Were I a character from LoTR, I would be Galadriel, Elf Queen of Lothlorien. Well, naturally. Who are you?

As I’m sure anyone who has ever actually used the features (on such sites as blogger and metafilter) will agree, Ctrl+Shift+A, B, and T should be adopted as standard keyboard shortcuts and implimented in every web app and text editor known to man. Thankfully, Meg has embarked upon a series of articles to help make it so. In celebration, I added them to my own comments system.

I’m Santa. This, apparently, as a result of that big discrimination against the non-jolly lawsuit that was settled out of court recently. Ho ho ho.

Your Daily Cryptic Admonition: Never forget that this is supposed to be fun.

And so this is Christmas:

Little more than a week left ’til Christmas, you know.

Yep.

I guess somebody should put the tree up, huh?

Yep. Oh. Oh!

(It gets put up later and later every year…)

People: “alot” isnot aword. And it’s a URL, got it? A yoo arr ell. (Okay, so I’m now That Guy. Whatever.)

Overwrite permission denied EEEK. I’m having the same problem, with Barrysworld not allowing me to upload over already-existing files. Which is stupid and a PITA to start with, but throw into the mix that at least half the time Blogger doesn’t catch this error, and reports that it published sucessfully. I finally had to resort to using a batch file to delete index.php and the December archive, and running it immediately before I publish. Every time I publish. (So if you get some weird 404 or 403 error, you’ll know why.)

You wouldn’t think it’d be that hard to find a weblogging system done in PHP that doesn’t require *SQL¹ or some other database and doesn’t add in a whole lot of slash-inspired fluff. (Just trust me on that one, you really wouldn’t.) So of course, I can’t find one anywhere. Pivot is looking like the closest thing out there to what I need, and even it is a poster child of feeping creaturism. Sadly, it’s appearing like this comment from the afore-mentioned MeFi thread might still be true: “It is probably simpler to roll your own than to try to find an existing package that will do what you need. A simple weblog engine only takes about 40-50 lines of code.”The thing I can’t figure out, however, is why nobody has written and released those 40-50 lines of code, instead of the >100kb monsters out there now that do the exact same thing, only slower and after you spend days configuring them.

Does that mystical 50 lines actually exist somewhere out there, in some dark ungoogled part of the web? Am I crazy? Am I dreamin’? Discuss.

¹ I don’t really like your ‘traditional’ databases. I like XML. Also, I don’t have access to SQL anyway, though that is by far the lesser concern. I guess I’ll never really trust anything that I can’t open in a plain old text editor and grasp the basic structure of inside of 5 minutes. Scripting languages have spoiled me for all useful purposes, I know.

Hey, an online test that actually has a mildly accurate clinical record, done up by people who should know what they’re doing. (Remember when they were all like that?) The Autism-Spectrum Quotient test gave me only a 20, four above normal, and well (12) below the threshold. I guess I’ll have to come up with yet another theory to explain that whole ‘high school’ thing. (via Matt, via Matt.)

On the Phone

Me: …you know she and I bond on all the geek things. Hell, I can’t think of anyone I’ve chosen to have in my life who isn’t a geek.

Him: Wait a second, did you just call me a geek?

Me: We’ve talked about this. Of course you have a touch of geekiness. I probably wouldn’t be with you otherwise. Besides, if you weren’t, you wouldn’t even get half of my jokes.

Him: Oh. Well, actually, the thing is I only remember to smile and nod half the time.

I ♥ Barrysworld. Welcome to that fabled “actual webhost” I’ve been going on about. I now have PHP, 20 megs, and a complete lack of Geocities in my life. I can breathe again. I’ve brought all the old content back online, including a revamped projects page. I’ve also been playing with PHP some, most notably dotcomments. In general, just accept on faith that everything is spiffier and that this makes me happy.

A reminder: fixing your links to me is a good thing to keep in mind, next time you’re making a sweep through your pages and correcting old/expired URL’s. (You do do that, right? Of course you do.)

Once again: Blogtracker users click here to add the new location to your favorites. YayDir users, click here.

“20 years of Usenet archives, more than 700 million messages dating back to 1981. […] a fascinating first-hand historical account.” Damn skippy.

Allow me to take this as an opportunity to harp on one of my pet topics, the future of history, as a science, which it now is. The link itself lists a short timeline of articles of historical import, from Challenger to the Berlin Wall, but the greatest overall impact on history will be found in the mundane. To justify that last statement, in short: the future of history is here, it’s not going away, and its memory is more complete than not. That which is not recorded is the exception. The ‘lens of history’ can now focus so fine, a stray photon passing through it could probably obliterate a small moon. And guess what? You’re a part of it. Every single little thing you publish on the internet will, much more likely than not, live forever. Ain’t that just trippy as hell?

And of course, lest we forget those historical events which are really important, the very first ever use of ‘blog’ as a contraction of ‘weblog’ on Usenet.

The Rambling Webgeek: Playing with the interface to the CYOA features again. I’m hesitantly declaring it perfected, having sacrificed compactness for clarity.

I’m also sitting on a redesign that should look better at higher resolutions (I always forget to test for that), to make sure that I really like it and that it’s not just the caffeine talking. I’d also like to avoid having another design that only lasts a week, just on principle.

None of these old designs are just chucked in the trash, by the way. At some point when I have an actual web host, I’ll get around to letting users pick their own design. In theory, that’s possible now, as one of my supplemental web hosts allows CGI and SSI. In practice, however, I haven’t any more compelling reason to move everything over there at this time. (Mostly because Perl causes me intense cephalalgia, whereas PHP does not.)

The third time is not the charm: it would appear that two things haven’t changed since the last time I played with remotely-hosted comments. A) It doubles the load time of your page, B) understandably, no one feels a compelling need to talk about the things I say. I do however love the way Sylloge does comments, as a sort of on-page guestbook, and I’m thinking that’s the way of the future. It would definitely solve problem A, at least.

Words About Words: mmm, nymmy.

Anagrams: it would appear that fully half of the anagrams of my full name disparage either my mom or the good people of Oman and Omaha. The joys of enamel also make quite a few appearances. Other interesting recurrents: ammo, [redacted], analyse, anneal, anomaly, [redacted], enemy, Johnson, homo, homonym, honeymoon, manhole, meme, moan, moon, NASA, omen, [redacted], seamen.

My personal favorite anagram of all time: ‘Freakho’=‘a href ok!’

Similar to Jessie’s experience, and yet infinitely more disturbing, I have glanced at a clock and noticed the time at 11:42 five times in the last three days. Five times. My own subconscious mind is no doubt to blame, but that makes it no less weird. The fact is, two people — one across the continent, the other across the globe — can effect my subconscious in this way, just through their writing on webpages.

After much gnashing of teeth, I still can’t decide whether this means I’m spending too much time on the internet, or if this sort of thing must just be endemic to the weblog/journal/diary set. So solve my problem for me: have you, personally noticed this or related phenomena in your own life? Have you ever belatedly realized that the seed of some action you’ve taken lay in a webpage you had read? Am I just losing all pretense of a grip on reality?
Discuss.