2:54 PM:
It turns out that MT's databases are not contained on a central server, which means I'd have to maintain it myself. Without a shell account, it might be difficult, so it will probably have to wait until I host my site elsewhere.
(#)

4:27 PM:

to research:

Movable Type. I know at least one person who can provide actual info on it, but there's a few things I'm curious about myself. Namely, importing stuff into it, and the format requirements for said import (if it is, in fact, possible).

If the above is possible, I may be able to experiment with a livejournal "backup".

I also have to re-evaluate my daily schedule of work and study. I may have to reduce the number of actual study days for health reasons. (#)

4:34 AM:

minor discovery of a modus operandi.

My current task, this evening, is to take the content that I've decided will be on my homepage, and style it.

The method:
Have a sandwich.
Queue up a whole sh!tload of Pink Floyd, starting with the Wish You Were Here album and working from there.
Shut out the world.
Make sure it's the middle of the night, too.

The results, so far? At just over 40 minutes into the experiment, I have a sketchy, but working, understanding of a two-column stylesheet. It's a good start, and while I'm sure I'm glossing over a few things I'll want to understand in greater detail, I think I can work them into the "schedule". Seeing as how this task involves almost nothing but CSS, I won't be "done" with this phase of the development until I learn the last thing I need to complete the first version of the stylesheet. (#)

9:57 PM:

Also discovered (after finally deciding to stop thinking about it) that it is easier to shove a <div> into the template to handle stylesheet margins than it is to guess how Blogger creates its paragraph and line break tags.

"Regular" work hours are now mostly evenings, which means more late nights in the cave studying. Next topics to gloss over look like XML/XSL/etc, PHP (since my server supports it), and actual stylesheet code. (#)

7:49 PM:

(#)

While bored, discovered the help section on the permanent link. Looks pretty straightforward, and looks like a good foundation for a comment database... er, when I actually start looking at databases. (#)

1:23 AM:

And So It Begins

As much as I am now aching to update the browser on the 98 machine, I'm going to keep it around anyway... for now. As an exercise, I may attempt to build two versions of the same site - one supporting newer browsers, CSS, and W3C standards, and one for older browsers - and try to make them look as similar as possible. Again, just as an exercise. You never know what a client or company will need or prefer.

Time to start building the home page. I don't feel like I have much material left for it; hopefully I can make the most of it. (#)

5:57 PM:

To L337, or not to L337...

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of decrepit brows'rs...

Sometimes I forget that most of the articles I'm reading are not just factual, but opinionated based on fact. I have seen several good arguments, both for and against the support of certain web design procedures. By and large, I can see both sides of the arguments, because I have a fairly good idea of their target readerships.

Companies that want to reach the widest possible chunk of a market will sometimes (often) toss out proposed standards that are not supported in older browsers. (Of course, this worked best in the entertainment industry, when it mostly regarded accessibility as an afterthought.) All ethics aside, does it pay to keep those tricks under your belt in case of emergency?

Up until this point, I was working under the fallacy that one, or the other, would be the correct set of skills to learn. I forgot that things are never so clear-cut, especially when dealing with words like "art" or "design". And while it's not a bad idea for me to have a working knowledge of low-tech solutions, there's also no time like the present to learn about the future of the web. (#)

1:15 PM:

The Smell of Fear

Anything makes a good subject, as long as you take your time and crystallize the details, tying them together and actually telling a story, rather than offering a simple list of facts. Do readers really want to know how miserable you are? Yes. But they're going to want details, the precise odor of your room, why you haven't showered in a week, or how exactly somebody broke your heart. One-liners won't suffice. from ALA: How to Write a Better Weblog

I suppose this qualifies as a "design" post. It does, after all, have something to do with how you attract visitors to your site. And it follows the advice I read elsewhere: not just posting links, but at least providing some feedback or opinion on them, since there is generally a reason you want your readership to click on it. And the article references HiFi, so really, what's left? (#)

11:36 AM:

What I've Been Cramming Into My Brain

Slow mornings at work are great for catching up on reading that may or may not be important to me at the moment.

Accessibility is the theme of the morning here, just as it is the word that developers everywhere are already tired of. Flash accessibility (currently an oxymoron), a DVD subtitling, and the dreaded five-oh-eight, yech. While I can appreciate the need for accessibility in many forms of web publishing, it strikes me as odd that these rules have been in place for so long and nobody noticed, or cared, or whatever it is that they didn't do. 508 has taken confident web developers and software developers alike and made them dance around feverishly looking for a magical Compliance Button that will get the Feds off their back.

Having not studied any of the backstory of this at all (a disclaimer to those who will wonder what the hell I'm on), a lot of the 508 backlash seems random... granted, many of the arguments presented are valid, and granted, sometimes it feels like nothing meets accessibility guidelines, but when it comes to applications like Flash, something just doesn't seem right. Of course Flash wasn't made for accessibility. It's Flash. It's multimedia. And maybe that's why it's getting hit so hard now that the web community is experiencing their own mini-Y2K trying to get things up to spec.

I'm just having trouble seeing all the possible uses for Flash where accessibility is a must-have. I can't see Pulp Phantom employing it or anything, so I'm wondering if the 508 and I will ever really cross paths. (#)

11:48 AM:

Read Between the Whines

Oops! The button is right above the Post & Publish button.

Still others - tricky devils - have created platform and browser detection scripts to serve a variety of "appropriate" Style Sheets to specific user agents. For instance, serving one Style Sheet to an IE4/Mac user and another to a Navigator 4 user on Windows NT. This approach was always unpleasantly complicated and almost always added to the bandwidth requirements of each web page, but at least it used to work. It no longer works. Throw it away. -from A List Apart: Fear of Style Sheets 4

Good to know, I guess. I'm beginning to read these types of articles a little more carefully lately, though. On my last few short and uninspired forays into design, the above article (and any others like it) would have looked to me like this:

CSS level 1 and 2 standards, created by the W3C, contain numerous useful ways to make your web page consistent across all browsers. Unfortunately, nobody listens to them, so neither should you.

Nowadays I seem to be better at actually reading these articles, and the trick to CSS seems to be knowing which parts of it to ignore completely. And knowing is, after all, half the battle. (#)

1:24 AM:
How half-witted of me not to include Joc in the list of potential authors for the Advanced project. I'm sorry, hon!

She suggests a graphical Flash interface for it. While that would indeed be impressive, it's not supposed to be the focus of my learning, since I already know Flash pretty well, and it can circumvent the need for a database, as well as handling navigation and such. However, if it's written in screenplay format, and then adapted for Flash, perhaps I can still create a non-Flash version for the screenplay. There are numerous ways to accomplish both goals, of course, and it's just a matter of picking one.

If this idea gets big, I may want to create a small protected community site for it. (#)