entropia

Remember Back In The Day, before blogs were called ‘blogs’?  Remember how simple and clutter-free everything was?  When you visited a new blog, you knew exactly where everything was.  This is because every blog had the same five pieces, and usually the same layout

1. The Content.  Displayed predominantly in the middle of the screen.  Every post was shown in full and impossible to miss.
2. The Archive.  Listed first in the menu bar on the left or under the title.  Brought you to a list of months, which brought you to the posts for that month.  These are still around, but in a dozen different forms.
3. The Forum.  Back In The Day, we didn’t use post-by-post comments.  We just had forums.
4. The Downloads.  No indy dev site was complete without a handful of unfinished RPGs and graphics demos.
5. The Links.

Every home page consisted of the title, these five links, and the posts.  The content took up 99% of the page.

Now, it can actually be a hassle trying to navigate around an unfamiliar blog or news site.  And there’s so much clutter it’s hard to concentrate on what you’re trying to read.  Take a look at CodeBetter.  Now, this isn’t exactly a blog in the traditional sense, and I don’t mean to pick on a site with more good content than I could ever hope for, but it’s where I was when I thought of this.  Look at how many things are on the front page:  ads, “featured” articles, latest articles, two sets of popular articles, a “tag cloud”, member projects, links, more ads, and 12 RSS links (yes, 12).

Most of these sections are probably useful to a lot of people.  If it’s your first time visiting a site, you want easy access to the best or most popular content, not just the most recent.  And RSS feeds are becoming more and more mainstream, but there’s never any reason to have more than one or two of them on the front page.

Then there are the parts that as all but useless.  Tag clouds are the worst thing to happen to blogs since the term “blog”.  If you want to show the most popular tags, show a list; they’re smaller, easier to understand, and more informative.  One thing I’ll give CodeBetter credit for though is that they didn’t cram in a calendar view.  Like tag clouds, they’re nothing but more complex and less usable reworkings of more established views.

I guess it all comes down to the 80-20 rule which Joel Spolsky writes about so elegantly:  most people won’t use most features, but that doesn’t mean you can get rid of them.  I’m sure each of those 12 RSS links has been used by someone at least once, but for everyone else they’re just clutter.  They belong tucked away in a separate, but easy to find, page, along with the tag cloud and member projects.

Of course, this is just my opinion; I prefer the content to take up most of the page. 

I uploaded a few changes.  Namely, a fix to a bug that was causing only the first instance of a variable to be replaced when generating the output, and a nifty little slider thing that makes it easier to where you are in the program flow.

It’s still right here.

I’m also working on a set of functions for doing dynamic css.  It’s not the it’s hard, but the cross-browser support is tedious.  And I haven’t seen much for example code so it’ll be useful, at least for me.

After pretty heavy development for a couple days I didn’t touch CSS Colorizer for a for weeks.  I think it was because I wrote myself into a corner with the UI.  So this weekend I changed how it works and got a demoable version ready.  It’s not all the usable yet but most of the essential functionality is there.

First, some words on the UI.  At first, I was showing everything on the screen at the same time:  the color picker, the CSS, and HTML, and the preview, with the option of switching back and forth between the internal CSS and the generated CSS.  But this layout had no flow.  There was no way to know what to do.

So I broke it into steps that are shown two-at-a-time.  You can easily move from step to step, even backwards to previous steps with Next and Prev buttons.  It even has a little scroll animation.

Try it out here. 

Here’s how the flow breaks down:

• Previously Generated CSS - if you’ve already used Colorizer and have an output file with a header, paste it here and click parse to generate the internal CSS.  Otherwise, skip this step.
• Internal CSS - if you don’t have a Colorizer file, paste your regular CSS here and replace the color codes with color variable names.  Variables begin with $$, such as $$foreground.
• Colors - here is where you actually create the color scheme.  This section isn’t complete, but you can do basic editting by entering raw rgb values or functions.
• Raw CSS - Click generate to replace the color variables with the actual color values.  The output is actual usable CSS.
• HTML - paste some HTML to test your CSS.
• Preview - click the link to apply HTML to see it in action.

The main area that still needs work is the color picker.  I need a visual color map of some sort and the derived colors still have a very limited selection of functions (even though they’re list on the page, hueshift() and hsv() haven’t been implemented).

Overall I don’t think it’s as useful as I hoped.  Choosing colors as functions of other colors feels unnatural.  I was hoping to make it easier to generate matching colors but that’s really something that’s best left to tweaking by hand.

But, it’s something.  Which is better than nothing.

Last night I was looking through some screenshots of my old work, mostly graphics demos written in QuickBASIC, and I ended up reading my old blog.  ‘Old’ as in before they were called ‘blogs’.  And I couldn’t help but notice how self-destructive I was.  I don’t know how many times I wrote “I need to get around to doing some real coding in C++”.

You see, I started programming in QB.  I used it a lot, doing things no one had done in QB before.  I knew that it’s basically a toy language, but I kept using it, even during college.  I knew I needed real experience, outside of class, to get a job, but I never went for it.

And so last night I’m thinking “what a loser I was”.  All I had to do was apply myself.

But eventually I realized I haven’t really changed much.  I have a job and experience now, but I’m still not doing what it takes to actually “make it”.

That’s why I started this blog - to do something.  Unlike all the other times when I started because I thought I had someting to say.  This time I thought, “I’ll start writing and coding and putting myself out there and people will come back with feedback”.  Any feedback would be nice, as long as I can use it to better myself and further my work.

So that’s really all I have today.  At least by aknowledging that I have nothing, I’m putting something out there.

Recently at work, I had to fix some code that checks a cookie in C#.  The cookie could either be in the response (preferred)or request.  The problem was that checking the response cookie when it isn’t set would actually set it to null.  This was bad.

I know there must be some way to check the cookie without setting it, but I couldn’t find it, so I ended up with something like this:

Of course, this isn’t quite right because it’s from memory.  But I feel like this is a WTF - it’s an ugly workaround of something that should be a one-liner.

Now that I’m running Vista, I can play some of the games that wouldn’t run on Windows 2000*.  I started with Company of Heroes.

I haven’t played a good PC strategy game for a long time, but everyone says CoH was the best of 2006, and the best in years.  And for once, everyone was right.  CoH takes everything that’s wrong with modern RTSs and throws it out, leaving you with a great game that actually takes strategy.

I’m not going to go into much detail, but it’s like a cross between Warcraft and Commandos.  Instead of hundreds of individual units running around, you have a few groups of 4 or 5 that work together.  And instead of just open fields with trees and junk in your way, objects and buildings give you cover.  And instead of using settlers or peons to harvest resources, you earn them by controlling strategic points.  It’s a lot like capturing flags in Battlefield.

There hasn’t been a PC game that really grabbed my attention since Sim City 4 or Dungeon Siege, but CoH ends the streak.

*A lot of games that don’t like Win2k will actually install if you try hard enough, but most of them refuse to run for whatever reason.