Well, if I don’t have enough to do, I do make sure I keep myself busy.
Guess who forgot to go to sleep tonight and found himself still staring into the cosy glow of my computer screens at 8 a.m this morning. I’m probably one of those mutants that have forsaken the term sleeping.
Anyway, I got rid of my own hacked together blog scripts and replaced it with the robust Blogger engine. Well, my scripts did work quite well as a blog, but they never seemed to get finished, and I went back patching up stuff in them all the time when I discovered problems or bugs. What made the cup tip over was a few days ago when I noticed in my server logs that the MSN Search Robot had indexed a couple of 1000 pages from my site. Huhu. Several 1000 pages? Do I have that? Nah, but the robot had discovered a loop hole in my blog script and indexed about every date from 1997 up until 2025 or something like that. Where all pages reports “this date contains no entries.”. So that pushed me over the edge, and late yesterday evening I decided to start using my Blogger account instead. From the beginning I thought it would be quite a painless transition, but hey, you know how it is, nothing is painless!
The problems came when I was to tailor made the blog output to conform with the rest of the design of my site. So I spent the entire night learning about Strict XHTML coding, XML, RSS and Atom feeds and everything else related to the new web standards. Well, never hurt to know about it, so well, I guess it was well spent time in the end anyway. So sometime in the early morning hours I started to get happy and began transferring all my old data into the blogger database instead. And now it seems like everything finally works just fine.
The Blog is much prettier now, better organized, more functions and possibilities. And if you are using a modern web browser (ie, anything other than Microsoft’s aging Internet Explorer), you can add a live bookmark to this RSS feed presented at this page, to get the bookmark to update automagically when this blog is updated. Pretty nifty don’t you think?
I also programmed an ASP parser tonight for the Atom XML files, to feed the frontpage with blog entries as well, and it seems to work just fine as well. So the site might not visually have changed very much, but the backbone is so much better now. There is still some minor adjustments for me to do, but they are just cosmetically like font colors, positions and sizes. So I’ll finish that tonight.
I’ve pretty much fallen in love with all the functionality that Blogger offers and all customization it allows for. If you’re thinking of starting blogging, I definitely recommend to check it out.
That wraps up this post. Got a pretty productive night after all. And when I was messing with the site I also took the time to update some design flaws here and there in the coding, so now every single page should validate with 0 errors no matter if it’s a strict XHTML coded page or a loose HTML coded page through the World Wide Web Consortiums Validator, as well as their CSS validator. And that I’m pretty pleased with.
Oh and not to forget, tonight’s music choice;
Working Music: Anna Ternheim – Unreleased “Demo” Album
(Her wonderful music and voice helped me through the late hours)