Lumpy's Corner

Well, I did have a pretty good day all in all. I am finally starting to get the hang of this XHTML and actually generating pages as a pretty decent rate. Work is going much better, things are starting to get real organized and we have a good crew.

Considering it is 3:30 AM, I am going to bed short tonight. Hopefully, I will have more to say tomorrow.

What this site is about.

For those of you who have visited here before, you will have noticed things have changed much. I have opted to go with a simpler cleaner look in blog format. I owe much of this look to Blogmaster Foofy, Dilandou and Geek who have all helped me in their own way.

First off Foofy's site Blogstyles.com is where I got the style sheet and templates for this site. This made the whole process much easier than had I started from scratch.

Then there is Dilandou. I aptly refer to this man as "Dil the Jedi Code Master". He sat for hours in front of his PC an ocean away and coached me through the process of writing my first page of valid XHTML code.

Dil convinced me to go KISS and I promptly burned my "Dreamweamer" CD (with lighter fluid) and switched over to GVIM. This really got me going. Then he brought up the idea of using a style sheet. Again with Dil online, a simple CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) emerged next. It was this direction from then on. Of course, school comes first.

Sadly it was going to have to end. My course load would be just too demanding. But into a certain chat room entered a Canadian nicked Geek who likes to blog and even has a blog-support IRC channel. By the time I met him, I was ready to try "Movable Type"... Guess who walked me through that process? So I then had a blog running as an experiment. I blogged and liked it. Lumpy's Rabid Rants and Lunatic Ravings was born.

I have been busting my butt of the late to make sure that this little corner is one hundred percent XHTML valid code. Some of you have asked why? Well, first off, I have this major anal streak in me which just makes me that way (and tend to get a bit ornery when people ask me "why?"). Second, you are SUPPOSED to write valid code. It is just a matter of good practice. I mean don't you want to do things right?

On that note let me get my soapbox out and talk about valid code. Valid code is a standard set by the World Wide Web Consortium . This organization, the W3C for short, is trying to set a uniform standard so that the whole world is on the same page. This guarantees that browsers for the blind, deaf and other special devices such as brail printers will know how to function with the given web page.

This is actually a major improvement in things for HTML which was rather forgiving in terms of code but could be ambiguous. XHTML is stricter but more specific and powerful. Using XHTML instead of HTML allows one to "extend" the language and allow it to do much more than HTML. (The "X" stands for "eXtensible".) It can properly display math equations with MathML, make full use of XMLwhich allows one to really change the static nature of HTML. In short, it is just better just think of it as HTML on steroids and crack.

I asked that same question in the lockergnome channel and good ol' flatrabbit told me it stood for Really Simple Syndication. Not to sound ungrateful to any of the lockergnomies but it hardly helps. Now I know what it stands for. Well that was almost a year ago and I did not really pursue this matter much further. I simply tucked the information away in an empty place in my brain (trust me there is gobs of room up there) and waited for my new found trivia to be put to use swooning young women at the clubs. (I am not claiming it ever works but the geek in me keeps trying things like that.) I did however decide to explore it now.

RSS is basically a dialect of XML and means that it extends XHTML. (If you are not sure what any of that means read my blog on XHTML.) By being a special type of XML it has specific keywords that have specific meanings. This allows programs, commonly called readers or news aggregators, to organize this data for its users. It allows one to custom choose what type of news and stuff one gets via the web. It also checks for updates. It is really THE method for finding your news items you desire. It is also THE method to keep up with your favorite blogs.

Now I have explained a little bit about what RSS is. Harvard has some good information on that subject (again this link was given to me by flatrabbit) as does this article if you wish to learn more. My goal is to get all my HTML e-zines into a RSS reader.

The site is now up and valid.

I hope to have a few more post up in a day or so.

Well, it should be simple enough.

All I want to do is take the content from a textbox, preserve its formatting and output into a php page. (Now, if you do not understand any of this, read no further.)

First of all there was this security issue of having it query the sql db and not allow an injection attack. Mucho thanks to Helio and Usrbingeek for help on that little issue. (And no, I did not forget, Helio does not have a website.)

I do not know about all of you out there but I have this anal thing about valid XHTML code.

I do not have any clue as to why some one would write code, ask you to put it on your site and give you invalid code.

Does any one have a decent answer to this?

I have spent the past two hours fixing other peoples laziness.

Still playing with it and making suttle and not so suttle changes. I like this theme. I doan't like some of the issues with widgets. NTL I shall make it submit

Sometime life is so ironic. I was planning to visit my folks this weekend but my cat kookie decided it would be best for me to stay home and deal with his infected eye. Instead of getting better after visiting the vet on Wednesday, the poor feline's eye was only getting cloudier on Saturday. The vet gave me additional instructions. Meaning more frequent applications of eye irrigation and eye ointment.

Now both of my feline roommates are very well behaved and docile animals. This however matters little when the animal does not understand that the "treatment" going to benefit him. His only though it "God gave me claws, you are not putting that stuff on my eye!"..

I have found that the only method I can deal with the furry spastic fearful ball of fur is to toss the poor little bugger into a military laundry bag. The draw string allows just enough cloth to bunch up around his neck so that he can't get those claws into me and ruin another set of pants but not tight tnough to choke him or bind his neck. He is actually adapting well to this new 5 time per day ritual. He hasn't hissed and growled since Saturday now.