Website Archives

Friday afternoon saw an early finish to work and, with the sun shining, the need to exploit the situation and go out. Figured we'd go for a little trip to the beach.

Anyway, everything was going well. William loves water, so we took him for a paddle. And then came the big wave (relatively speaking anyway). I guess that's one of those lessons from the school of hard knocks. Not actually sure what the message is - “watch out for waves” or “the Pacific is bloody cold”.



It therefore seemed appropriate to create a page with the pictures. To see the rest of the pictures from the outing click William at the beach.

I've had this page up for a week or so, but haven't linked to it as hadn't really got enough stuff on it. It actually serves no purpose whatsoever which is what makes it so good. It really started as a test page where I was practicing javascript (as I'm not very good at it) and then morphed into a kind of lets see if we can make things change color and move around the screen.

I guess it's the page designed to make you go oooh and aaah. Basically, load the page up, click to show the panel and then click around on the options and see what happens. The fun starts when you put text on the screen. If you get the text rotating and then set to follow the mouse with the style apart, you can create some amusing effects. Well worth 10 minutes of anybody's time. Probably not more than 10 minutes as that would make you really sad.

So, the link is to the Ex-Perry-Mental page.

I will admit to looking at the works of many others in order to create this page. They all seem to want some notation in the code, but given that this was created from so many different pages and then completely hacked to bits, that wouldn't really make sense, so, here's the list of sites that I found pretty helpful:

Code Lifter
Dynamic Drive
Hypergurl
Javascript Source

Thanks

There be another quiz there be! To anyone following along with the challenge to take on the local bumpkins, another quiz has been added on the Bumpkin Quiz page.

If you've done the earlier quizzes, just filter on Quiz 3. As an added target, this week's winner was my old man and his team with 43 out of 63 (60 questions + bonus points). Proving that we really do know a lot about nothing in this family.

Maybe a risk, we'll see. We've created an Open Forum for blogs. The idea being that anyone who wants to create an article because they have something to write about can do. Hopefully this won't get abused by a bunch of drunken college kids, but we'll see.

The Open Forum blogs can be found by clicking the link on the Blog Bar to the left.

So if you're a casual visitor to this site and happen to have come across something interesting, we invite you to share it. There's also the ability to upload pictures if you have something that will add to the article or if the picture itself is funny.

Many thanks to the Software Feedback Drinking Comrade for coming up with this concept and sharing it with me. Anybody have any other ideas to improve the site, let me know.

Well, maybe we can't help you with that or even any other problem that you may be having, but we can help you find your favorite blog articles. We've created a search function that allows you to search. I'm sure Google are going to be making a bid for this site soon to try and buy out the algorithm we've created to perform sophisticated searches. OK, maybe not that sophisticated, but I have got it to highlight your search text in yellow in the results. Except that the search returns the first 200 characters of the article matching your search term, so it you search term appears after the first 200 characters there will be no highlighting going on :(

Said search function is conveniently located on the Blog Bar to the left.

Shouted the cigarette to the Rizla.

So, the biggest milestone this fourth of July was the completion of the sign up component for the website. One of the many projects that's been on the cards since the site started, the sign up form allows you to become a member of EastBayRag. I mean, how can you refuse? A site with this depth of content, why wouldn't you?

The sign up is simple enough, just register your email address and you will be included on the weekly distribution. The weekly distribution list gets an email on Monday morning highlighting all the additions to the site in the week and the weekly vote.

As hard as I find it to believe that people aren't glued to this site on a daily basis, I figured that some people may have better things to do and that a weekly summary may be quite useful. So the weekly email has each entry (linked to the article itself if you want to read more) and the first few words of the entry so you can see if it's something you are interested in.

If nothing else, I guess the parents and in-laws might find it useful. But you never know, there may be someone else out there.

This weekend saw a frantic amount of activity on the website design and the completion of two additional components.

First, the Bumpkin Quiz. Fancy pitting your wits against a bunch of drunken bumpkins. This page has quiz questions from a local village pub, so see if you can beat the village idiot. Actually, that's not difficult. Since moving to the US, the post of village idiot has been vacant, but you can still see if you can answer the questions.

Second, the weekly vote. Another frivolous creation to obtain feedback from anyone bored enough to click a few buttons and offer their opinion on a specified topic - the first being Independence Day. The reward for this is watching a pie chart and bar graph dynamically update according to the votes that have been cast. Oooooh!!

It appears that the technology I have designed to update blog entries works from my PDA. What does this mean?

Well, if I'm stuck in a meeting that's boring I can sit at the back of the room and look busy whilst really posting articles to my website.

Let's say, for example, you get stuck in a vendor demo that you have no interest in.

The graffiti wall now allows you to preview your message before it is posted. You now have the option to accept it, regenerate it (recreate the message with a different font/color - these are assigned randomly) or delete it.

Note that once submitted, they still can't be deleted.

Over on the Fun Stuff side of this website a Graffiti Wall has been created. This allows you the ability to enter things (jokes, limericks, anything really) and have them displayed on a wall. Like .... well .... graffiti really, hence the name.