Flavours of shattered...

Today's recipe is tired, but feeling good with myself. Did Rivers running club today, which in reality has been Kveta and myself doing medium to long runs for the past 4 months, which has been good as we've pushed each other to keep the miles up. Today, for the first time, we had a new starter, and as a result when we went out got round just about 3 and a half miles in 50 minutes. To her credit she was obviously exhausted, but she kept going, and kept her sense of humour as well.

When we got back I'd not broken a sweat, so decided to go back out for a proper long run. Kveta had to go back on duty, so I ended up doing an 8 mile route, including a section along the Thames (complete with half a tonne of midge like biomass smacking me in the face) before heading up to do a lap of Prospect Park. its the longest run I've done since the half, and it felt pretty good. Now, 4 hours on, my legs don't ache, just a slight feeling of fatigue that lets me know they've worked.

If I want to improve at Roadrunners then I really need to take the initiative, and start doing the mileage again. I've been lax the last couple of months, and there is no excuse for it. The club can help me with speed and technique, but ultimately I need to make sure that I have the engine to support everything else. Long runs aren't hard, they just need the motivational kick in the arse to get out and do them...

Nearly there

The layout is pretty much done (just got to decide what to add into that top-right corner), and I've added in a little javascript to dynamically load up the CSS files based on screen resolution. I've even wasted 20 minutes creating a "favicon", which is a really pointless gesture, and almost broke XHTML Strict validation (lower case only apparently).

Only other thing left to do is add in a bunch of icons to display when the blog post loads in, based on its tags (if you can be arsed to look at the page code you'l see a word in comments at the end of the blog post...thats the tag I've assigned it). I need to do a bit more mucking around to see how they are displayed when they come in multiples, however I could live with a single icon being dsplayed.

It all looks comfortably generic, however the main advantage it has is the only real content is;

1. The header graphic (times 2, one for each resolution)
2. the backdrop image
3. A single "blue metal" texture
4. A default image for the blog posts (a few more of these to be added)
5. 6 files (4 PHP ones, and 2 CSS ones)

So the total footprint is about 100k, and thats only as the images are not very compressed. I have no idea what would happen if the feeds are not available...either it won't load up, or it will fall over in an ugly and spectacular way...probably both. I should probably add on a "previous posts" section somewhere, jus not sure where yet, as I never considered that when I was working out what the layout was going to be...it does seem a bit daft to show 4 image/video posts, and only 1 blog post...

Work In Progress - The Update

I've managed to get a fair bit done, and its starting to look a bit more like a semi-decent web page. The bare bones are certainly there. I still need to fill in the gaps caused by the huge amount of modularity going on, and it would be nice to add some subtle graphic wankery like rounded corners here and there, but I'm really not sure I can be bothered...after all, this is a site that's supposed to look after itself.

At the moment it only really works in moderately high resolution screens. I'll do some work on sorting out a separate style sheet for mid resolution (1024x768) and shockingly low resolution (800x600 and below) over the weekend. The mid-res one is fairly key, as my laptop works at that res, so rest assured that I'll be making it fully readable. I may have shot myself in the foot a bit using such a small font, but worst case I'll turn up the brutality of the string-length limiters in place.

It was quite a good laugh to find out that I can post directly here from my mobile phone...one of the side benefits to using a large scale site as your back end. Not sure how much I'll be using that, and it did take a couple of hours to appear, however it does give me the option of snapping a picture, and sending it off with a bit of prose for the world to see...

This is the first time I've really done any work specifically concentrating on making a website viewable in both IE and FireFox...previously I've been lazy and done IE only. This was in a large part down to the fact I horrendously abused tables for layout purposes. This site is driven entirely off 'divs' and 'spans', and a healthy shitload of CSS in the background. It's been tricky, and I've had to make a lot of use of HTML validators to ensure that I got all the tricky bits right (my personal favourite being 'divs' within 'a' tags, which puts FireFox in a right tizzy...). Hiding behind the HTML are a handful of PHP scripts doing specific tweaks to the various feeds coming in, and right at the back is a function module by the guy who wrote Boastology, which my old site ran off. That does all the complex stuff with XML and RSS, so I'm just left with some cleanup and layout work, which makes everything nice and simple!

Right...off to bed for me, after all...it's a school night...

The inherent dangers of new toys

There is always a risk, when you get something new, that you'll have a semi-brainwave and end up trying something stupid. Like doing a blog post from your phone. You may be even dafter, and attach a photo... And all to see if it works. All in the name of progress, of course!

The World of Tomorrow...TODAY!

It's a move of home to the IJY blog, after a bit of a sabatical. Basically the old site became the target of hack attacks (due to being old and vunerable code). I'm in the process of building a more robust front-end to IJY, and then using various 3rd party sites as the backend.

I've chosen blogger/blogspot for this part of it as;

1. I already have feeds in from other google sites
2. I already had an account by defualt
3. Its fairly simple and flexible to use
4. I'm lazy
5. There is no 5

The theory is that from the RSS feed of this I will publish to ijy.cc, and anyone who is actually bothered about the shite I type can come here and read it in full. I suspect most of the posts will relate to;

1. running
2. work
3. computer games
4. board games

and I'm hoping to be able to ID that from the RSS feed, and flag them somehow at IJY with pretty icons, or the like. Expect a few test posts to appear here while I try and get everything working.