A triumphant return.

Wow, you’re still coming here? Now that’s what I call perseverance. Or, perhaps, simply an inevitable consequence of the internet…it’s pretty easy to click a bookmark during your lunch break. If you’re technologically inclined, you might even have subscribed via RSS, in which case you probably didn’t even remember until you saw the little notification!

I like the RSS possibility the best simply because it make me feel important. I mean, how many people can say they’ve got subscribers? You know, aside from everyone who’s every published a LiveJournal. Or has a profile on Facebook. Or…nevermind.

Anyway.

The site is back after a two month hiatus which – given my previous track record – it’s possible you didn’t actually recognize as such. It’s actually been very difficult for me to maintain this sort of web presence lately, primarily because my life hasn’t been very notable. I was doing essentially the same thing at any given point in a year as I had been doing at that same time in the previous year, a situation that does not make for interesting weblog content. When even I found myself being bored by the entries I tried to write, I decided it might be time for an extended leave of absence.

Circumstances change, though, as they are wont to do, and I’m happy to say that things are finally looking to be…dynamic…enough to get me to type once in a while. That’s not a guarantee that things will be exciting, per se, but I’ll at least try to have things to talk about from time to time. I’m involved in a major (relatively speaking) game development project that seems like it might have a shot at going somewhere, I’m finally a few months from getting the hell out of college, and from this point forward things look to be a bit more entertaining.

As for the site itself, obviously (or maybe not, depending on when you last came by) there’s a new visual aesthetic. It’s a pretty radical change from the previous one, so I’ll understand if it doesn’t immediately appeal to my entire audience. The vast majority of it works just fine, although I’ve no doubt that various browser bugs (I’m looking at you IE6!) will be exposed in the coming weeks, but the functionality has all been tested. Feel free to try out the new Live Search function in the sidebar, which will update dynamically (though not exactly quickly) as you type, or the AJAX-based archives. In a shocking reversal of the expected, the photo gallery actually works! It even has a fair number of (older) photos!

There are a few more things I’ll be adding and touching up over the next few days, some of which are predicated upon third parties getting them done. If warranted, I’ll make brief announcement when they’re ready.

It’s good to be back, and here’s hoping that I’ll be able to maintain a healthier level of commitment in the coming year.

Javascript blockquote elements.

This will be yet another web-development entry, so those of you who have no interest in such things should feel free to move along. I promise I’ll make a less technical post sometime tomorrow!

Anyway, I’m adding little bits of functionality to the site as the days progress. You know the kind: things that are too small to warrant holding up the release but big enough that you think they’re pretty cool. Today I implemented a short Javascript that takes the cite attribute from a blockquote element and adds actual cite tags within. It’s pretty simple, and I’ll include the code below so that you can use it yourself if you like.

<script type="text/javascript">
  function citeQuotes() {
    var quotes = document.getElementById('commentlist')
                 .getElementsByTagName('blockquote');
    var total = quotes.length;
    if(total > 0) {
      for(i=0; i<total ; i++) {
        if(quotes[i].hasAttribute('cite')) {
          var citation = document.createElement('cite');
          citation.textContent = quotes[i].getAttribute('cite') + ' said:';
          quotes[i].insertBefore(citation, quotes[i].firstChild);
        }
      }
    }
  } // end function
</script>

To use this, simply insert the above code into the head of your document and then put onload="javascript:citeQuotes();" into the body element. It should be clear from the code that I’ve limited these citations to blockquote elements that are inside my comments list, but there is no reason it has to be this way. If you would prefer that the style apply to all blockquote elements on your page you could simply remove the getElementById() method altogether.

I should note that this script can take an annoyingly long time to run, but the flicker that you get as the citations are inserted probably isn’t noticeable to anyone who didn’t design and build the page. If it ends up bothering people I’ll look into hiding that adjustment. Feel free to leave feedback in the comments!

