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THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "Out in the province of my left wrist, my watch is melting - hands reaching out, curl back to their breast of numbers in the sudden heat. An old man's supplication. Time, the bringer, finally ruins everything. I have been living in my mind. Pain rides in. I no longer care; the king is sick with doubt" (Russell Edson, --The Kingdom-- ).
20/09/08: OK, I'm going to have to try and update more frequently, as another three months and a --CENSORED BY KANG-- load of water under the bridge and there's no trace of it in the site journal. You'll notice that the redesign is really steaming ahead - I was all set to switch everything over to my last brainwave (individual floating panes with a fixed navbar on the top left) when I discovered that --Firefox-- and other browsers using the Mozilla engine freak out when they encounter tables that have different numbers of rows in different columns. Even a single stray cell is enough to make half the borders disappear at random the first time you load the page from the Web. This vexing behaviour simply doesn't manifest when testing the page offline, making it a nightmare to troubleshoot. For the first few days I was working from the assumption that Firefox didn't like more than one set of bordered cells in a row. Eliminating the navbar seemed to fix the problem, but it returned as soon as I added any content in this area, borders or no borders. To make things worse, it seemed to manifest intermittently, with even apparently good code manifesting random borders upon a purge-cache-reload.
In the end, I killed two birds with one stone by getting rid of the navbar, cleaning up the table formatting, and introducing a nifty javascript version of the navbar that floats above the page and scrolls with the browser (source --here-- ). Even then I had a devil of a time trying to get it to work across the five main cross-platform browsers, with --Firefox-- and --Safari-- being the chief offenders (depending on the width of the column on the far left, they either agree with --Opera-- and --Google Chrome-- or are one pixel out). IE6 is always two pixels away from the latter two browsers (the same size as the only border between the edge of the screen and my content table, suggesting a difference in how borders are totaled up when calculating table size), which I can live with, but the inconsistent behaviour of the former browsers just drove me to distraction. Firefox also frustrated me in that it apparently interprets more than five left-aligned columns in a table as a request to autofit the entire thing to the window. As a result, I've had to go with a slightly less than ideal workaround involving a right indent. On the other hand, justified text doesn't look like dog (mess) now, so I guess shouldn't complain.
That done, I was all ready to start uploading. Of course something had to ruin it. I've noticed that when I'm testing code (or anything else for that matter), fate always conspires to mess with my head. The first time I try it out, it invariably doesn't work - the fix doesn't seem to have worked at all, the problem is still there. So I take another look, and lo and behold I'm testing the old version of the file, my browser cache needs clearing, etc. So a fresh wave of hope surges up within me, and I bring up the real thing. Of course, that's broken too. In this case, it was Opera's fault - my new snazzy content box design now left extraneous borders on the right. At first I blamed it on the new unbroken column on the left, designed to allow the new floating menu to smoothly glide down the full length of the page. Removing it, I realized that it had only masked the fact that the problem applied to both sides of the content-bearing column. After yet more fiddling, I was able to work out that the issue was simply with the length of the individual cells - by dividing each content box into several different cells I could banish the unsightly lines, as well as minimizing Opera's unsettling tendency to tack several miles of virtual real estate onto the end of cells not specifically given a preferred height equal to their contents).
I'm still not completely happy with it - there are still a few interesting glitches, like how the navbar freezes when bringing the page back in a browser like Opera that caches the absolute position of all elements, or the 2 pixel difference in IE6 I mentioned earlier, which leaves a line between the navbar and the content box, but it'll do for now. I'm going to make another push to convert all the main sections over at least; note the shiny new titles (created in --Adobe Photoshop-- from the tutorial --here-- ). A lot of the mirror download links seem to have broken in the meantime, so I'll try and get them back up. I'm going to have to find time this semester to work on my flash site, as well as a nominal web presence for the magazine* I'm going to be launching for my upcoming Creative Enterprise project.
The Thought For The Day for this update comes from --Russell Edson-- , allegedly the best prose poet on the planet. Regular readers (yeah...) may recall that I made fun of a particularly trite offering from the man (the jaw-droppingly inane --"The Turkey Happening"-- ) in my last --update-- , but I've taken to his "The Kingdom" so well that I've made it the official intro piece for my metafictional animation series "Thought" (see --My Settings-- for details).
I've more or less given up on the "Reality and Reason" rant (which regular readers will know has been steaming away since June 2007. Due to the joys of my all new and improved laptop and its craptacular 3D capabilities I can't finish my epic Age Of Mythology map, so I might just end up putting up what I've done so far in case anyone feels like taking it over. Abyss: Scorched Earth is, as always, teetering on the verge of completion; I just need to add scenarios, objectives, and oh, how to actually win the game. :despair:
Anyway, I'm going to make a conscious attempt to make shorter updates, in the hopes that I might end up actually end up doing something on the site or on my other projects rather than just talking about it, and in the interests of not completely scaring away anyone who might happen across this site by deluging them with a sprawling mass of un-spellchecked rantness. Seriously - there's some decent stuff here, you just have to find it amongst my 12,000 word blitherings. Signing off, blessings all 'round, careless talk costs lives, etc.
* "The voice of Reason, breaking all bonds and toppling all tyrants" is the proposed tagline to the modestly titled "Scourge Magazine". It'll be a hybrid literary/hobby/soapbox/local news/University news-sheet which, if I play my cards right, will supplant the Student Union publication within a few issues.
UPDATE (16/12/08): "SCOURGE Magazine" now has its very own website - check it out --here-- !