Sunrise Family website

30 Jan 2006

The site

This is the vaguely alluded to website of a few days ago, for Seven Network’s breakfast show (I refuse to describe any such commercial network drivel as “current affairs”!), Sunrise. The Sunrise Family is essentially an incentive/loyalty scheme vaguely akin to Triple M’s (recently-abandoned… doubtless to be re-released in nearly exactly the same form under a different brand) Freq Club and Entertainment Book-style discounts. There might be more later on, but that seems to be about it so far as what’s there right now. And, truth be told, I’m not really sure what else is coming… I’d love to replace Sunrise’s boring ROSwall form with something akin to the infamous Flash Just Letters interactive fridge thingo, though maybe in an add-only type way, which would link in to viewers’ existing Family login (i.e. so they don’t have to enter their name every time, etc.), but that’s just an idea of mine.

The technology

So, the deals.

The interface is using AJAX, presently with inline onClick triggers — because, unfortunately, I’m not quite good enough to make it pull the data from the ID… though, if you view source, I’ve setup the ID’s to have two pieces of data in there. If anyone can tell me how to write an event handler that converts an ID into a string which I can then feed to an onClick handler (and, server-side, explode() using PHP) I’m still very keen to fix that “properly”. The ID’s have two data elements because the Deals interface is designed to add support for multiple states (i.e. localised offers, etc.) in the future. And they’re prefixed by d_ because, obviously, valid identifiers can’t start with a number. D can stand for “deal” or “data”, whatever :-)

As for how the AJAX is pulling down data, I’m just using innerHTML, because it works in pretty much everything and is lots faster and lots simpler than “real” DOM methods, especially here. Observe the “Details” pane on the right of that page, and how there are different numbers of paragraphs of text, different types of data (lists, anchors, etc.), then consider how ridiculous it would be to use DOM scripting there. Euuuuccch. So, I’m not-quite standard but perfectly comfortable about that. I am, however, using HTML 4.01 as the doctype. There is no reason to use XHTML, and I’m not happy to use XHTML and not serve it properly. And, if I serve it properly, it’s too likely to break (parsers spit the dummy when encountering bad XHTML, because tolerance is zero) for a production site. Further, obviously, innerHTML doesn’t work when documents aren’t served/parsed as anything other than text/html.

I’d rather do absolutely awesome HTML 4.01 than valid but mediocre (and ultimately pointless, seeing as it’s not being parsed as XML even) XHTML.

In other nifty technology-related stuff, Yahoo!7′s partnership means (hopefully) that Seven will up the ante in terms of what technologies they’re unfurling. For us, this means taking a step forward and providing syndication services (both Atom and RSS formats) for the deals. For Seven as a whole? Well, maybe they’ll start to get rid of their once-ubiquitous table-based layouts, and (maybe) embrace more of an open broadcasting paradigm in line with their web strategy — assuming Yahoo! are directing that in any way, and/or that Seven’s online team have open minds — I don’t really know and haven’t personally dealt with anyone there, so I’ll just assume they must have a handful of cluey people on board!

The RSS and Atom feeds won’t be available if you’re checking it out on Monday, but it’ll likely be running by the end of the week. For Yahoo! users, this means they can add Sunrise Family Deals to their personalised page (but, seriously, who uses portals? I never understood that whole thing). For everyone else, you should be able to download a feed reader and add the feeds. I’d love to have a page telling people how to do this on the site, but imagine Yahoo! would object. So I’m saying it here: the people that matter know how to do it! (Though, I imagine, the “people that matter” — you, dear reader — aren’t particularly regular Sunrise viewers. Or, like me, never Sunrise viewers. Heh.)

We’ve also implemented a spot of JavaScript to fix text-selection in Internet Explorer. My layout is pretty insane in terms of the sheer quantity of absolutely positioned elements, which broke that functionality in Internet Explorer. One quick question to the WSG mailing list later, someone had provided a JavaScript fix (which we had to edit a little bit to make work properly, because we had problems with flickering elements even with cache enabled).

