28 Aug 2004
Yeah. The style you’d see if you were reading this on Saturday, August 28, 2004, would be Silver Is The New Black, as featured on Alex King’s WordPress CSS Style Competition website. Unfortunately, part of its appeal can be attributed to its use of proprietry Mozilla CSS hooks, which just sucks.
Not because they’re not nice: they are. But the whole lack of standards compliance (coming from the platform everyone seems to be proclaiming as the uber-standards testing platform) is really irritating, regardless as to how well the Mozilla engine might handle established standards. If, in five years time, those “proprietry” hooks become used for something else, then we have five-year-old content which is screwed over. Admittedly, -moz-radius isn’t something which seems very likely to be applied elsewhere, but the principle remains.
So yeah… It’s nice and all, but I’m hacking it back to standards compliance, before making it look DIFFERENT from the original style. To be fair, this style is really only an intermediate step, until I can bang together something which I’m happy with. And even then, I’ll probably only be happy with it for a few weeks or months, but hey ;)
On another note, the page generation time on this magnificent piece of software really isn’t that bad. I haven’t had an opportunity to test it on a remote server yet, but I’d say it is DEFINITELY faster than my own blog script even with the calendar enabled.
This is being written with WordPress running on my own server, and generation times with the Calendar are averaging 0.037s. With Calendar disabled, this drops to a smooth 0.029s generation average. At any rate, even if I were being pounded with a few thousand hits per second (which, in case you hadn’t already realised, I’m not!), the generation times wouldn’t be substantial compared to the saturation of bandwidth!
I don’t really think that is a valid argument against WordPress, sorry. Anyhoo… I’m off to hack at styles and things!
28 Aug 2004
I just cracked 6000 spam messages. I can’t wait until I start running my own mail server locally; I really really really want to see how much using all that sample material will stop dead!
Perhaps when iiNet bring their iiSLAM’s to Kensington, NSW… and if they keep the “testing” unlocked backchannel enabled! Haha, symmetric “A”DSL – Got to love it.
In other news, I’ve decided that I probably won’t be bothering with mod_rewrite on this iteration of the website, because I think it’s going to get dumped sometime in the near future anyway… that said, Google actually seems to be indexing down to my permalinks without any difficulties anyway!
I’m currently failing to see the benefit of using my own news/blog script over something more advanced, and would prefer to invest time in other projects (specifically, to enhance and extend the content management system to better support CSS, XHTML, semantics and improve authentication and user management, amongst many other things) rather than re-doing what’s been done before, and better, without seeing any real tangible benefit for it. And yes, I do know there are better, more advanced, more usable (open-source) CMS offerings out there. Integration of features offered by those products is something that is being explored, but until that is feasible, development of this one will continue…
Despite whatever nasty things people might have to say about WordPress, the more I see, the more I like, so nyah.
At the minute, design and standards are something I’m far more passionate about, anyway.
28 Aug 2004
Addiction is…
…finding comments like /* drunk, fix later */ and /* too high to make this work */
27 Aug 2004
I just remembered that I haven’t yet posted my submitted subject selections for next year, so here it is:
Advanced English – 2 units
Extension 2 English – 2 units
Modern History – 2 units
Mathematics – 2 units
Business Studies – 2 units
Information Technology Framework – 2 units
——-
Information Technology Specialisation Studies – 2 units (Board-accredited, not relevant to UAI)
Total of 12+2 units.
I’m excited about the lack of physics on that list, and the addition of a unit of English. I’m also excited about being able to lose a subject sometime next year — although it will be hard to decide which to lose, as Maths is… discouraging, but more enjoyable than Business Studies, which is dead boring, frustrating, but doable. Meh! That’s still a bit down the track, I guess.
In other news, which actually happened a few days ago, but has only just come to my attention (whilst drinking Milo, no less — it really is a brain food/drink! — no, I’m not getting paid for product placement, I choose to!), I’ve decided that SACS really is scheduling drama events to co-incide with tests and assessments, specifically of the Mathematics variety.
Wednesday, HSC drama AND a maths test (which I missed, and was re-scheduled to Thursday anyway; not that it mattered, since I hadn’t looked at a maths book for about five days prior to that, and really did need to study). Earlier in the year? I think it was SACS Idol (which was in blog version 1.5, I think, which has since disappeared into the void – so no hyperlinking here), which we were halfway through bump-in for (Wednesday morning?) and I had a maths test. It may have even been the same day in the two-week cycle. Wouldn’t suprise me!
They’re out to get us. Don’t doubt it.
Man, I really want to wear a tinfoil hat into school some day. It’s on the list of crazy things to do.