I was supposed to settle on a project name, but none of the things I came up with are making me excited, so I'm just going to keep thinking about this blog engine as "my-as-yet-unnamed-blog-engine-and-by-the-way-I-hate-the-word-blog". But that doesn't have to mean stalled feature development. For my next trick I want to build in a "tag" feature. I think the easy approach will be to explode() the comma-separated "tags" list on entry submission, looping through to add any novel terms to the tags table. Th... (...more)

I got my grip on template-based web app design techniques mostly from building my "snippets" mini-app. Reorganizing the whole website to let me juggle "snippets", and its simpler clone, "projects", in preparation for shifting the site's focus to the "blog engine" not-so-mini app, was good practice too. What I really didn't expect was to end up with a "controller" module. I'm not all that thrilled with it, but now that it's done I'm not sure how I'd go about refactoring to remove it. If the thing I'm cal... (...more)

3.3mi in ~52.5 minutes (down 1.5m), full lap at 4.8mph on lap 2, 3 more half-lap bursts, one peaking at 4.9mph (up .2). Around lap 10 or 12, I pushed too early into jog mode, and after only about a quarter-lap I knew a half-lap would leave me gasping and overheating, so I dropped back to a 4.1mph power-walk pace rather than collapse all the way back to my mid-range 3.7mph pace. I would have liked to say to the second how long that 3.3mi took, but as I was nearig the "finish line" somebody's unattended 6... (...more)

I've had some errors, typographical and formatting/styling and factual, creeping in all along, so today I stretched out in bed all day with my lappy and reworked the unnamed blog engine to include entry-revision functionality. En route I learned a number of things, including some finer points of CSS selector precedence and a bit more about PHP's MySQL functions. I'm not sure exactly what I learned about stateful app design using session variables in PHP, but something wasn't behaving as expected, and I ... (...more)

Note to self, style specs attached to CSS ID selectors take precedence over specs attached to CLASS. That makes sense, since semantically, you might have any number of elements inheriting style from a given class, but there shouldn't be multiple elements on a page inheriting from a single ID, right? Except if you assign an ID to a container, elements within that container inherit any element-specific styles attached to that ID. For example, you decide to have a DIV id="content", not unreasonably, becaus... (...more)