The eye-candy

I’ve implemented useless (but rather cool) eye-candy on the Deals page in the Details pane whenever a new deal is selected. A variation of the Fade Anything Technique, which is only meant to be pretty. No originality is claimed, we’ve had this technology all millennium.

Accessibility

Disable JavaScript and you lose the fades, and use a little more bandwidth as the entire page reloads for every item you click. In terms of non-visual user agents with JavaScript disabled, I’ve put the “Details” above the list of offers in source-order, and on every reload they only hear “Sunrise Family. Link: Skip to main content” (presuming they select the link) before getting to the actual details, so I’m fairly happy on that front.

Additionally, I’ve got the “header” from Yahoo!7 last in source-order, so anyone with assistive technologies don’t have to skip over that EVERY TIME they change the page. It was a little painful to figure out, not in the least because Yahoo’s supplied universal header isn’t at all nice for sites that are built properly — i.e. with web standards and accessibility in mind — but I much prefer it this way. This is also something we had to achieve silently and without complaining, because, whilst anyone who has a clue about web accessibility will immediately see this is a good idea, marketing people would conceivably think: “But we want people to see our search bar more often!”. Er, no, you don’t achieve anything by pissing off users. No matter, we pulled it off without making any noise about it!

We’re server-side sniffing for Firefox and handing it an “Add Yahoo!7 to the Firefox Search Box” link (which, incidentally, has particularly horrid inline JavaScript — but I don’t care because the only UA it’s being served to can do something useful with it), whilst IE users get a “Make this my homepage” link in its place. Yahoo’s version (which you can see on Seven’s — pure Flash, *obligatory shudder* — Australian Open website, though I think that version (of the header, not the website) might now be deprecated) uses JavaScript for that, but it was fairly obtrusive and, seeing as we have the ability to do that server-side, I’d much rather reduce page weight.

In terms of accessibility generally speaking, I’ve bundled in all the usual goodies such as a skip to main content link, as well as skip to login on the front page, base font size of 100.01%, and relative font sizing throughout… but extensive image replacement techniques mean that the headers are probably sub-optimal in terms of visibility. This one is out of my control, and everyone else in the workplace seems to love small text (even Lyn, who seems to often put on glasses to read things on a screen… go figure!) so I wasn’t going to fight too hard about it. All other text will scale pretty well, with the exception of the deals — because the layout is so tight, it’s only really possible to go up one, maybe two size steps in most browsers.

We’re lacking any explicit accessibility statement, and we’re also lacking access keys. Mostly because I’m convinced access keys are practically useless, and rarely bother to implement them. (On forms, there are never enough buttons for access keys and/or there’s no logical combination available, and everywhere else it sort of seems a bit pointless unless everything has an access key. Where do you draw the line?)

This site is interesting to me because, even though it’s a television audience, I still can’t make assumptions about how people will be browsing. PDA devices, for example, would struggle with our built-for-1024 layout had we done it with tables. For this site, PDA/mobile users are realistic: for example, if someone incidentally is near a Wendy’s store and remembers they might’ve seen something on the Sunrise website but can’t remember the details, they can quickly and painlessly look it up.

Further, the site also has to cater for people with cognitive or motor disabilities. For cognitive disabilities, one thing in our favour is that we’ve provided a short summary of each deal before a more heavy-duty fulltext item. For users with motor disabilities, the entire website should be accessible via tabbing — including the JavaScript-enabled Deals page.

I lost an argument regarding target=”_blank”, but will eventually win this point. A handful of advertisements — including those for intra-network links, such as for the Seven Store — open in new windows, which I am most certainly not a fan of. All external links, however, should have the rel attribute set to external. There is unfortunately no visual cue associated with this. Links I count as my biggest area of defeat in this website, which is pretty good (as in, I’d rather it just be that than something more significant such as iframe usage, enormous usability problem though new windows may present).

