Ayeeeee! IE!
Well, it dawned on me - stupid me - that I have IE:mac at my disposal. Sure, it isn't the same as IE for Windows, but maybe it wouldn't hurt to try out the site in it… Ouch! It looked horrible. So, I tinkered until I realized that my position: relative settings made IE go crazy in some cases (not all). So, I removed as many as I could without disrupting the design and IE:mac now shows the front page pretty well, save for the missing logo on top (I can't figure out why that doesn't show up). The site continues to load fine for me on my browsers, but if y'all would let me know if I messed up or fixed anything from your perspectives, that'd help. Thanks for being guinea pigs.
As I mentioned to Kevin in the comments of the last post, the boxes on the right side are suppose to be sticking off a bit for visual interest. Of course, if it just looks bad, let me know.
Welcome to the New Design
Finally Moving Ahead for My Blog's Third Year
2001: Original Site
There wasn't a blog here yet, nor much of anything else. I built the site because I thought it was time I had a personal website. For years, I had been building sites for my company and for others, but never one for myself. Thus one Saturday evening, Tim's Site was born. Minimalism was the object — it was going to be a site where I posted stuff, not were I spent lots of time tinkering with the design. |
2001-2002: The Blue and Penguin Theme
The site took a turn for the worst in the summer, in my estimation, here when I introduced this interesting combination of my “famous” little rendition of Tux, an ugly blue color and Comic Sans MS for the text. This was a dark day in my web design history. My blog premiered on the site one month before the demise of this design. |
2002-2003: Green the First
Green being my favorite color, it was inevitable that it would show up on my site eventually.This design was one I worked on over Easter weekend, maintaining the navigation bar of the blue theme, but soothing colors, a more professional feel and no more Comic Sans MS. This design is the foundation of all future iterations of the site until the present one I am introducing today. |
2003: asisaid premiers
Sitting one day with a notepad in front of me, I started writing down names I could use for my site. Now that it had become mostly a blog, it seems to deserve a decent name. I picked asisaid while thinking of e-mail debates in which I would often reference back to what I had said by saying “as I said,” since people often don't seem to listen in debate (yes, I love to debate). I could also imagine some nice looking logos for it. The first asisaid design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design, save for the header. I do not have the original asisaid header handy, but the one in the picture was incorporated into the design within about two months. |
2003-2004: Blue Returns, or the Christmas Theme that Stuck
This was the last design to grace the late, great Ciaran's Journal blogging tool. It started out with the Christmas theme with a nativity and then gained the green hill when I got attached to the design and wanted to keep it for the rest of the year. The design was the same as the 2002-2003 green design and 2003 asisaid green design, save for the colors, the hill on top, and the purple/blue background behind the blogroll (instead of the previous white background). |
2004-2005: SAFARI Blues
After the old blog tool died, I started restoring the site, and came close to making it look the same as the 2003-2004 design. However, I never completely replicated it, leaving out a few things such as the “Recently Said” graphic in favor of a quote du jour (I had started using quotes at the top in October 2004, but had kept the “Recently Said” graphic until I imported the theme into SAFARI. |
2005: Green the Second
This is the present theme. It is the first theme to ditch almost all tables in favor of a CSS layout. The blog entries may violate W3C standards, but the template is verified as XHTML Transitional and CSS 2.0. Not exactly as dramatic as the War of the Roses, but the battle between green and blue continues as green sweeps back into control of the site.
You'll notice it uses similar colors and a similar logo backdrop to the 2003 asisaid design. It's logo background also recalls the November 2002 logo banners of the Sakamuyo log, which I had designed for Kevin. On the other hand, I have aimed to make this theme cleaner, more legible and more user friendly than past designs. I nuked the 2001-style navigation bar that linked to a bunch of outdated pages in favor of a new one, placed a special box just for quotes on the right side, and made a few other tweaks. You'll also notice that I kept the hill scene, but moved it to the bottom of the page. What do you think? Let me know in the comments. |
Still Soon
I'll have the new design up tomorrow, I think. I got tied up trying to make it validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional tonight. I have a few bugs that cropped up during that process, but I hope to have everything arranged OK tomorrow. We'll see…
Time for Change
Maybe it's because Christopher and Kevin just switched to spiffy new designs. Maybe it is because I am procrastinating on some work. Maybe it's because it has been years since I did more than a cursory update to my site design (2002, if my memory serves). Whatever the case may be, I feel that it is time for change. I'm going to try to dabble in CSS and see if I can bring my site into the modern age. If my dabbling goes well, things may look different later today, if my dabbling fails, you'll just have to live with this look for awhile longer.
