Reboot My Reass: April 21, 2005

In which I am still blathering on about code.

Categorized

Life

The house smells like stagnant water from the construction site down the street, my FTP account won’t let me upload, I can’t figure out my correspondence-course homework and I can’t e-mail my instructor about it because I’m fairly certain she thinks I’m a whiny little idiot as it is. Grr, arrgh, etc. etc.

Having got that out of the way — no, wait, I had one more thing to point out: I find it somewhat ironic that, on the same day the new pope was elected, there was a tornado warning in my state’s Pope County and the Catholic church down the street was razed to the ground. That means something.

Okay, now I’ve got that out of the way.

I’ve spent the past week in front of the computer, in an all-day-every-day kind of way. Fortunately, some of it was paying work — yay for freelance proofreading! Then there’s my correspondence course homework, which has just gotten into the let’s-use-Microsoft-Word! stage. Turns out I’ve forgotten all those nifty margin tricks I learned during frantic late-night college essay-writing projects, so I’ve spent the past few days trying (and generally failing) to set my margins according to the assignment requirements. Think I’ve got that figured out, though… except for the turnover lines. Turnover lines will kill me in the end. (Confused? Don’t worry; none of this makes any real sense to me, either.) And the cherry on this sundae of confusion is the May 1st Reboot/CSS Reboot — yes, yours truly had to go and sign up for both of those damn projects, just because my life doesn’t have enough deadlines as it is.

(But in fairness to me, it must be said that some of those problems and deadlines occured after I signed up for the Reboots.)

The site redesign is coming along smashingly, if I do say so myself. To be fair, I must tell you that the new layout won’t be very spectacular, as it’s just a tweaking of the much-loved “Old School” layout I’ve had up for so long. But it will be much more shiny and polished, and I’m sure it will inspire at least twice as many envious sighs as the old version did. The real star of this redesign is the content and structure of the site. Almost all of the content has been buffed and pruned and generally manicured, and the structure has been altered to allow for easier surfing (for you) and updating (for me). Brand-spankin’-new features will include:

all pages coded in valid XHTML Strict and, for the very first time, valid CSS
updated comment and feedback forms
a new guestbook (maybe not in time for 5.01, but definitely soonish)
improved accessibility for those with visual disabilities
a pop-up Romynian dictionary
new content added to SCRAPS
a search script

I hope you’re all duly impressed — especially with that last feature, since it involves a helluva lot of indexing, something which I’m really doing a bit too much of these days.

And speaking of which, the margins are calling me…