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Category: Technical
Cleaning Up the URLs
04/08/08 10:45 am
I have been tinkering with the site's .htaccess directives to change the URLs from variable-laden to "clean" versions, because it's user and search engine friendly. This might cause some links to go AWOL however, since well-defined redirection rules can be tricky business. If you find a link that's not taking you where you expect it to, please email me (or leave a comment on this post) with the full URL you used. Don't tell me about the links in the RSS feed though - I know about those already.
Filed under: Site Related Technical
Winamp Classic Viscolor Tool
04/2/08 6:34 pm
I'm not highly skilled with Javascript, and it's somewhat amusing to me that it's an in-demand skill at all. Back in the day, we all hated Javascript because, as far as we could tell, its only use was for annoying, useless things like pop-up greetings or animated page transitions. But now JS is back in vogue, most often touted through "AJAX," and people... like it. Huh. Go figure.
Anyway, the point of my ramblings is to say I spent some time Javascripting over the previous weekend. Here is the fruit of my work: a viscolor.txt generator for making Winamp Classic skins. Up until now I have been making my viscolor files manually... it's stupid, I know, but it's why so many of my visualizers feature flat-color bars and backgrounds. But I went Googling for an automated maker, and didn't find anything particularly useful. When such a problem presents itself to me, I just do it myself. ^^;
So, hopefully that can be of use to any fellow skinners out there. If not, it's still useful to me. Huzzah!
...Oh yes, it doesn't seem to work in IE, of course... Maybe I'll try to fix that later. But really, use Firefox.
Edit: fixed in IE, mostly. But still, Firefox.
A Little Discourse - ASP
03/13/07 1:54 pm
I have to use ASP for the site I work on (the site I am employed to work on, that is - not this one, of course). This was not my choice; in fact, this was the first time I'd ever used it. Though I am glad for the chance to have learned it on the job (perhaps the best way that I learn code: through analyzing, modifying and eventually wholly taking over a complex working example), I must say... I dislike it.
I think my main gripe is that it doesn't follow normal syntax structures. It tries to be "user friendly" with a more "human readable" syntax (or that seems to be the rationale, anyway). I, personally, have never known a code writer who complained of their choice language being syntactically hard to grasp, whereas conversely I've heard nothing but displeasure over languages that try to pull this sort of "easy to follow" nonsense. But maybe I've only known more-experienced coders? Is this sort of things supposed to be good for beginners? ... Wait a minute, why would a beginner start with ASP?
Which brings me to my next point - if you search for ASP-related questions, you're likely to turn up few [useful] results, or a lot of results for ASP.NET instead. It's not hard to understand why you can easily find so much more help on a language like PHP: people use it! *ahem* This is not to say, "no one uses ASP," but whereas PHP often comes standard on any decent hosting package, encouraging its increased usage, ASP tends to be a pricey add-on that only businesses want for no inherent reason. Yeah, that may be a bit too far for me to speak, as a n00b of the language. But bringing it back around to my point - your typical web scripting beginner is going to use what's at hand, and that is not likely to be ASP.
And even if that were so, is it a good idea for beginners to learn with what will become "bad habits" if they go on to any other language? Admittedly, after weeks of nothing but ASP, I'll turn back to PHP and write an if statement with a single = sign, or end a line without a proper ; delimiter. Oh the shame, the shame of it all!
Alright, I'm done here. Hooray for Asian Kung Fu Generation! Oh, and an aside, some new skin site links added recently: Shadows of Deception has a Clover skin that I've had for the longest time and was surprised to so suddenly find its owner. INERTiA is pretty small so far, but has good stuff - particularly some Death Note skins, which can't be found here ^^; (maybe later...)
