Where’d I go?

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Damn.

Can’t believe it’s been a year since I posted here — actually, almost 15 months.

I do remember reading something somewhere recently (/.?) that mentioned an article that correlates the rise in blogging with the rise of unemployment among the blogger types — techies.

Makes sense, and sort of works here.

But whatever. Onward.

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I’ve finally gotten around to redesigning/recoding the littleghost.com site.

When I got the domain back in July 1997, I spent a weekend putting together a look and feel and all that….and pretty much have not changed it since.

Sure, I added sections here and there over the last five years, but I never really touched the GUI. Added a touch of a style sheet and so on, but nothing remarkable.

So I have begun the process of recoding the site. I’m trying to accomplish the following:

  • Slowly bring the look and feel of the separate sections together

  • The look and feel will be HTML 4.01 compliant and pass the W3C tests for HTML and CSS. Style-sheet driven site

  • The coding should be XHTML complient, as well. This will take a bit more work, replacing tables and BR tags and so on

  • Make it look virtually the same in IE6 and NS7 — those are the only browsers I’m really worried about. (Note: The site will not render well in NS4.x, because of that browser’s poor CSS support.)

As always, this site is really for experimentation and so on — it’s not supposed to be a real site that people really want to visit. For all the servers and so on I have locally, having them remotely is different.

For example, there is some bug at Concentric that does not allow the inclusion of (or, at least, acknowledgement of) a style sheet if the doc type is html 4.01 strict. Replace with HTML 4 transitional, and all is fine. Weird. I have to figure out just what is happening there.

So, currently, I have the style sheet called from geistlinger.com, and it’s fine. Go figure. Works fine locally on NT (Win2000 pro) and Linux (Apache). So I dunno. More things to check into! Oh boy….

Conversion is going well so far; I’m glad I waited until I had a little more experience in HTML 4.01 coding before converting — it’s not really as straight-forward as you might think, especially when you approach it (like I do) with an HTML 3 & HTML 3+ mindset. Still hard to think of DIVs and not TABLEs, how to align, messing with the inheritance issues of CSS styles and so on.

It’s been a nice learning experience.

So far, I’ve converted over the main page, the postcard section (for the most part — large CGI rewrite necessary, as well) and the Term Glossary (need to import a new version of this from my Linux box).

I have not decided whether or not to change this area — Blog This! — to the new format. Would be a good exercise, but the first issue is functionality, and I don’t want to mess this up just for uniformity in looks. The looks will get there; I have to make certain the functionality is not affected.

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Other than that, I’ve been doing a lot of coding, from Perl through PHP to Cold Fusion. Database work has been relatively light recently, just a stored proc here and there, some tweaks as new sections need it and so on.

One thing I did spend several days on is using Google’s open API as a Web service. This rocks.

Basically, I can make calls to Google’s database and pull back the results to my (Linux) machine and massage the results as I see fit. It’s done via a SOAP wrapper and a local WSDL style sheet (provided by Google).

We’re talking a Web service. And it works. How cool is that?

I’d love to publish it out here on littleghost.com, but the necessary SOAP wrapper (I wrote the program in Perl) is not available on either of my domains — so I can only run it on my Linux box. Still cool….

Amazon has a similar program going; I have to try to see if I can get that to work. Maybe this time I’ll do it in PHP (need the PHP SOAP wrapper for my Linux box, however…).

Lot’s to learn out there, and the industry leaders in services are turning out to be companies like Google and Amazon, and not the players like IBM, Sun, M$ and so on. Interesting. While the “real” players (IBM etc…) will catch up quickly, I think it’s interesting that the pure players — the “all Web” players (Google etc…) are really making a difference, and making the promise of Web services (which is wildly overhyped currently) a reality for the average Joe Developer to see.

You go guys….