http://maureenjohnson.blogspot.com/2009/03/blog-every-day-april.html

^ from the blog of my favourite female author, a challenge to write something to your own blog for every day in the month of April. When thinking about taking up the challenge, I looked at the number of times I have posted to this site over the past years. If I do this, I will have written more stuff in a month than I have in any previous year. Yikes.

Some people need something to do. I'm not one of those people - in fact, I'd likely be happier with less to do - but my gut was telling me to do it, and my gut has been pretty good to me over the years.

So April 1, here I come. Unless the Conficker virus screws-up the Internet first.

More site updates:

• JavaScript effects are now in place
• Twitter feed is now displayed to your right...

...or so it should be if you're using Firefox.

I've recently installed the Google Chrome browser to see how my site fares using it (and because of some 'OMG Google Chrome pwns' rants from my brother), and let's just say that the site experience isn't exactly great in it:

• background images at times were missing
• PNGs with CSS opacity don't display correctly (this is a known bug with Chrome)
• and Scriptaculous - the JavaScript library I'm using for the effects - either runs slow or not at all

Although if one of my earlier posts is anything to go by, cross-browser compatibility isn't my greatest concern at the moment. I'm really just having fun messing-around with all this new stuff!

Some minor site updates:

• splash page removed for now, tracker moved to main layout
• CSS fixed up on some buggy pages (but still not IE tested)

My hosting service does provide me web statistics, so I really should get rid of that old site counter, but I noticed that the hosting service stats don't include URL query strings - the stuff after the ? character in a URL. Since my site is kind of built around the query string, this kind of skews the stats and doesn't give me a very good picture. It's been on the To-Do list for a while to get rid of ?-based URLs on this site, 2 reasons:

• having URLs like artwork/name_of_artwork seem to be more the norm around the internet
• URLs like that are more SEO-friendly

And we all like being SEO-friendly so that Google and the like can put us at the top of everybody's search results ;)

In other news, the last couple of weeks have seen some Red Horizon related queries *gasp* Yes, that's right, stuff has happened on the old Red Horizon front, but not programming progress I'm afraid.

Firstly, Nyerguds (Google his name, it'll come up in a lot of C&C circles) asked for the latest Red Horizon: Utilities stuff so he could refer another C&C modder to it - YAY, people are using my stuff!

Secondly, rm5248 (another C&C fan who frequented the now-defunct CNCTechCenter site where I used to put the development thread of this project) asked to take a look at the code to see if he could do something with it. The idea that I'm losing a tiny bit of ownership on my code did make me hesitate in his request, but it's not like the code was doing anything better sitting on my computer and not going anywhere. I will continue the project, but with the way things are with me now, not anytime soon. So I gave him the code in its current state - which is to say error-ridden and doesn't compile - and I wish him luck in whatever he wants to do with it.

So I've finally finished the site redesign... almost. What you see now is a fully-functional version of what the final product is supposed to look like... provided your browser renders it a lot like what Firefox 3 does. Yeah, I haven't even tested it in IE yet.

Over the next couple of weeks I'll be adding the fancier features like showing display items (like artwork, stories, etc) as overlays instead of going to a whole new page which had the potential downside of losing navigation. I might also have to change the splash page to match the new look - or get rid of it altogether.