Please stand by…

Yes, I know I said I would make a “real post” several days ago…what else is new? The real issue at hand is an ill-advised upgrade to the newest version of Wordpress. It turns out that they decided to deprecate approximately 9,000,000 template tags that I was making use of without so much as a sideways comment about it in the upgrade details.

Seriously, I love Wordpress and the guys behind it work hard, but this is stupid as hell. Hopefully I’ll have everything running more or less as it should by the end of Sunday but some bits of functionality appear to be rather difficult to replicate using the new system. Fun times.

Buried in bits.

With the exception of this weekend it’s been a fairly boring and mundane week or so. And the “exciting” things that happened over the weekend relate exclusively to developments in my project which, even if I could talk about it now, would probably bore the hell out of you.

But then, what else is new?

I’ve been whiling away my idle hours playing Warcraft 3 with Darth and a few guys from campus. Though it might seem a bit strange to suddenly get involved in a four year old game, the RTS genre has been woefully under served in the last couple of years. I got a lot of enjoyment out of Rise of Nations, to be sure, but that sort of game takes too long to play. With so many meetings and classes strung throughout the day I just don’t find myself with consecutive hours to play games very often. Which is actually why I finally quit (or, to be precise, went on indefinite leave from) Final Fantasy XI. Although I still got a certain satisfaction out of the game – and I would very much like to see the changes they make to white mage – I just can’t justify devoting entire evenings to it anymore. If I ever could, really, but that’s a totally different topic of discussion.

As lame as this may sound, a significant portion of my days are now spent answering, reading and writing e-mails. I have become, almost completely involuntarily, a manager. Don’t get me wrong, when I took on this project I knew that I was going to be the team leader and I had at least some idea of the kind of work I would be expected to perform. On the other hand, I don’t think I was prepared for the sheer volume of e-mail. Over a period of four days (Friday through Monday) I managed to accumulate ninety-two e-mails…ninety-two!

This absurdity quickly sent me crashing up against the university’s storage quotas. I’d been flirting within a few megabytes of their limit for almost a year now, but deluge annihilated what little buffer I had. To remedy this I spent most of this morning going through my e-mails all the way back to late 2005 and deleting around twenty megabytes. After lunch I’ll probably start archiving and compressing a lot of the older stuff that I can’t get rid of yet (mostly HGD correspondence) to move it off of the university servers.

Coming up on the next post: more exciting e-mail stories? Maybe!

The first line of this post is sort of a lie.

I’m not sure how I feel about Facebook.

Yes, I know I’m essentially the last college-aged person on the planet to join this party. For that matter, I’m probably well behind the hipper segment of the baby boomers. In my defense, I’ve had an account there for a long time…back when you couldn’t even join without a university e-mail address. And I think they had to explicitly invite you? I don’t honestly remember.

In any case, a few weeks ago (as part of a New Year’s resolution) I finally created my profile and added a few friends. The goal was to do a better job of staying in touch with the many friends I have that don’t (or no longer) live anywhere near me. Like any stereotypical internet denizen, rather than writing letter or making phone calls I took the path that required the least actual human contact. In the process, though, I found out a couple of important facts about the modern Facebook community that have caused me to rethink why I even bothered.

For starters, like almost every other group event that humans have ever created or taken part in, the whole thing has turned into a competition of the most ridiculous sort. I’m sure nobody would actually admit to it, but when I look at some of the people that have three hundred or more “friends” on this thing I start to question the usefulness. Are you trying to tell me that there are three hundred people you genuinely want to hold conversations with? Do you honestly give a crap that Joey, Jeffy or Jamie is going to a frat party tonight when you can’t even remember how you “know” him?

I risk veering into tangential territory here – sufficient to say that the Newsfeed is twelve parts idiotic for anyone who has more than a dozen friends.

This vaguely coherent rant was inspired by receiving yet another (the fourth since I created my profile) friend request from someone who graduated from my old public school district two years after I should have graduated from college. For fuck’s sake, today I got a request from someone who will graduate from Walled Lake Northern this spring. I am ninety-nine percent sure that school did not even exist when I was attending Western.