Sunday 27th June 2004
Unless something really neat happens in the next couple of days, this'll probably be the last main.html on the site. Which, I hadn't realised until just now, is actually kinda neat. Notwithstanding the first couple of versions of gremlin.net, in which the main page was the index.html, there's always been a main.html here, following whatever splashpage I'd had at the index.html. Which is to say that there have been a lot more than 154 of these things over the years, although, until a couple of years ago, I never bothered to save the old updates, since there didn't seem to be a lot of purpose to that.
There's probably still not much purpose to it. Nevertheless, wih a couple of perplexing exceptions, the old news is still on the server, dating back to the spring of 2002. Where in hell old001.html and old002.html and a few others missing from the sequence between old003.html and old153.html disappeared to is anyone's guess. Mine is that the server just lost them somehow, which tends to happen, for some unknown reason. I might have them burned to CD somewhere, which is a lot like losing them on the server, except that now they're lost on my desk.
In any case, we've come to the end of the hypertext now. Which isn't entirely accurate, of course. Really, it's just the end of the extension. This place has been hypertext with JavaScript upgrades for years, and ASP is effectively just hypertext with better upgrades than JavaScript can offer. Ultimately, the only real difference with ASP is that there's no way to run it offline on WindozeXPHome, which my laptop has. Which is both good and bad. The good news is that, being unable to see how the site looks offline either way, I have no reason to stick to WordPad in writing it after today; I'll probably start writing it in Word and saving it as pure text, before which Word will make a big deal out of typos--something WordPad never cares about.
Something I'm not planning on doing is using Word to produce a website in a single step. Although Word has the option of yarfing out a .htm, I've never been real pleased with its formatting. Instead, I'll just save the .txt What's News as .asps, or, if it proves easier to do from my end, leave them as .txts and just #include those into the main.asp, which might be a better idea, in the end.
That's kinda why I've been thinking about going Active Server for a while: it lets me do a lot more with less actual effort. From your end, it won't be much different; the whole concept of ActiveServer is to have the server do the actual work, compiling all the elemental inclusions into what, for all anyone can tell from outside the system, equates to a single hypertext file. Which is to say that, viewing the sourcecode for an ActiveServer site, it would look the same as a hypertext site; with the exception of a few functions reliant on ASP, you could save the sourcecode as whatever.html and get it to open in Exploder without any real changes. Ultimately, it's just a simple shortcut to be able to alter little bits of code and have all the sites using the inclusions update instantly. Kinda like JavaScript, but without the limitations of CSI.
Of course, overexplaining this is probably a waste of time. If you already get ActiveServer, then I'm not telling you anything except that it's possible to totally overexplain inclusions; if not, then this probably isn't making any sense at all. Ultimately, the shorthand is this: main.asp is easier to maintain from my end than main.html is; you probably won't notice much of a difference, looking at the coding.
Not right away, at least. There are a couple of tricks available in ActiveServer which are damned near required, like the serverside clock, which tells you what time and day it is, regardless what your computer happens to think about chronology. I used to have a CSI for that in JavaScript, but it slowed things down and ultimately relied on everyone else's computer to work, so whatever information it contained was only as good as your system's clock, which you could just as easily glance at without the inclusion.
Of course, the server is in San Francisco, so the new clock is Pacific Time [and, curiously, a couple of minutes slow]; but it's not that hard to extrapolate the correct time from it: add three hours for New York, and so on.
ASP aside, there are a couple of other site updates in the new version. One of them is the adverts. Don't worry: it's nothing really upsetting; I just finally got a site put together which actually met google.com's impossible standards [which was obviously not this one] long enough to get approved for this programme. There are still acouple of irksome rules to it, even though I'm able to put it on any site I like once they let me into the backend system for getting one site out of a hundred looking wholesome enough to contain their graffiti; for example, I can't personally click on any of the adverts from my own IP Address, which is fair enough, I suppose; also, I can't officially tell you to click on the adverts, which kinda isn't. So: whatever you do, never ever just click on one of the adverts for no good reason; that said, ethically speaking, clicking on an advert merely because I make about thirty-five cents everytime someone does that sounds, to me, like a Good Reason. You know what I'm saying....
Also, about the adverts, I set it up to mix their adverts with mine; so, in cases, there'll be a slightly better-looking advert for Wasted, Inc. over on the right side of the screen, instead of a bank of textads; although, having got to Wasted, you'll likely find clickable textads on the left side of the screen. Just in case you wanted to click on a textad for Funny TShirts, being at a site already selling shirts. Which kinda works for me anyway: if someone's not at Wasted to buy a shirt, I might as well get thirty-five cents for sending them to a site where they're still not gonna buy a shirt. If anyone loses, it ain't me.
