Freedomness!
‘Kay. I’ve got about 60% of the functionality that I want for the blog coded up and working. You probably won’t notice the difference, aside from the slightly different URL, but there is actually a lot of new stuff going on under the hood, designed by me and for me, to make my life easier and less reliant on Blogger.com.
For now, the automated publisher that I wrote only builds the front page and a bunch of files that I’m going to need later on when I finish the code that builds all of the archives. All I have to do is write my entries in a text file, then make a tiny little text file with information about the entry, upload them, load the publisher in any browser anywhere (and I don’t even have to press anything, I just have to load the file), and boom boom boom, my blog gets rebuilt with the five most recent entries standing out front and everyone else scrolled off into archive files that you’ll have access to once I get everything else running over the course of the week.
If I have one complaint about the system I have in place now, it’s that it is incredibly insecure. There is no user authentication whatsoever, so if you, the reader, wanted to, you could load the publisher script yourself into your browser and execute the build. Fortunately, you guys don’t know the URL of it, and if I ever see evidence that someone other than me has been accessing it, I can always change the filename and it’ll still run the same. In fact, since the whole system is in a single file, I could just delete it from the server when I’m done with it, and then reupload when I need it. It’s only like 10k right now, and it’ll probably only be about 15k once all the code is written. But I’ll probably keep it up there anyway, just so I have easy access to it when I’m at work. I know, you don’t care. I’m just very very proud of myself, like I just used the potty for the first time. Sure, I got more pee on the floor than in the potty, but hey, I’m free from the confines of the Blogger diaper now, so yay.
Man, IE is a pain in the butt about CSS. I got everything coded up real slick-like with CSS tags, so everything looks nice and elegant once the publisher I wrote finishes generating all the HTML, but for some reason, none of the styles worked in Internet Explorer. After maybe an hour of fruitless attempts to coax IE into doing what the W3C wants browsers to do without having to pull teeth, I finally gave in, commented out the lines that used CSS, and rewrote them with the HTML formatting hardcoded in. Blech.
Standards, dude. Geez.
[EDIT] I looked into the problem with IE: it turns out that once you enter a table, CSS completely breaks down. IE7 will probably not have that problem, but that doesn’t even enter open beta until this summer. So you figure on the end of the year for the release, and then another six months at least before more people are using it than IE6, and yuck. Of course, if everyone would just use Firefox, which I duly note used my CSS tags precisely how I wanted them used on the first try, we web peeps wouldn’t have to worry about making sure our pages display correctly in a broken browser, but nooooooo, IE comes with Windows, so it must be better, right? Grah. *despair*