Inline JavaScript is completely unrelated to accessibility in light of the way this has been implemented. Admittedly, it would be advantageous to use event handlers in place of inline JavaScript (and we will be thinking that to ourselves as we look at the traffic statistics), but from an accessibility perspective it has very little impact. Standard HREF’s are defined, and caught with Javascript using return false; No functionality is lost. I much prefer this method to scattering iframes throughout the site! At any rate, I’m still trying to resolve this one, accessibility related or not. It’s a matter of personal pride, I suppose.

The Styles and Bugs

The entire design (done in-house by Dacien) is awesome (in my opinion — if I didn’t think it was, I just would have kept quiet about it), but very tight.

So tight, in fact, that I had to set outline:0; on some links to stop Firefox from breaking the layout (1 pixel difference) when a link was active (as they are when you click a deal and it’s caught by JavaScript rather than actually reloading the page — the link remains active), adding a 1 pixel dotted border. Cross browser support is pretty awesome — it should be good in IE back to 5 — Opera, Safari, Konqueror, and even (mostly) IE 5.2 Mac are happy. Firefox deserves special mention: it has so many little (big for this site) things wrong with it that it’s often rather painful to make work properly. In fact, of all browsers mentioned, Firefox 1.0.x (on non-Windows platforms) is the only one whose behaviour I’m definitely not happy with (mostly because I expect better from it, but also because it gets some things horribly wrong).

Such as, for example, the “Meet the Family” page. It works perfectly or near-perfectly in every other browser, but certain Firefox variants on certain platforms render only the first two items in the “Sunrise Team” list(/right column, if you’ll excuse my presentational-speak) on first load… and then renders perfectly if you refresh the page. This is what I meant by my “predictable inadequacy” post of a few days ago. I’m fairly certain it’s something to do with floated list items, but possibly not.

Another bug is (also in Firefox — noticing a trend, anyone? No, I didn’t build for IE. I wrote about 90% of the stylesheet sitting in Firefox 1.5.x using Chris Pederick’s Web Dev extension, and both that browser and Opera operate near-perfectly) Firefox 1.0.x’s penchant for adding scrollbars where they’re not required with overflow:auto (see front page on non-Windows platforms, and the Deals page — lots of style overlap/common classes there, so this is to be expected).

By far the most interesting rendering difference I encountered building a layout this tight was between Internet Explorer/Windows XP with and without Windows Themes enabled. Yes, it does make a difference. Interface widgets shouldn’t really interfere with styles at all, IMO, but they did here. The solution basically entailed shaving off a couple of pixels where required, so I didn’t come up with something particularly innovative for it!

Summary

In all, I’m pretty happy with the site. Seven’s internal Online team apparently noticed/complimented our team on the absence of layout tables, which I (perhaps arrogantly) take with some degree of indifference: people shouldn’t be building sites with tables for that purpose anyway. If we are to be complemented, then it should be on the design (and, as part of that, achieving a design this ‘tight’ with CSS), or on the usability benefits realised by intelligent integration of AJAX, or the development pace (again, partially because of the flexibility CSS gives us), or maybe on lightweight, semantic code as a cost-saving mechanism.

Truth be told, I now believe we may have even gone a little overboard with the tables elimination. If I could do it all again, the Deals page would feature a table instead of a list, and I’d use DOM scripting to insert/delete records rather than replace the “state” part with innerHTML. The markup might gain a (very) little bit of weight, but it’d be worth it. It would, of course, remain semantically sensible and completely accessible. It’d probably be more semantically sensible, actually. I realised a table would work great about two days after I’d finished styling the list, and thought “I’ve put way too much effort into this to pull it now”, but felt like Dave Shea must have after building a “pseudo table” without realising. At least it wasn’t that complex!

