for me.  The non-breaking space and my darling beloved emdash.

You know—that long hyphen-lookin' thing I overuse in practically every entry.  I figure that no one besides me will ever use the silly button, but you know what?  In the end, I'm still writing this for me.  If, in the midst of all this timezone and security seriousness, I want a button for the piece of punctuation I overuse the most, I shall have it.

(You know, that last sentence sounded much more evil and dictatorial in my head than it did when I actually wrote it down.  Hmm.  More's the pity.)

Given that I've managed to cross everything else off my list, it looks like tomorrow will be the lovely day in which I install Quarto on our junk machine (the one with register_globals turned off) and … well … there's really not a good scientific term for "I'm going to bang on it, beat on it, curse and cry and scream and code furiously until it works."

Yeah.  That's exactly what I'm gonna do.

Then I'll sketch out my plans for a rework of the manage_entries page, and let it sit for a couple of days.

For now, I think the soundest course of action is to walk away from this computer, lie down someplace soft (a bed or a couch, preferably) with the nearest available feline, and let the words of some utterly unimportant book do the cold-air-on-Jello thing.

I'll wake up tomorrow morning with a slightly more congealed brain, and get back to work.  I've got about twenty days before my self-imposed deadline arrives.

Time to get cracking.

Comments

I think I prefer the semicolon; it fits in more with the way I think.

It's all a matter of whether it fits gramatically. I know that I tend to overuse punctuation in cycles, but the words of Dr. Stephen Szilagyi eventually come back into my head, and my overuse of colons, semicolons, and long dashes go away. I'll use the emdash, Amy. I don't know because, well, I'm lazy.

Yay emdashes! I agree with you—every CMS needs a hard-coded emdash. *grin*