Update (2005.02.19 23:59): It isn't going to go up today, if you didn't already guess that. I'm aiming for tomorrow. All I can say is that I have come to really like doing layouts in CSS today. All of my cratchty complaining about CSS layouts may have been ill advised. You can teach an old web-dev dog new tricks!
Picture This
Well, I added my “official mug shot” to the right column of this page. I point you back to yesterday's post for the appropriate warnings about it, but it is at least better than the last. This is the head shot I referenced earlier this week.
As I noted previously, I've been on the web for either ten or eleven years now (I can't recall exactly when I first popped open a web browser — I think 1994), and this is a first. I've thought about doing so before, but just never got around to it. But now I have and Ed cannot complain about me should I decide to turn asisaid into an Internet Church now.
In other news, I did some minor adjustments to my Choose Your Own Adventure piece, so that it now specifically says that Riley was trying to contact the police. I'm not sure if it is quite what Christopher was looking for, though, so he is welcome to throw a rotten tomato at me and tell me to fix it in some other fashion, if he'd like.
Topically Speaking
I'm not sure if anyone has (or ever will, for that matter) make use of the topics on the sidebar, but as long as I have them, I decided to start putting things in order. My blog has been subtlety shifting to less of a technology focus (at least I think it has, did you notice?) and so I shifted things around to avoid placing new content into Miscellaneous. The Linux category and some other technology sections were merged into the existing Comp/Tech category, which makes more sense. Here's what's new:
- Books, Literature and Language: This category will be a good place for discussion of books when they don't fit anywhere else. It will also contain my musings on literature (several longish pieces coming soon) and the English language. This kind of stuff is already on the site and I'm sorting through the other categories and moving stuff here as appropriate.
- Holidays: This category absorbed the Christmas and Christmas Cheer categories and will also house some of my stuff from other holidays. Again, I'm still working on populating it with posts that previously went into less appropriate categories.
- Creative Works: This takes over for my Writing and Poetry categories that house creative projects I've placed on asisaid. When inspiration of Haiku or Villanelle strikes, it will land here from now on. I have a few pending that I have not decided if I will release or not. If I ever get a start on the next Great American Novel, that will go here too. I've started placing items in it, expect some older ones to be added in the future.
- Learning: Stuff from “the Academy.” I'm not sure exactly what will find its way here, but it will be more than mere discussion of course schedules in the future. More informal posts on the joy of learning may factor in too.
- Question: This category is home to previous asisaid Challenge posts. If you want to revisit our friend Mosca from Volpone or recall the official languages of Sweden, check out these entries.]
- Current Events: Apparently I don't comment on Science and News independently from other categories all that much, so I merged them together. I'll probably find some old posts that fit here in the future. If I discuss voting in Iraq, it will likely go here.
In addition, I'll be adding a Religion category soon, which should round out the new “Humanities Section.” This will house some posts I'd like to write on the Academic/Critical Study of Religion (not negative — critical can be positive) as opposed to my present Faith category, which normally focuses on the personal experience of faith in Jesus as opposed to systematic study of doctrines. If this difference sounds vague, stay tuned, as that will be the subject of my next post (or perhaps one post after that), time permitting.
Topics
You may have noticed I've added topics to the side column of the site now. I just stuck them there for the moment without concern for aesthetic issues, which I hope to deal with on this site in the next few weeks. I'll also need to re-organize to remove some of the topics that I've ceased to use and merge topics that are redundant.
Back when I was using my fork of Ciaran's Journal tool, I had hacked in topics by replacing another field, but there was never a place that listed all of the topics being used — an article was simply added if I typed in the right name in the box when posting (if I typed in something different, a new topic would be “created”). Now that I can see them all at once, I can see where I've changed topic names at times and can avoid doing likewise in the future.
