Maria could be describing my day when she writes:
I love days like today, when everything seems to be well padded in mist and torpor. The leaf blowers are silent, no one is out there improving their house or garden, and with the windows closed, for all I know, cars have ceased to flow on the roads.
However, our day was more a cold rain than a mist. Still, it was in ‘in’ day, spent catching up on coding projects. After a day of hiking, coding seems more fun somehow, as well as it giving my knees a chance to ‘rest’, poor dears.
I worked a bit with the OsCommerce store application and think I’ve managed to get the CSS layers and the HTML tables to play together for the layout. I am not a CSS purist, but I do strongly believe that templates are more adaptable and easier to work with when done as CSS rather than tables — tables add a lot of extra baggage, making the pages harder to read and customize. I’ve found this with the weblogging tools I’ve worked with, and I’ve been through enough weblogging tool templates by now to almost think this could be a truism.
I also worked on Tinfoil Project today, and have incorporated annotation as well as comments into the pages. I did have to use popup comments, but there’s a little ‘goodie’ included in most of the popup pages–similar to the sidebar ‘goodie’ that appears, from time to time, with these posts.
My busy fingers didn’t rest once today, and I also spent time contemplating migrating IT Kitchen weblog entries into wiki entries. After looking at the wiki database schema, I found that this isn’t as complicated as I thought it would be. However, I decided against doing a migration today, primarily because the weblog writing doesn’t translate well to a wiki environment. After all, weblog writing is fairly static and created by one author; while wiki writing is fluid and authorless. I don’t want to move people’s essays over into an environment that encourages editing.
What’s needed is the ability to ‘freeze’ pages in a wiki, and annotate with the author–a ‘essay category’ page. Better yet, the ability to pull data in from the WordPress/Wordform database and format it as a wiki page, sans the editing capability. The code is so nicely organized and documented in MediaWiki, it wouldn’t be an especially difficult task, and could be a fun exercise. The hard part would be to merge discussion between the two tools, weblog and wiki. That could be tetchy.
I’m finding out that I really enjoy ripping into open source code, blending bits and pieces of different products together. I was even eyeballing OsCommerce code today, thinking, “You know, this could be combined with a weblog for subscription based online publications…”
So many possibilities, so little time. Speaking of time, congratulations to Scott on his five year blog anniversary, and Karl for his almost five year mark. Reading both of your weblogs, I found your words are still fresh and youthful–like the words of young blogging babe instead of the old blogging codgers that you are.
