Eric Nehrlich, Unrepentant Generalist

I finally decided to learn about this new-fangled CSS thing where I can have a separate column down the left with information and stuff. That’s right, I’m finally updating my HTML to, say, 1995 standards. And as long as I was at it, I decided to go to blosxom’s website, and see if I could figure out a couple of the plugins to do things like automatically make a directory list, and make quick links to the posts, and things like that. And, after many hours of hacking this weekend, I finally got it mostly working the way I want it to, with the blogs I read (using javascript code from bloglines), the directory structure of this blog, and recent posts all in the left margin. Finally. I even had to modify a couple of the plugins to get it just right, so I learned a bit about Perl, or at least regular expressions. But I’m done now. Yay!

Of course, since it took so long to get all this durn formatting the way I wanted it, it means that I probably won’t get around to putting up the actual content I’d been meaning to this weekend. And not all of the pages will be updated immediately to the new format, unfortunately – I do all the rendering on my local machine and upload it to my site, so until I write the Perl script which will automagically upload the entire directory tree (and, yes, I know it’s easy, but I want to learn to do it myself), it’ll be done on a piece-by-piece basis. Sorry about that.

Let me know what you think.

I’m in the process of trying to consolidate the two blogs I’ve been vaguely keeping (the reading list one and the journal one) into blosxom, so I just dumped the last few months of posts into blosxom. That’s why it claims I wrote a bunch of posts this afternoon. I put in the actual dates that the posts were written in, which should help clarify things. I think. We’ll see.