More Progress
Cookies now work (or should), subjects are automatically filled out in comments again, “Read More” links only show up when they should, etc. Am I done? Not even close, but I am closer. Let me know if you see any new bugs (or any old ones I've seemed to have overlooked — other than stuff like padding around text (the layout is on my list to fix).
Oh, and here is the RSS feed, if you are interested.
The Genealogy of SAFARI (Or How Blogging Revived Old Code)
SAFARI (Standardized Automated Format and Retrieval Interface) began its life in 1999. I had a simple goal and wanted a simple solution: I was redesigning my church's web site and I wanted an easy way to post the entire church newsletter online. At the time, I had been tinkering with Perl for about two and a half years and thought I was a much better Perl wrangler than I really was. So I decided what every overambitious Perl programmer would decide: I'll write a content management system.
At the time, there were far less CMS's out there, I wasn't aware of more than a handful, and none of them did what I wanted — provide a way to sort articles by issue, a must for a monthly publication. I started working on SAFARI, and quickly started to realize the enormity of what I had taken on. I had no idea where to begin. But I trudged ahead, creating a relatively modular CMS that uses a flat-file database (that's a fancy term for a text file that stores your data), provided multiple levels of user access and eventually even a rudimentary search engine. In 2001, I released the code here, although honestly the code has some serious flaws which I knew, even at that time, needed to be corrected.
In fact, SAFARI was so focused on issue-based content, that I had to go with PHP-Nuke when I launched OfB, simply because SAFARI didn't work in the proper fashion for a normal internet publication. It was rather depressing, but laziness has a way of winning over pride, and so that was that. OfB was launched two months before I even released the SAFARI code, which made the release of SAFARI ever more depressing. However, SAFARI did serve its niche well, so I did release it with hopes that maybe someone would find it useful.
Blogging Days
My blog launched in February of 2002, at the time before blogging had really become all that well known. In fact, while I had heard the term, I had ignored the trend, and when my friend and fellow DMOZ-editor Ciaran Hamilton told me he had started a blog and offered his then-unreleased Journal script to use, I decided to give blogging a spin. This did compound the fact that within four months I had passed over using my own SAFARI script not once, but twice, but by that time I had given up any grand plans for SAFARI.
Hiya! My friend Ciaran Hamilton gave me this nice script, waddya think?How I wish I had the foresight that I'd still be blogging today. Eduardo started by invoking the muse from Homer's Illiad, I start with broken English that makes me cringe. But, I digress…
Ciaran's Journal code is probably one of the tightest blog codebases you will find. It is a compact, two file package that gets the job done well. I know that much, since it served me well from February 21, 2002 through December 23 of this past year, when it finally died for a reason I still do not know. During that time, I synchronized with his official code based once in November of 2002, after which I forked the code, adding commenting capabilities, a much more standard issue look (attempting to mimic MovableType somewhat) and a few other features.
This is the point at which my interest in blogging would become galvanized. Blogging was only so interesting when you didn't know if people were actually reading the posts. I know Ciaran and Kevin were at least occasional readers, but only because I knew them from elsewhere. It was my first post with commenting support that Christopher left a short comment and I realized I had a reader originating from the blogosphere — maybe I could get into this thing after all!
The Christian Directory Project (OpenMoz/FreeMoz)
Another important thread in this genealogy is the ill-fated FreeMoz project. FreeMoz is key for two reasons — first it is the project that brought me into contact with Ciaran and also some of the lessons in database design that I learned working on it figure into SAFARI later on. Long before my DMOZ-editorship lapsed, I made a post on the editors forums asking if anyone knew of a way to get the DMOZ codebase to create another specialized directory. Ciaran answered and after exploring the options, we decided to write our own replacement. I hacked the basics together in December of 2001, Ciaran added some much needed functionality and we would continue to work on it on-and-off for about a year. The project died, as Antony Flew would say, a death of a thousand qualifications, as we sought to garner support to develop the software needed to create a Christian variant of DMOZ. The impetus for the project was an issue, or I should say, issues with DMOZ, such as DMOZ's listing of X-rated material as well as the simple fact that “FaithMoz” could hopefully leverage the same concept to bring together a directory of Christian sites perhaps even better than DMOZ's, since there would not be as much “noise.”
