--- date: "2001-10-10T14:14:00Z" title: The Apex of Page Updates ---

A lot has happened since I last updated my page: Brian (bma) and Karen (aphrael) got married! Brian's wedding cruise pictures are available here. Tom(giblet) and Sue (schmoo) were unable to join Brian and Karen's wedding cruise due to the post-WTC international flight mayhem, so they spent the week at my place instead. Tom posted pictures of the week and the reception here. Also at the reception: Beth (Sue's daughter;she's a great kid and funny as hell), Kevin (het), Nick (learath), Jimmy and Megan (Karen's non-Internet-enabled friends that we hang out with quite a bit), Megan's sister Jill, the man behind the curtain, Mr. Mej (mej, KainX) himself, Richard (richlowe) and Jon Anne (lilyj) were at the reception as well, and they're staying with Stephen (Snow-Man) and I for a little while as well. Lots of great Gimpable pictures of Richard in Tom's pictures. Not that I would ever encourage someone to modify a picture of Richard, or of anyone else for that matter.

I finally got around to purchasing a CDRW, and I've been burning CDs like mad. Somehow I managed to accumulate a couple DivX movies, so I burned those along with a CD of mp3s for work, a full backup of my home directory, and some other random junk.

Pablotron is semi-broken at the moment. Snow-Man upgraded PHP on the web server, and it seems to have broken some of my spaghetti PHP. I've been designing a new backend for another site, and I'll probably update it to support site themes and port Pablotron to the new backend. The new backend is much, much cleaner than the current Pablotron one; it makes extensive use of stylesheets, object oriented PHP, and standard configuration files (currently only CSV, but I plan on adding XML support in soon). Here's an example of the differences:

<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/header.php"); ?>
<html>
<head>
<title>Pablotron : Sample Page</title>
</head>

<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/doc/top.php"); ?>
<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/top.php"); ?>
<b>Sample Page</b>
<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/mid.php"); ?>
This is a sample page.
This is a <a href="http://www.sample.com/">sample url</a>
<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/bot.php"); ?>

<?php require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/ssi/doc/bot.php"); ?>
</html>

Under the new system, that page could be written as follows:

<?php
require("$DOCUMENT_ROOT/inc/header.php");

$page = new Page();
$page->start("samplePage", "Sample Page");

$page->start_item("Sample Page"); ?>
This is a sample page.
This is a <?php $page->url("sampleUrl", "sample url"); ?>
<?php $page->end_item();

$page->end();
?>

Obviously the latter allows us to do all sorts of crazy things that the former does not. Coupled with CSS, It also strengthens the distinction between Pablotron's content and the layout.

Some other random stuff; I whipped up a quick script to convert Yahoo! Finance stock quotes to the GKrellM FMonitor format, so you can view stocks in GKrellM. You can download it here. Well, there's a lot more going on, but I have to get some sleep, so I'll try and update again tomorrow.