November 2001
I’ve been envying my friends with all their
Livejournal sites (such as
cleanskies and
tinyjo)
and other web logs (such as
Dave Winer’s).
Given that I already have to struggle to keep my work log up to
date, I don’t think I’m up to keeping a journal of my
own, but I did want to ape the layout for my own pages.
In particular, I have gone from a vaguely chronological list of
stuff to a strictly chronological order of short paragraphs, with
pointers to longer articles or photo albums.
This style allows for me to add short notes on whatever takes my
fancy without special effort as well.
I also have
permanent links for each entry (the # links next to the date).
Given the snail-like pace of progress in my area of my site, my
archives are annual rather than monthly...
This is all cobbled together in a semi-automated fashion
(using TclHTML)—not
quite as mechanized as a proper weblog, but
simpler to implement. Entries are kept in spearate disc files on
my home PC, and assembled in to the HTML pages automatically.
Now the display of entries is sorted out
I plan to partially automate the
creation of new entries.
I now have a command I can invoke in GNU Emacs to
create a new entry in this work log. All it does is visit the
entry file (each entry in this weblog has its own source file)
and create a skeletal entry for me to type in to. Since
I don’t mind typing in HTML myself—and always
have an instance of Emacs running—this is enough for me to
make entries easily. I have a similar set-up at work for
my on-line work-log—nowadays it is the only application
I still use Emacs for at work...
After a hiatus of a couple of years, here is a new essay
about web development. I’m afraid this time the
experience I am drawing on is
negative rather than positive:
Just say No to webclasses. OK, I admit
this is something
of an obscure topic for a rant—you probably will never
have heard of this particular web-application framework before
today. But it is sadly occuplying all to much of my
working life these days... :-(
We were going to go see the Moscow State Circus, but then
several of us collectively decided it was far too cold to sit in
a tent so we went round to Jo’s to play Cheapass Games instead. Jeremy
and I haven’t played Parts
Unknown since we binged on it with Adrian and Alex at Aviemore (it is possible we have too many
Cheapass games, since we don’t play them often enough to
work through them all faster that that). Jeremy also read out
Martin Hand’s account of Caption 2001. It seems
Caption 2001 succeeded surprisingly well at fostering romance
amongst the attendees. We’ll have to ask him if it is OK
to add it to the site...
I forgot one of the biggest reasons why the webclasses framework should not be used
for collaborative web development: it does its best to
prevent you from using a source-code control system to
co-ordinate your developers’ changes!
It is a tradition of Caption that the photos of the event take
months if not years to appear. This year is no exception—I am
still working on indexing the pictures nicely... but the first
cut of my Caption 2001
photo album is now on-line, and not before time. I’m even
trying to munge several of the photos together in to animations.
Here’s a simple demo
of using SVG
to annotate an existing (raster) image. To view this you will
need a web browser which groks SVG; so far I have tested it
with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 for the Mac, and MSIE 4
for Windows, using Adobe’s SVG
Plug-In 3.0.
