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24 September 2009

Ah, numeral triplication :)

12 September 2009

August 2008

May 2007 Update

After a brief two-year hiatus, I’ve finally gotten off my lazy bum and started posting updates to the site again. Of course, seeing as most of my time has been taken up with graduate work and other projects not worth posting about yet, the update hasn’t taken too long ;)

You know, getting a masters degree takes a lot of work! (Surprise, surprise) Despite being a hugh time sink, though, I would have to say it’s been worth it considering all the neat stuff I’ve seen and done. Still, after six years of higher education, I’m ready for a change ;)

There are some little tidbits remaining that I plan to post soon, but those will most likely come after I return from vacation :)

June 2006

July 2005 Update

Another year, another host :) Except this time I get to play around with a real server ;D

Of course, switching to an entirely different platform required several major changes to the site, the largest of which was converting all of the code from VBScript to PHP (and, obviously, learning a little PHP before I got started ;). After writing the site once in VBScript and then again in PHP, I have to say that PHP is by far the better language. The code required in this new version is maybe a fifth of that from the VB version, and that includes several new little features that have been added during the move. I’m not too fond of the C-style function names, and prefixing variables with a dollar sign does take some getting used to. Still, for people used to languages with C-based syntax, PHP is definately the way to go ;)

The overhaul also gave me an opportunity to improve the backend setup. Before, special styles like Winter and special items like the Resume page were handled using a big list of special cases in the site processing code. Now I only need to check for special processing instructions contained in the same directory as the item itself. I also fiddled around with the directory structure, which did involve a few minor changes to the style files and various links in the site, but nothing too difficult.

So now the code for v2.0 is complete! Leaving only a few more items from this summer to add to the site, a few more projects I’d like to start working on, a few thousand pages of material I’d like to read, finishing up preparations for my new apartment, starting graduate school, etc, etc . . . which I’ll get to, you know, “eventually” ;D

July 2004

I had been toying with the idea of displaying content with a choice of interfaces for a while when summer rolled around and I decided to apply it to a website. This is the result :)

Although I’ve worked on some basic HTML sites in years past, XML and ASP was something new. I had read up on the basics in recent CPU articles (which is a great read, in my humble opinion ;), then moved on to a few online tutorials for a crash course in XSLT, ASP, VB, and some more XML before getting started (though I still can’t get my head around Schema definitions).

So how does it all work? Basically, each item you see on the site (main page, projects, etc.) is a separate XML file contained in a directory of the same name. When you go to a directory, the index.asp file there loads up, runs the XML through the stylesheet for the style you chose, and spits out the resulting HTML. The only real difficulties are getting navigational links to work properly (which are actually passed in as parameters to the XSL file) and subitems.

The first style I designed was Curvy, which was fairly easy in and of itself. Translating that into an XSL file, however, was a bit of a chore (especially since I was working out all of the site code at the same time :). With that behind me, though, the next few styles were quite easy.

Curious about the format? You can learn a bit more at the Preview page. You can also take a look at all the updates made to the site here.

So now it’s back to my first love: programming. Enjoy the site