EVula's Blog

A progress report on the Lair redesign

For those that don't know, I'm in the middle of redesigning the Lair. It's a pain in the ass project, to be sure, and has taken quite a bit longer than I was wanting it to. However, I am making progress.

porn klip

I currently have 15 directories fully converted and verified that they are valid: About, Cheat Codes, Copyrights, Games, General, Misc., Escape Velocity, Humor, Opinions, Junk, Reviews, WarCraft 3, Quote Archive, EV Bible, and the Link Archive.

The main thing that has been eating up my time on this is sorting out all of the different styles for everything. A lot of my old code is, quite frankly, crap, meaning that I have to rethink a lot of it. For example, let's take the "Alien vs. Predator" line from the existing Reviews page (modified slightly for this page):

<LI><A CLASS="review" HREF="movies/avp.html">Alien vs. Predator</a> &nbsp; <span class="new_updated-green">NEW</span> <BR> &nbsp; &nbsp; <span class="bracket-gray">&lt;</span> <span class="gray">by <span class="review-stats">EVula</span> | Rating:</span> <span class="review-stats">9.1</span> <span class="bracket-gray">&gt;</span>

At least it uses <span> tags, I say; some of the parts of the Lair still have <font> tags. *shudder* Anyway, it's extremely cluttered, and has a ton of redundant tags. Here's what it has become (again, modified slightly for this page):

<li><a href="movies/avp.php">Alien vs. Predator</a> <span class="new_updated">NEW</span> <p>by <em>EVula</em> | Rating: <em>9.1</em></p></li>

The first bit of code had 331 characters; the second has 141. That's less than half the size, and it looks exactly the same (though I did remove the < and > that exist currently, that's the only change). While it may not seem like a whole lot of code, on page with 31 instances (like the Movies page), it can start to add up.

Ultimately, though, I think that I'm going to end up slacking off when it comes to updating the entire site right now. When I put up everything, nothing will look like the current version of the Lair, but if I don't get much further along, I'm going to just quickly convert stuff over for the new style, rather than going, line by line, finessing every bit of code. Specifically, I'm guessing that the Survival Guide won't be validated until the middle of the year. :)

Eventually, this blog, the Store, and my personal site will all get recoded to match the rest of the Lair (right now the Store and personal site at least have the same look and feel; this blog, on the other hand...). However, I'm probably not going to worry about that until after I publically update the Lair for two reasons:

1. I need yet one more thing to do like I need a rash on my ass. Lovely mental imagery, I realize, but it's true. At this point, I just want the update to be done, period.
2. The Store and Blog will be very tough. Because the blog is run through MovableType, rather than a simple file (like I have everything else on the Lair), I'll have to tweak a few things to make sure all the templates are updated properly. The Store, on the other hand, will be forced to have seperate style sheets; one for the local Store pages (which I won't give a damn about being valid; too much work to convert CafePress' code every single time), and one for the CafePress pages (since CafePress forcibly inserts something into the header of every page, I can't just override it with my own code).

Once I'm done with the Lair update, I'll be able to turn my attention towards other sections of the Empire. I did up a To Do list for 2005, and I'm going to be making some major changes to evula.org later this year, as well as a few things here and there on evula.net. Maybe something even bigger is on the horizon... <cryptic grin>

Hah, spam is funny!

This is just too damn funny. I got an email titled "MAIL SYSTEM ERROR - RETURNED MAIL":

Dear user evula@evula.com,

We have received reports that your e-mail account was used to send a huge amount of spam messages during the recent week.
Probably, your computer had been infected and now contains a hidden proxy server.

Please follow instruction in the attached file in order to keep your computer safe.

Sincerely yours,
evula.com technical support team.

Now, aside from the smug smile I have on my face that is the result of having a Mac and not needing to worry about the aforementioned hidden proxy server (or the .zip file that was attached to the email), the "evula.com technical support team" part is going to have me laughing for the rest of the week. Good job, spammers! :)

I now have a validated blog, hot diggity damn!