Like SAFARI, building a whole directory project was a big deal. Hoping to attract developers to create the code-base, which would be useful for many directories, I began talks with Richard M. Stallman (RMS) of the Free Software Foundation about making the software, re-badged FreeMoz by RMS's request, an official GNU Project. We ended up getting bogged down in legal (i.e. avoiding infringement of AOL/Netscape's DMOZ) and editorial freedom issues, and the months we spent on that ended up killing off the momentum of the project. It was my fault for worrying to much about amassing major support, rather than the FSF's fault for worrying about legalities.
Back to SAFARI
In March of 2003, OfB was hacked, thanks to PHP-Nuke's poor security model. Having taken a week of vacation that very week, I resolved to spend the time figuring out a replacement for PHP-Nuke. I became convinced that all of the Nuke-spinoffs had issues, and blogging software simply wasn't quite right for a news site. What was I going to do? I decided it was time to revive SAFARI. However, SAFARI needed to be improved vastly for it to work on OfB. I would need to lose the issue based mentality of the CMS (or, more correctly, relegate it to one of several modes of viewing the content), add commenting, and most importantly, port the whole thing over to a SQL backend instead of the inefficient flat-file database.
I was able to do the last item within about three days, but after my work-vacation ended, I did not have time to finish the project. I also invested some time in fixing parts of PHP-Nuke, so I gave up the idea of bringing back SAFARI, once again. The promise of a really useful version of SAFARI, that I could use somewhere other than just my church's web site, was starting to seem like vaporware.
Over the next year, OfB would be compromised again and, at the same time, I started noticing things that were lacking in my forked version of Ciaran's Journal code. For example, I could not delete or edit posts or comments without editing the database manually (editing was especially tedious because the db was encoded). I also noticed that asisaid was becoming extremely slow and a huge resource hog, since each view of any post required the entire one megabyte database to be processed thoroughly. At some point, I resolved that I would make asisaid a test site for SAFARI, since it was a low traffic site and needed a needed a CMS — once I got SAFARI into a state where it worked satisfactorily here, I could move OfB to it as well.
Over the past year or so, every few weeks I'd take some time (usually a few hours) and start rewriting functions of SAFARI. I integrated the comment code I had written from my old Journal code, finished SQL-support and started implementing a more sensible theme system, similar to the one used by PHP-Nuke. The comment code is essentially SAFARI's only link to Ciaran's code, although it also incorporates some of the ideas from Journal codebase.
Back to Genealogy
If you've been following this byte-wasting toy of mine all the way to this point, you've probably noticed that SAFARI doesn't have a clear genealogy. SAFARI is an older codebase than Journal is, but it is also, in some senses, the decedent of Journal. Likewise, while porting SAFARI to SQL, I incorporated many of the ideas I had first tried out for FreeMoz, which had, conversely, borrowed some ideas from the original SAFARI. Once I complete the project, SAFARI 2 will probably have enough new code that it might be fair to say that it is the grandchild of SAFARI 0.9, Journal and FreeMoz, but it is not a simple linage at all.
Lastly, to believe themselves, when they tell you they will make you immortal by their verses. Thus doing, your name shall flourish in the printers` shops. Thus doing, you shall be of kin to many a poetical preface. Thus doing, you shall be most fair, most rich, most wise, most all; you shall dwell upon superlatives. Thus doing, though you be libertino patre natus, you shall suddenly grow Herculea proles — Sir Philip Sidney
Buh Bye
The old blogging software I've been using seems to have given up its ghost. It's dead. As a doornail. Gone. Bit the dust. Bought the farm. All the entries now refuse to appear, although all the data is intact on the server. I have no idea why.
Fortunately, I've been planning a blogware update to my new SAFARI 2 Content System. Unfortunately, I discovered some bugs in it this afternoon as I was considering migrating it (this was all before I realized my blogware had died). Fortunately, I've fixed most of those bugs. Unfortunately, I haven't fixed all of them yet.
My big hope is that I'll return to the blogosphere within the next few days, at worst, maybe tonight, at best. In the mean time, I'll update this page, but I don't want to put too much effort into this static page.
I've placed a place holder article on OfB.biz where you can comment on this “entry” if you'd like to. Click here to read and post comments.
In the mean time…If you have not visited all of the sites on my blogroll before, why not visit one of them right now?
