Made some minor style-tweaks to the home page. The text you're reading now, for example, is slightly less-bright (easier on the eyes), while the links are a little brighter .. than they were before. (Might have to refresh your browser to load the revised style sheet.)
Visited-links in the sidebars are now slightly less-bright (grayer) .. than un-visited links. Used to be no diff.
Been studying more CSS. Becoming very comfortable tweaking styles. Fine-tuning. Easier for me to determine what I don't like, than what I do.
Oh, the date is also slightly brighter (whiter) .. than the rest of the text, and has a "text-transform" property applied to make it » UPPERCASE .. via a span tag with 'date' class attribute.
Upgraded the Rad blog to the newest version (4.32), which was released a few days ago. Way easier, now that I have Linux shell skillz & a VPS. Five minutes instead of 2 hours.
Movable Type v5.0 will be coming out soon. Currently at » beta-3. I normally install NEW versions of whole-number upgrades, rather than upgrading previous installations. Keeps the number of blog-entries down for a given installation.
Currently have 167 entries on MT 4.x. Lots of entries tend to make the blog respond sluggishly (when rebuilding). That would be » Ye Olde Rad Blog IV. (Started with v2.63 .. in May 2003.)
Considering installing a wiki (software). Can't hurt. Might help. Would be a place (beside the forum) where folks could post & reference their own info/content. Might be a good learning experience, too.
I have no experience with wiki's .. other than searching Wikipedia. Not sure which one would be best. So many choices. Ideas? Saw this comparison. Nigel once recommended Dokuwiki (I think) as a well-coded (PHP-based) piece of software.
The Dokuwiki download is 1.7 MB. (Compare that with the Movable Type download, which is 4.6 MB.) An über comparison of all Wiki's and their features is posted » HERE. Meanwhile Wikipedia, the mother-of-all wiki's, uses MediaWiki, which is both free & Open Source.
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UPDATE - note from Nigel (in New Zealand):
Your recollection is correct. I did indeed recommend DokuWiki, for several reasons. As you recalled, I commend the quality of the PHP code itself as worthy of study.
Another quality of Doku is that the underlying backing storage is plain-text files in the host webserver, which you can copy and move to easily backup or replicate your wiki instances. Other Wiki software (most notably MediaWiki) tends to use a database, which complicates things immensely.
[ I set up a Doku installation internal to the Symantec Auckland site for our internal needs in 2004, and spent much time expanding and improving it. It has served us very well. ]
Yes, there are Wiki standards, of sorts. These are really more along the lines of consensus about things such as how to refer between Wikis. But there is one very important effort which deserves special note. Ward Cunningham, creator of the original Wiki concept and software, put in quite some time and effort trying to get folks to agree on a common syntax, since there had been an explosion of violently incompatible syntaxes expanding on his original design.
The result is at WikiCreole. As with the syntax design of DokuWiki, that consensus syntax is heavily influenced by, but slightly different to, John Gruber's syntax for web publishing, Markdown (another piece of code that's worth your time to study & understand). Although Doku isn't the same as Creole, it's close, and Doku's extra features over and above Creole are pretty powerful.
One other Wiki of practical note is Trac - because it integrates a wiki with a front end to Subversion along with a simple bug-tracking tool. I wouldn't recommend you install or use Trac, but it's good to be aware of, since that particular package of source control + wiki + bug tracking is something that you will want to get used to if you're interested at all in writing code.
Trac isn't anything particularly special compared to hosted environments like Google Code, but it's installable privately and plenty of people use it instead of hosted services.
- Nigel
