I've made a few small changes to the site today.
The most obvious one is the picture in the header (if you're still seeing the old one, refresh the page). The old picture was a satellite image of Leiden, which hasn't been really appropriate for about five months now, but I couldn't decide on what to replace it with. A similar satellite image of Tokyo might've been nice but the old one had a nice uniform colour scheme on account of all the roofs in the Netherlands being the same colour. Tokyo is more varied in roof colour, which makes it very hard to put legible text over the image. In the end I decided on this image of the Shinkyo sacred bridge from Nikko.
The other changes are less noticeable. For one thing, my own comments are now highlighted, making it easier to see when I've replied to one of your comments. I've also added links at the bottom of the main page to page through the post archive. The category pages, which previously would show all posts in a category which led to huge pages, now show only five posts and use this same paging mechanism. Similarly, on the page for an individual post, links at the top lead to the previous and next post. This should make the blog somewhat easier to navigate.
I've also changed it so a post with images attached shows at most five thumbnails in the post display. Any further images are simply indicated by the text "N more images". This should decrease loading time for posts with lots of images, and should reduce my bandwidth usage.
Since I wrote the blogging engine used by this site myself, it lags a bit behind some other blogs in terms of features. I specifically chose to do this though since it allows me ultimate control over the look and functionality of this site, and give it a few unique twists (for example: there are, as far as I know, no off-the-shelf blogging engines that do the AJAX comment loading and calendar that I have here).
I've been working on getting some of the gaps filled. In the past week I've added post categories and more friendly URLs for the individual post pages. Also new is that the calendar now shows the number of posts for that day if you hover over a link (it's rarely more than one, but still). I've also fixed some bugs and improved the code in many places, which should make for a better experience all around.
El Goonish Shive fans will be pleased to know that I have begun work on catching up with the character statistics. I'm hoping to get that done this weekend, before I get swamped in real work again.
This post is just to let you know that the e-mail addresses c9@ookii.org and egs@ookii.org, previously used for feedback on the Channel9 and El Goonish Shive sections of the site respectively, no longer exist.
The reason for this change is the amount of spam I received on these addresses.
If you wish to contact me for any reason, including anything about those sections, please do so by posting a comment here on my blog.
Find As You Type for Internet Explorer has just reached 1000 downloads on the site: about 900 x86, and 100 x64 (and an additional 263 downloads of the source code).
And that's not even counting the downloads from Channel9 or other places that may be mirroring it. Since the IE blog linked to Channel9, and since C9 has slightly more traffic than ookii.org, I suspect it's been downloaded even more times there.
Thanks for your support everyone!
You may have noticed that the calendar in the sidebar on the right uses a nifty javascript/AJAX implementation so the page doesn't need to refresh when you go backward or forward. Yesterday I discovered a really stupid bug in it: go backward a month, then go forward to October again (unless it's already after October when you read this, in which case you just need to go back, assuming I haven't fixed the bug already). You'll see October 29th appears twice, and the days after it are shifted ahead.
How does this happen? It's because the javascript Date object doesn't have any built-in support for date arithmetic; you can't easily add a day to it for instance. So I built my own support for that. Since you can convert a date to and from a representation in seconds, to advance one day I simply add the number of seconds there's in a single day to the date object. Which worked great, until now.
You see, I'd been working under the premise that dates are all 24 hours long, not an unreasonable assumption you might think. Unfortunately, thanks to the end of Daylight Saving Time, October 29th is 25 hours long, throwing off my algorithm.
I'm going to fix this, of course. Soon, I hope.
UPDATE: It appears I'm an idiot, and the Date object does support the type of arithmetic I need. I don't see how I missed that when I implemented it... Anyway this'll make fixing it a lot easier. I still need to actually do it, of course. :)
Update 2006-10-31: The bug has been fixed. All seems well with the calendar now.
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