This week’s instalment of my on-line tarot deck is the four Threes: Wands, Cups, Swords, Coins. This week also sees a behind-the-scenes change to the way I convert the simple images in to the complete cards. Up until now I edited the fancy image file by hand in a text editor using cut & paste. Now I have a Tcl script that does this step automatically. The idea is that I spend more of my time drawing and less of it fiddling with the SVG code!
Jeremy’s completed the first year of her Weekly Strip: the first strip was Monday 2 April 2001, the 52nd will be Tuesday 2 April 2002 (which she assembled before disppearing to Amsterdam for Easter).
To mark the occasion I am belatedly overhauling the Tcl
scripts used to generate the HTML pages that form the index for
the strips. Careful readers will have noticed that the old index page had the year 2001
in its URL, despite including all the 2002 strips as well.
Basically my indexing script was all organized around generating
a single index page. I have now refactored the whole
shebang so that not only are there now per-year index pages, all
the ones for years beyond 2001 have their own directories (e.g.,
the index for 2002 is /jrd/2002/ instead of being
/jrd/tws-2002.html). There was a little jiggery-pokery
required to ensure that existing pages do not move to
different URLs (to avoid breaking any links or bookmarks other
people might have). Thus last week’s strip remains at URL
/jrd/20020326.html,
and this week’s /jrd/2002/20020402.html.
I have decided to change the way my home site works. Up until now I
have been writing entries by creating a quasi-XML file containing the
HTML text; I am changing the format to be quasi-RFC-822: a text file
with a short header section at the top. The text is translated to
HTML via the usual hacked-together nest of regexps.
Read more
If you are reading this on-line then I have finally managed to alter my
Expect script to work with the Mac OS X version of ftp. This is part
of the long drawn-out battle to transfer my projects to my PowerBook so
that my old desktop (circa 1998) can be repurposed.
Read more