Welcome to Our DeityFree Environment; Thank You for Not Pretending....Which reminds me: CP, to whom I'm outsourcing all this stuff, have an upper minimum of a hundred bucks before mailing out cheques--which is to say that I can have them actually pay me once I get to ten bucks, but I actually kinda hate that. Anyway: I tend to avoid getting paid, and instead use the money I have on account to buy prototypes. Which is to say that I get to buy neat stuff, and it counts as a writeoff. Since they mail out the cheques on the first of the month, like, for instance, the first of July, I wanted to use up enough cash to avoid getting a cheque sent out, but ran out of stuff to buy. So, at the last minute, it occurred to me to make, upload, and buy a new poster, which is hovering there on the right. I'm sure I'll find a good place to affix the thing >:)
Then...there was that other site update. But I forgot what it was....
Hang on...I'll think of it....
Well, anyway....
The damned chatroom is down. Not the one here at gremlin.net; that's been down ever since the site left the Unix server; I've never got the think to work on Windoze2000. But chat.yahoo.sux is down too. Or, at least, unenterable. Through YahElite. I could probably get in through chat.yahoo.sux itself; but who'd wanna do that. I doubt it's just me, either. So maybe the regulars, unable to get into the damned chatroom, will gravitate toward the messageboard here. Which I still prefer, since it's technically faster. Sure, there's still that downtime waiting for people to post, but it tends to take people less time to reply on a board than to get to the point in a chatroom. Also, the trolls no one wants to hear from aren't actually smart enough to figure out the board. They're taxing their braincells just having to hit Enter after spamming us with messages from their bogeymen.
Oh. Duh. The other update. Appearance. New look for the site. Which is a given, which is why I couldn't think of it. The site looks different. But there's a point to this.
Given that the inclusions can be layered, the general look of the site probably won't be real static from now on. Since ASP allows a given .inc to include nothing more than an inclusion of another .inc, I'm thinking about writing a few different layouts, and just kinda switching them every once in a while. I thought about doing that randomly, but then I realised that it would do it randomly just between files. And that would get annoying--going from the board to a message to a reply and so on, and always having the background change. I've seen people do that with cascading stylesheets, and it annoys the hell outta me. Instead, I'll probably just write new backgrounds and switch the inclusions every few days--#include file="background.1.inc"; #include file="background.5.inc", et cetera. I can live with that.
Anyway: if you hit the site and it looks totally different from one day to the next, you're still in the right place. I don't wanna sound like PayPal.com here, but always make sure that the Address Bar begins with 'http://PayPpl.com'.
Don't ask me why I bought that. No really: don't ask. There's a reason; but that comes later....
Okay. Offsite stuff....
It's Sunday, so there's nothing much I can actually do in the world with everyone taking the Day after the Sabbath off for no logically defensible reason. Which means that A) there's a huge hole in my ceiling, for a change, because the pipes they replaced six weeks ago just carried the two-hundred-degree water [illegal on its own, though I'm personally not complaining about it] to other substandard pipes, resulting in new rainstorms in here, and throughout the building. Basically, it was just dumb luck that, back in May, the worst pipes happened to be in here, letting out all the water over my stuff; once they replaced those, the water started falling out of ceilings throughout the building. Including, of course, mine.
So. Firday, they outsourced the pipes to the professionals again; yesterday and today, nothing happens anywhere on the planet [or, really, in this benighted country] because some novel written by goatherders says so. Tomorrow, I can probably expect to spend all day waiting for someone to come in and replace the ceiling now that the pipes have finally been replaced. Not that I'm planning to. Instead, I'll leave Hunter behind to play Zelda all day while no one shows up; I'm planning to deal with lawyers and get started on suing these idiots into extinction for all this shit.
It's not even about the money, though, given what these idiots have already cost me, I'll take it. It's more about these twerps lying to me, endangering me, and, in all probability, attempting to hold me responsible for their own mess. The fact of the matter is that there's now black mould and asbestos all over the place, because their pipes broke, saturating their ceiling, causing it to fall on their carpet, despite all my attempts to get them to fix their problem before it became mine.
That, along with the fact that, in the last six weeks, the best offer they made to me was to knock a hundred bucks off rent [which might almost cover the value of the Dawn of the Dead poster I'd just bought when the rain began], makes this a moral imperative. I'm not settling for less than half a million. Whether they have that much or not. Hence the lawyers: Step One is placing a lien on the property to prevent these criminals from selling the place and disappearing.
That's actually the most insulting aspect of all this. That they appear to assume that I'm just another dumb fucking mendicant. Which I can almost understand, given that my neighbours all seem to be. Ultimately, I've got to hurt these twits just to get them to understand that I'm able to.
Just...not today. Today, I get to sit around watching the country do nothing at all, because yesterday used to be a day on which to appease bogeymen by being lazy.
More later....
--Gremlin