Date: 2008-11-02 11:52:02 Created: null
Welcome! This page of not-all-that-frequently-asked-questions has been lovingly put together to assure that you get the very best experience possible browsing it in your pursuit of answers. Operation of this page is simple: just scroll down, stopping whenever you see a question of interest, then stop and meditate over the deeper meanings of the well formulated and thought out answer.
Repeat.
Feel a sense of increasing wisdom and peace fill you. Easier than nailing your foot to a charging elephant, and more fun too!
Enjoy!
Click and see! What they do is take you to a new page with detailed information about the link, which is a bit quicker than having to browse through the links section to find it.
Externals, in the context of this website, are links to other websites. They show up in the little box called, creatively, "externals" just right of the main menu on many pages and lead to sites that has some kind of relation to the page in question. Externals always open in a new browser window and never appear in the texts themselves. All links inside texts go to other pages within this site. No surprise moves here!
As for the term itself I nicked it from the wonderful card game Guardians (see, non-external link), where it has a wholly different meaning.
Being who I am, the ideal browser for this site is a recent version of Opera. Up until recently, it was also one of the few browsers that displayed the tables correctly. That has now been fixed though, and any recent browser should display this site correctly. The oldest thing I've tested with is Netscape 4, and currently there is a lot to be desired when you use it here. But I aim to get that fixed as much as possible as soon as possible, I've always liked compatible sites. My decision to use stylesheets might be a disadvantage in this case, but I think the problems can be worked around if I just give it some time.
February 22th, 2003
I'm looking at the site in Netscape 4.79 right here, and while quite a lot of things aren't the way I specify them to be, there's nothing terribly wrong about it either. A bit more space here, the wrong colour there, the wrong font there, but it still works just like it should. Still, I think it could be even more similar if I didn't use stylesheets and other stuff in such a standard-orthodox way, but I like my standards ...
This site used to be served from Pigbox, my very own kitchen-based computer running Mandrake Linux and Apache. However, I've now got myself a domain and a webhost to run things from instead. So this is coming to you from a faceless-but-powerful Linux server in the US instead of a loveable homecomputer. But hey, it's improved the database query speed!
Pigbox is still running, and available at the same location as before, but it's not getting the content updates. I plan to use Pigbox as a test site to try out things on the site without disturbing the workings of the main site (what, you don't want error messages and array contents printed instead of page content?).
Nope! I only add larger things to the news page, and edits to a page added the same day usually aren't noted either. That means I may continue to add stuff to a diary entry (for example) all day without noting it beyond the first time on the news page. To be sure of not missing anything you can either check more frequently than you blink, or keep to reading stuff added the day before :-) ....
It's all in the database! This site is really only one main page and a few supporting ones, all the content is dug up from the MySQL database using PHP. I think I'll write a more extensive guide to how it all works later on, in the mean time you're welcome to mail me if you're interested!
Well, I did that in the old site but even though I had a decently easy to use system things got a bit unwieldy. There are 652 HTML pages in that site, and every page I wanted had to be created by hand, inserted into the right menus and then the whole lot had to be uploaded. This new one stores everything in a database and updates are made through the site itself. I log in and get a bunch of extra links that allow me to add things wherever I want. And best of all, the menus are created for me!
Plus it was nice to try something new after years of plain HTML.
Well, sort of, naturally. I wouldn't have had to write all this php, create databases and so on, could just focus on adding text and would get more functions I don't have here at the same time. On the other hand I've got my beloved category sorting so I can order everything nicely and more importantly I find that doing it all myself is a big part of the fun. It's cool to be working with something you've created yourself, know (to some extent anyway :-) how everything works and be able to change it around all you like. It's a geek thing, you don't need to understand :-) ...
Good question. A little has been moved already, and some more is likely to follow over time. But I don't think I'll move everything over. Don't count on it if I don't suddenly start saying I have (and if I do, demand proof :-).