Every so often I check my “referrers” page to see how people are finding me. I wasn’t prepared for this, though.

A Google UK search for “latex kilt.”

Those are two words that just don’t go together, you know?

I don’t think I’ve ever talked about spanking or being spanked by a coworker. Nor am I aware of a “duck sex song.” Sorry, websearchers.

And for the record, I don’t have any pics of Aeka or Ryoko naked. (Of course, saying that just guarantees that I’ll get more “aeka naked” and “ryoko naked” Google searches. Oh well.) I could get my hands on some “cartoon females with weapons,” though, if that’s what you’re into. Dirty Pair, anyone?

It’s a sad fact that I spend more time listening to music under Windows (and therefore Winamp) than I do on the Linux box at work that used to feed the “Current Music” feature on this page. The time came for a change. The desire to show off my eclectic music collection was unfulfilled, and I had to do something about it!

I found several options, such as DoSomething or finding a way to shim SpyAmp into the site, but I finally settled on BlogAmp. It worked right out of the box, but I wasn’t quite happy. If you look at the BlogAmp site you can see that its music display is quite cool, including clever hover boxes containing the extra data. The default look is just a text dump of title, bitrate and played-time data. Bah!

While poking around I came across references to the acronym tag in HTML, a tag I just now used quite shamelessly to show how it works. It occurred to me… eventually… that I could use it to show the data I wanted in a tooltip.

It sounds easy enough, but I’ve also never dabbled in Javascript before. Learning how to script the output I wanted took the better part of two more hours. (Sad, I know.) At least an hour was spent just looking for a premade function that would convert the raw number of seconds provided by BlogAmp into a nice minutes:seconds display. In the end I just went looking for math syntax references and brute-forced the display.

The end result sits near the end of the left-side column: a list of played songs that you can mouse-over to find out how long the track is and when I listened to it. Hooray, or something.

Do you want to know the really sad part? Of course you do. The really sad part is that I sat down four or five hours ago with the intention of ripping some Ogg Vorbis tracks. So far I haven’t so much as touched CDEX tonight.

Oh well. Tomorrow is another day. I did learn stuff, and I did achieve the results I wanted from BlogAmp. Yay!

Via J : Da Blog I found a nifty little toy that provides a real-time listing of referrer information about visitors to this journal. (I will probably expand this feature to the rest of the site… eventually.)

And no, before you ask, I don’t have too much time on my hands.

This website has always “kind of” worked for small displays, but not really. Upon firing up one of the Compaq WinXP machines and browsing to greyduck.net, I was appalled at the overlapping text and general cruddiness. Time to take action, it was.

An hour, several false starts and some Googling later, we now have a fully functional new layout engine. What’s that? You say it looks almost exactly the same? Good. That means you don’t notice anything broken, and that’s the best news I could get.

The bulk of what works about the new stylesheet rig comes from saila.com’s CSS Layouts page. If you dabble in CSS at all, I recommend taking a peek.

Oh, and hey:

CSS Layouts – saila.com

Here’s the short version. The longer version will come as part of a rambling Life entry I have yet to type up.

Gary (Hilliard, one of my bosses) loaned me his HP digital camera for a week or so. I used it. I wanted to share the outcome with the world. I found Gallery. I installed and tweaked same. Pictures were uploaded. (My) Gallery permalink was added to the main site navigation file.

I now await the flood of adoration for my photographic skills. It should arrive at just about the same time as the flood of adoration for my music video creation skills, I figure.