Linkstew

2008 Prediction 4: PHP Problems - "A large part of the problem PHP has is that it's evolved substantially over time and doesn't force you to program in a certain way: you never know if you're getting clean object-oriented code or nasty procedural code" [From Commentor Chris Adams]

The thing I find ironic about this comment is that it forgets functional programming completely, which kind of just emphasizes how bad PHP is at it.

What I Hate About Your Programming Language

The first half of the article is kind of boring, but I thought the specific language issues were somewhat interesting. In particular, I was just thinking about the lack of namespaces in PHP last night, and how that's one of the big things that makes it (in my opinion) so unmaintainable in the long run.

Oh, and for the record, number one on my list of things I hate about C and its derivatives: Header files.

Instead of posting over the last couple of days, I've been working like mad towards realizing one of the major goals of LinkStew -- A living information network, which calculates relationships between entries based on a number of heuristics, in the hopes of presenting readers with links to entries directly relevant to the post that was just read. Think of it like Amazon.com's "Recomendations" feature -- "If you enjoyed reading this entry, you might also enjoy reading these other entries."

So far, only about 1/5 of all the entries in the Stew implement the feature, but almost all of them in the last couple of months work. To access The Stew, you just follow a link to a particular entry on the site (like this one or the ones in the corner of each post) and look at the list of titles following the entry.

Right now, the Stew isn't updated in real time, because I haven't yet worked in optimizations, forcing the system to work out the relationship between every node in the system. Also, it doesn't take into consideration a lot of the heuristics I plan to add in the future. For now, just take a look at the Stew and let me know if you have any suggestions or ideas, and I'll return to classifying more of my posts, hopefully making the Stew more accurate.

Today was another Saturday spent mostly at work, and yet, I'm really not very bitter about it. I had intended to go to the grocery store early this morning, but since it was raining, it's probably better that I slept through my alarms. I got to the office by about 3, and I started in on the code, along with another programmer who is now working on a project built on the engine I've written.

A lot of progress was made on things today, and it's a shame it got so late so fast, because I was really on a roll when I went home at 11 pm. In fact, when I got home I was in such a hacking mindset that I wanted to work on the new linkstew engine, but there's still no sense in doing that because my web host doesn't yet support xsl in php.

When I got home I played a few rounds of Mario Kart 64, in anticipation of the Game Boy Advance release this summer. It's reassuring that I still kick ass at Mario Kart after all these years, and was able to win the 150cc Special Cup on my first play of the game in six months.

Just a heads up -- the site may explode a little this weekend as my hosting service juggles servers. Hopefully this will be for the better and will result in a newer version of php with features that got lost last time the server I'm on crashed.

Here's an amusing satire about cracking down on the drug problem. For those of you who don't know, PHP is the computer/web page programming language which I use to create this site. Which is what makes the story so funny.

The content lives in a mySQL database, and I use PHP to retrieve the data and make the page. Any page you look at in here is all done using one web page, for now. Pretty cool, eh? I remember when I first started making web pages way back when, and I had no idea how to do something like that... Now, doing anything else strikes me as positively stupid.

If you do anything with forms, then this is a handy tidbit. This bit of info explains how to use an image as the submit graphic of a form in place of an ugly (on certain platforms) "Submit!" button.

I'm still in the process of porting things to php. It is happening, though, and I'm having a ton of fun doing it. I don't know why this is so satisfying, but it is.

Okay, the stress has now been taken off my bladder, so I can now sleep. Good thing, because I'm tired. Night folks,

First thing is that the Final Fantasy site I was considering making probably won't happen right now... The first reason is school is sucking my life away, and I have other projects I'm working on... And the second reason is another FF site appears to be doing something similiar to my idea. So I'll let them do it, and I'll find something else to do.

The second thing is in the back of my mind I'm toying with the idea of setting up a web site to track West Alumni. If it happens, you'll know about it. If it doesn't, you'll forget about it. That's how it goes. If you have suggestions, let me hear them!

And the most important thing to readers of this site, I think, is that this site is going to be undergoing HEAVY reconstruction in the near future. (The funny thing is, it'll look mostly the same when I'm finished... It'll just be much cooler on the back end, making my life even simpler.)

So the thing is, I discovered this thing called PHP, which is just about as slick as snot, and does all kinds of fancy things. So I'm reimplementing everything using PHP, which serves several purposes: First, it gives me a great big new bullet to put on my resume. Second, it allows me to do more things with the site. And Third, it'll allow me to change things even easier (as if it wasn't easy enough already) when I get the itch to do so.

The downside to all of this? Everything is going to break for awhile... The What's New and Random links may be broken for an extended period of time, even after the initial transformation is completed. I'll figure it out, though, and make sure it all returns to optimal levels.

And if there's anything you've ever wanted to suggest about the site, let me know!

So this is your fair warning. There won't be too many content updates in the near future, and things may be broken all over the place. I'm sorry, but it's for the better. I'll do my best to keep things navagable while I'm changing things.