Anyway, I’m really interested to hear what people have to say about the site. We’re being plugged every half hour on Sunrise tomorrow morning from 6am, and will be anxiously watching the server to see what, exactly, the effect of promotion on a show with 4 million viewers daily has on bandwidth, etc. I’ve also installed an AWstats tracker to collect aggregate data (as on this site) which we’ll parse later on (assuming the horrible monster that it’s running on, Zeus, outputs normal-ish log files for me! Oh, and it doesn’t support mod_rewrite, but instead has some retarded alternative that seems like a cross between VBA and AppleScript — and fails as much as the latter did in terms of actual ease of use, despite trying to use human language. It’s very dumb.) to figure out how Australia is doing in terms of browsers, operating systems, screen resolutions, JavaScript support, and the like. Should be incredibly interesting stuff, and I can’t wait!

On the follies of Copyright expectations

29 Jan 2006

I’ve been occupied the last few days trying to get an effective fileserving/sharing/roaming profile (domains) environment working with Samba, and was thinking this evening about the implications of a network-wide media share. At present, it’s illegal, though not particularly morally reprehensible in view of the fact that all content on it would be ‘licensed’ (just not for duplication in a digital form, under present copyright law — scheduled to be overturned).

It is a truth universally acknowledged… that the absence of a fair-use provision in Australian copyright law is simply an oversight on the part of legislators. (Apologies to Austen fans :P)

What if it’s not?

There is, now, what Paul Sheehan termed “little squares of light“, signifying connectivity in an “advanced, ironic, post-ethnic polyglot societ[y]“. Before that? The “Dark Age” (also Sheehan). It did exist. There was a time before computers and multimedia were intrinsically connected (depending on your definition of multimedia–multimodal media is perhaps more apt). There was, indeed, a time before multimedia existed — though we can, perhaps, trace its origins to Wagner’s 1849 essay, “The Artwork of the Future” and the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk — which, in turn, traces back to Greek drama, but no matter!

Yet irrespective of when this arose, legislators are meant to have acknowledged the imminent rise of the copyright-violating, citizen-empowering, content-producer-collaboration-dictat at the hands of the web. We’re expecting the wrong thing. Media has progressed, the law hasn’t. Yet.

But what if it doesn’t? Does this matter? Speaking to an influential podcast-media personality yesterday afternoon, it became clear that there had emerged between citizen media and conventional mechanisms a fissure that certain people were very reluctant to bridge. Suspicion exists between the two ‘industries’ (though it was suggested that an ‘industry’ cannot exist until someone is making money: perhaps not the case with citizen media, overblown acquisitions aside) where ‘citizen media’ is concerned that any partnerships with ‘conventional media’ will stifle innovation. Clearly, this is wrong, and ignores the ‘citizen’ part of ‘citizen media’: any partnership cannot exist without the ‘citizen’ remaining, thus changing conventional media. And if the ‘citizen’ component is dissolved, it becomes a meaningless acquisition as ‘media’ already exists, and ‘citizen media’ without the ‘citizen’ has no impetus whatsoever.

However, that aside, this (perhaps mutual) hostility raises interesting notions.

If we consider the two to exist in entirely distinct and disparate spheres, then new possibilities arise. We accept that citing and re-using ‘mass media’ material in new creations is, for a time, impossible. We accept that a ‘normalisation’ is taking place, to cite the much-lauded ‘village square’ concept of communal media: that we are returning to a ‘normal’ state, and that broadcast top-down media was a temporary hiccup in the state of human being. The difference, then, is that we now exist in a globalised state where those with whom we communicate (or, share media/experience) is not limited by geography… but remains limited in scope (sensual experience, for example, is rather inhibited by the tyranny of distance).

In two hundred years, assuming mass media assimilated back into ‘normality’ today, all copyright would have expired and all work could be cited, quoted, re-used and abused as people willed it. There is clearly no great possibility of this happening: acknowledged even by the mass-media-hostile personality interviewed. Should we care? Maybe. If there is material worth reproducing, that is.

