A Brief Update

It's been a very busy couple of weeks, so I haven't been updating this blog as often as I'd like. I've been working on a few things since the last post. I've started the large task of transcribing my journal, starting at the beginning, which was written at the end of 2000. I've written names of people who were part of my life then, and I can't remember who they are at all now. It's interesting reading my own journal 8 years later. It's like I'm reading someone else's journal. The person who wrote those words no longer exists as he did when he wrote them, and I can see how much I had to learn about life back then. A lot has happened in the intervening 8 years. I wrote about the dread I felt about the incoming Bush presidency, and how I felt a shadow over my new year's eve celebrations just preceding his inauguration. I guess I was right, in a way, to dread the incoming administration, but I couldn't have known at the time how bad it would be. I wrote a lot about my daily activities, who I was with, and what was going through my head. I never realized how moody I was back then. I was pretty good about writing daily or almost daily, and the moods I write about swing wildly from day to day. Mostly, though, I feel like I'm reading a novel, and I'm just starting out. Since I can obviously identify with the main character, I am really interested in what happens day to day, and it's a real page turner. I'll be writing more about my journal once I've done a bit more work on it and find some good work to share. I've only gone through the first week or so of entries. This is going to be a big project. 

I've just about completed the upgrade of www.travellerbook.com to YUI CSS. I'm still using Prototype for Javascript, but the YUI Grids CSS cleans things up very nicely, and makes for bigger pages and as a result, larger maps on the page. Those changes will probably be rolled out this weekend. Some of the changes I've made make logging take an extra click though, so I want to roll out login cookies soon too, so I have to decide if I want to roll that out at the same time as the CSS changes. I've added a few Webkit specific CSS effects, which means the page will look best in Safari, Webkit, and Chrome (and any other Webkit based browser) so most people won't see the fanciest changes I've made. 

I've been doing a lot of rails programming this week (and last) at work. I've rolled out an entirely new web app in just two weeks, which will probably soon have thousands of (potential) users. I definitely feel like I've reached a level in my rails programming ability that I can roll out new web applications quickly without much effort. The hardest part for me now is the web design, which I'm getting much better at, and now having done some work with the YUI Grids layouts, I think that won't be so much of an impediment for me. Hopefully Alexandria Society (or whatever it ends up being called) will be much easier to set up with these frameworks.