No Lair update yesterday, sorry, oh well.
autocad 2000 serialI'm tired. Anyone following the crap on my forums can guess half the story (the other half is strictly real-world crap, which I'll share when it isn't almost 1 in the morning.
As many of you may know, I'm going to redesign the Lair next year. I've already started working on some of the work; specifically, I've begun working on the redesigned (visually and technically) sidebar.
It will look very different from how it does currently, with a slick and clean look that will work well with everything else. From a technical standpoint, I'm finally going to have the effect that I tried to have on the site earlier, but ran into issues; those issues are alleviated when doing it in CSS, thankfully.
But the big surprise is that the sidebar, as it stands right now, is roughly half the size that the current sidebar.txt. The current sidebar is 6,461 bytes, while the new one is 3,386 bytes. Ultimately, this 4k difference won't have a super-huge impact on the user, but it does cut down the amount of data being transferred on a daily basis just a bit; in the grand scheme of things, it eases a fair amount of stress from the server (4k here and 4k there really adds up over a few thousand hits).
I feel I should note that Jon Pearse helped me out very much with the sidebar, practically coding the damn thing for me (though I'm styling his code quite a bit, the main markup isn't being modified very much).
Once the sidebar is done, I'll still have several other things to work on:
Those are just the things I can work on now. Once the Lair is closed for the year, I'll be able to start going through all of the content on the site, giving it a complete overhaul. Here's a list of some of the things I'll be checking (more for my benefit than yours):
That will, of course, be on top of the process of applying the new layout code to each and every single page by hand. Why am I going to do it by hand, when doing so is such an inefficient and slow process (not to mention painful)? Firstly, because I'm a bit of a control freak, and don't trust a program to do everything perfectly. I love BBEdit's search & replace, but I don't trust it to catch every single instance.
The second (and more important) reason is to make sure that I learn these new rules and follow them to the letter. I know HTML as well as I do for one reason alone: I had to drag myself through massive amounts of code in very long, mind-numbing projects. As a result, I know it like the back of my hand. If I do the same thing again, I'll be re-educating myself in a way that will make sure that it sticks.
The third reason is because I'm a glutton for punishment, it would seem. ;)
Gah, what a way to spend my first waking minutes on a holiday. Apparently, a spam bot hit blog.evula.net hard while I was asleep. After running through MT-Blacklist over and over, I ended up removing 946 items of spam. Yeesh. My own blog had about 50 spam comments, though several other people had a lot too (didn't keep track of those, though).
Grrr. So it was 4:30 yesterday, and I still hadn't gotten a call from Verizon about my new cell phone coming in. For a lack of anything else to do, I checked my messages. Sure enough, Verizon had called and left a message about my new phone.
Let me rephrase this: Verizon Wireless called my broken cell phone to tell me that my working cell phone was in. They were supposed to call my work number, because they "knew" that my cell phone was broken.
Arg.
So I now have a working cell phone... sorta. The backlit screen doesn't light up, which makes use in less-than-fully-lit places an impossibility. *sigh* At least I now have a working phone, and can stick all of the numbers I need into Address Book.