The web is a temporal media, still. Never before have such vast volumes of information been so volatile, in part because such vast volumes of information have never been so accessible (in an entirely un-web-standards-related sense). Hence, it is possible that the alleviation of this access will hurt more than it would had we not known what was possible. The nature of this detachment from the web isn’t something to be discussed here — suffice to say, global energy crisis, war, censorship (because the web remains relatively dependent on a small number of servers — DNS root servers particularly) and a variety of other factors could all play a part. But what would this mean?

Earlier, I alluded to the ‘globalised village’ concept, and how that, in some senses (no pun intended), fails. What we are now seeing is a series of online ‘communities’ existing in parallel, with very occasional (but also very complex) perpendicular relationships. There is no global village. There are a series of global communities, with which people can choose to participate and engage to whatever extent they deem desirable. A series of factors aside from the web and MSM have also led to the decline of the physical ‘village’ environment — urban sprawl, globalisation in a physical sense (highly mobile populations, etcetera) and the like are examples of such — but there is something wrong with an entirely directed, specific, no-overlap environment. Ben remarked a day or two ago that it’s intriguing his three best friends all have an affinity for English (and two of those teaching it), whilst he is indifferent about the language, as about teaching (though remarked it is ‘fun’ where maths is concerned!).

Rarely, in Internet-based communities, have I seen someone engage with people outside of their own area of principle interest. Web sites work like that. They are sites with a purpose: and, if they do not have a purpose, the traffic they attract is often sporadic and undirected. Even this blog has a purpose — it must, to have attracted (and retained) the attention of an American with an interest in web publishing. Once attention is engaged on one front, it is possible to explore others — it’s possible that people with an interest in web publishing and accessibility will read this post simply because it popped up in their feed reader and looked vaguely interesting (though length is doubtless a deterrent!). Back to the term ‘site’ — clearly, this word’s etymology ensures it cannot be divorced from its real-world meaning.

People do not simply enter a building for no reason. This parallel fails to some extent as the power of search-engines come into the equation — but, remember, search engines must also discover a ‘site’ at some point (impossible without incoming links). Which brings us back to the parallel-with-occasional-perpendicular-bridges image (note, parallel cannot mean linear because of the nature of hyperlinks. Perhaps I speak of parallel Möbius strips?)

Irrespective of the mechanisms for web-based exploration, web media and mainstream media both fail to serve an encompassing purpose of human interaction. Copyright makes no difference to this. Observe how distracted this post is. Observe how I return to the topic of copyright harshly, how it does not link to the important defining qualities of human interaction (which, it must be said, the web in part facilitates). This was both intentional and unavoidable: there is no better link. Copyright doesn’t matter, and previously created content under copyright does not matter. Eventually, copyright will dissolve, and a harmonisation between formally detached publishing mechanisms (I have decided that is all the difference is) will come about. People will continue to express themselves, drawing on the content of their time — ideas are aside from copyright — whilst, perhaps, drifting apart from this new media and back into the village…

Four things

29 Jan 2006

It’s Matthom’s fault.

Four jobs I have had

1. IT support/troubleshooting guy
2. Westfield Christmas decorations assembler at some signage place
3. Web… something. Designer/markup guru/accessibility consultant/CSS wizard/JavaScript mangler extraordinaire. That’s really a job title.
4. I’m all out, I think. Can I do “Three things” instead?

Four movies I can watch over and over again

1. The Matrix (and ONLY the Matrix, not :Reloaded or :Revolutions, because they sucked bigtime)
2. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
3. Underworld :D If anyone (in Sydney) wants to go see the sequel sometime let me know…
4. Ice Age

Four places I have lived

1. Lat: 33:54:24S (-33.9067) Lon: 151:13:01E (151.2169)
2. Lat: 33:54:44S (-33.9122) Lon: 151:12:50E (151.2139)
3. Lat: 33:54:23S (-33.9063) Lon: 151:13:30E (151.2249)
4. Lat: 33:55:09S (-33.9190) Lon: 151:14:14E (151.2373)

Four TV shows I love

1. Um. Wrong person. I’m going to tag Steve at the end of this post, which should be most amusing. Hopefully he’ll name a podcast instead!

