You may have noticed that I’ve rolled the work from the test page directly into the main site. This has the benefit of improving appearance and performance as well as freeing me to experiment with the deeper levels of code without worrying about losing the cosmetic changes I’ve been tinkering with so far.

I also took a step that should have been unnecessary. I moved the database to a server that’s much more stable than my capricious little workstation at the office. Performance may improve or it may degrade, but at least if I reboot Zero I don’t have to worry about losing the whole website when it happens.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother pretending to know what I’m doing. Case in point: Did you know that the “Print” and “Send” links were totally and completely useless until about fifteen minutes ago? It took me five minutes to fix them both to my satisfaction.

To be accurate, it took me almost five minutes to fix the “Send” page. The “Print” page took almost no time at all. The “Send” page required me to make all of the code changes that I’ve done to the main “Journal” page in order for it to look at least remotely correct.

I suppose that website building involves a lot of trial and error. In my case, it seems to involve error and error. At least it’s working now, dammit.

Because I can, and more importantly because I have a DVD player now, I decided to add a DVD review section. I already own a bunch of titles to review, it’s just going to be a matter of watching, taking notes and typing up a review for each of them.

Hey, it’s not like I have anything useful to do with my free time, you know. Or gods forbid I should have a social life. Pshaw!

As if anyone cared, but I’ve changed the daily random email address link so that the address itself isn’t shown. This should keep the column width reasonable for that side of the page and allow me more flexibility when the time comes to merge the design changes I’m working on into the main site.

The biggest problem I’m facing right now is that of layout. I have some elements that would best be served up in a wider place than is available in one of the two bordering columns, but I’m not sure where else to put them.

One idea might be display the first entry, then use the space right underneath for some “extras,” and follow with the remaining X number of entries. This places me right in the path of the other big problem I’m facing: I need to learn how to select and format items from the journal database without using the original Monaural Jerk functions.

I know how to get at the raw data. What’s lacking is my ability to choose specific items dynamically and to format them for display. The next round of experiments I conduct on the test page will probably be along these lines.