Four places I’ve vacationed

1. New Zealand
2. A boat. A big boat.
3. Mansfield, VIC
4. Tea Gardens/Hawks Nest, NSW :)

Four of my favorite dishes

1. I hate this question.
2. I can’t even choose food in a restaurant, from a menu.
3. Let alone with out any guidance in some forever-bounced-around-the-blogosphere meme.
4. This is my answer. My favourite dish is indecision.

Four sites I visit daily

1. Google. Duh.
2. Quirksmode, but rarely not-through Google.
3. My comment-spam moderation page :-/
4. whisper.joahua.com, for music playback. I’ll post about this sometime.

Four places I would rather be right now

This isn’t really a valid question seeing I’m doing this on a weekend. Not fair.

1. Bed.
2. Floating in a pool somewhere. Not normally me, but for some reason that has enormous appeal right now.
3. On a couch, reading a book (without thinking “I’ve got so much other stuff to do! I haven’t got time to read!”)
4. Making engaging rich media for the web. Scheduled for later today. One of several exciting things coming soon!

Four bloggers I’m tagging

1. Steve
2. Ben
3. LTTD, mostly because I want to see how a collective weblog would deal with this whole… blogging equivalent of chain-mail thing.
4. I can’t think of anyone else (who hasn’t already been tagged/done it) I’d want to inflict this on :P

This is interesting, because I once completely shunned that whole ‘e-mail survey’ thing, but now recognise it as a not-entirely-neccessary not-entirely-evil neccessary evil. Having said that, still not a huge fan :P

Skype Sucks

28 Jan 2006

NetMeeting video is still unbeaten. Trying to video conference with a guy in Melbourne today, MSN was on the cards but sucked even in a LAN environment, Skype was tried and looked awesome fullscreen and in a LAN environment, but bombed out pretty badly for web-cam support at the Melbourne end and in terms of bandwidth — you can’t even scale the video! — and NetMeeting was great in terms of reliability and decent quality over both LAN and Internet connections (and yes, it let you scale. Last update, 1996. Or whenver. A while ago!).

Unfortunately, NetMeeting is too difficult to use, and one end (or both ends… our end I’m 99% sure is working fine as I write this) had routing difficulties because, obviously, NetMeeting doesn’t use some crappy central directory server unless you select the “Microsoft, please steal my information” checkbox. Which, unlike the latest MSN Messenger install, isn’t ticked by default.

PC software makers suck. Earlier this week I… had an encounter with Tori’s laptop, featuring no less than 188 individual specimins of spyware: A new record for me. I started trying to dis-infect but eventually pronounced it vaguely beyond repair. The spyware was such that it was blocking sockets for all applications EXCEPT I.E. (presumably because it can control Internet Explorer infinitely better than it can anything else–more than a couple of sites were blocked, too), so I couldn’t even update the anti-spyware definitions. It’d also broken Windows Update. Yar, this be re-install territory. Caused, probably in no small part, by “ticked by default” junk.

Something unpredictable…

27 Jan 2006

[Or, making up for a distinct absence of posting for various reasons not to be discussed but hopefully rectified – the content absence, that is – by this post.]

Until about three weeks ago, I was convinced I was going to take a year off between finishing school and starting uni to work full time. I’d roundly insulted a small web firm a couple of weeks before leaving for New Zealand, re-building their site with CSS in about three hours (it wasn’t perfect, but it was a decent effort) and going into their office to tell them their version sucked and mine was better. To date, the website in question hasn’t been ‘fixed’, as it were, but I got a call the day after I returned from New Zealand asking if I was interested in coming in for an interview. I’ve been working four days a week there since.

Tori came back. We spent some time together, and I kind of realised that putting off University for another year wasn’t a brilliant move, contrary to what more than a handful of… older people… had said. The main reason is probably social (which I don’t ever talk about too much on here, I guess), but financially it’s not… compelling… to stay any further away from the other side of Uni any longer than is neccessary, because “that side” means a job/career I’m interested in as a longer-term option, hence financial stability more so than in an industry I’m perfectly interested in provided I get to do the things I like — and where I am presently fortunate enough to be in a position where that’s pretty close to what I’m doing — and indifferent about it (the industry) otherwise. Social/political information theory notwithstanding, because that’s an entirely separate kettle of fish that relates both to my pre- and post- uni directions. Which are, incidentally, IT/connectivity/accessibility now, and education later. Somewhere in the middle there’ll be (is?) a fusion of the two, which has been bandied about a little over the last 12 months. I had a very interesting conversation RE: something along these lines last night, which will hopefully evolve into something in the not-too distant future!

So yes, as of Monday I’m officially an Arts student at the University of Sydney. In a way I feel bad about this because I’d said to work that I was planning on sticking around in a near-F/T capacity for a year (and at the time I had been), but at the same time this feels so much more… sensible? Plus everyone was mind-blowingly nice about it, even though I called on Saturday to say I’d be in late Monday because I had to enrol (because of when the offer had come in, and because I’d been putting off saying it the week before).

Anyway, in summary: I’m working nearly full time doing web development in an awesome role where I get to do lots of CSS, semantic-web junk, usability work, and some occasional JavaScript (though mercifully not too much! Still learning. If anyone else in Aus is interested in getting a copy of Jeremy Keith’s allegedly-excellent “DOM Scripting” book, let me know so we can order a few copies from Amazon and get cheaper shipping, because no-one in Australia is stocking copies for another month or three!). And as much or as little server-side work as I want. At the minute I’m unequivocally saying “little”, but that might change at some point, maybe. I’m going to uni, too. That doesn’t start until March, so I’m going to be working ‘normally’ up until then, and after that feeling my way according to timetables, how much of a life I have, how broke I am, etcetera!

Tied into the whole work thing, my first to-be-promoted-on-TV website is going live sometime in the wee hours of Sunday Monday, which is audaciously exciting. Not in the least because it will hopefully attract insane amounts of traffic, and the CSS-is-good-for-your-bandwidth-costs argument carries weight here!! It also features AJAX, chiefly for usability/bandwidth-saving reasons… but also because it’s just damn cool! Anyway, there will be posts, screenshots, etcetera (probably saying the same kind of thing I just said, only naming names and with pretty pictures!) scheduled for release here to co-incide with the site’s launch, so… watch this space.

As for Uni? English, Philosophy, Classics and (Ancient) Greek are currently on the menu. Greek… may be swapped out, possibly. For Linguistics or maybe Latin if anything, but possibly not. The reasoning behind it — because I’ve attracted many strange looks as I tell people I’m planning on studying Ancient Greek — is essentially:

1. Learning another language (any other language) helps me understand English better. Doing English, no-one will ever explain grammar and structure of language to me. It sucks. Admittedly, Linguistics could prove to be useful in this department, too.
2. Ancient Greek ties in with the Classics courses I’m taking. Don’t ask me to remember what they are, or even look them up, because I don’t have a copy of my preferences (they took it, because their stupid computers were stupidly broken. I’m so glad I’m not studying IT!) and it’s not available online yet and I’m just lazy. And trying to get this massive post finished so I can get back to having a life, or something.
3. The New Testament is written in Greek. As Kristen so eloquently expressed it last night:

   You can be one of those people at Bible studies who go “Well, the greek word for that actually means ‘this is ambiguous…’”

   Heh. Marcelo coughed something that sounded suspiciously like “Moore College” (a Sydney Bible college) when he found out, but that’s not really what I had in mind choosing it… maybe, though!</li> </ol> Anyway. The blog has nearly caught up to me. Almost. There’s a bunch of other stuff happening, but this is the glut of stuff I needed to write at some point and had been putting off!