freecog.net

Updates for 2006

December 31, 2006

Version 4 of LPLFixup has been released.  This release includes several new features as well as a bugfix or two.

December 17, 2006

New user scripts!  Amazon Large Images increases the size of product images on Amazon.com.  Terror Island Enhancer and xkcd Enhancer show the title text under their respective comics.  I should also mention NoveList Link Fixer (which does more than fix links), which transforms evil JavaScript links into real ones, and LPLFixup, which makes the La Crosse Public Library's online card catalog much less annoying to use.  Both have been around for a while; I just forgot to mention them on this page.

Two old scripts, TitanTV Zeus and ABC Family Flash Fix have been marked as obsolete due to changes in their target sites.

October 8, 2006

I've improved the Sudoku board generator a bit; it fits in better with the new layout now.

September 10, 2006

I’ve fixed a bug in Syntax Highlighter (I have got to come up with a better name for it....) that prevented line numbers from getting padded so that they align right.  More importantly, I have added preliminary support for highlighting PBASIC source code (used by the BASIC Stamp microcontroller).  I’m working on another project involving this controller, hence the additon.

August 22, 2006

All right, I’ve got the new design up.  It still has some rough edges, so I’ll be working to refine it for a while yet.  Next up, some work to clean up the site’s JavaScript.

August 20, 2006

You may notice that some strange things are happening around the site at the moment, e.g. funny text sizes and the book page being down.  This is because I’m preparing for a move to a new theme (and a new system, for the books page).  Doing so requires some rewriting of the HTML code shared between pages because of its esoteric nature (fixed positioning in IE: eeegh)—hence the disturbances.  There’s a partial demo here—this page is highlighting an aspect of an IE bug that I uncovered while working on it.

August 18, 2006

The contact form is down following a sudden downgrade from Python 2.4 to 2.2.3 on the server I’m on at ASO.  I’ve filed a ticket, so hopefully the issue will be corrected soon.

Update:  It turns out that 2.4 is still available at /usr/bin/python2.4.  Apparently 2.2 is necessary for other stuff on the server.  Getting a conclusive reply from ASO took only a bit more than an hour.  Great service! I've also fixed the issue with server-side validation rejecting capitalized e-mail addresses with re.IGNORECASE.

July 9, 2006

I’ve rewritten the script to not trigger Firefox’s "stop this script" dialog.  It's also much smaller, (partly due to the use of Dean Edwards’ Base class) though it introduces dependencies on Base and MochiKit.Async.

May 15, 2006

I’ve added a simple script to produce better-looking directory listings for bare directories (like the year directories, /2004/, /2005/, and /2006/ so far).

May 13, 2006

Apparently Internet Explorer has a bug that causes problems with gzipped files.  This probably explains some of the strange, unexplainable errors that I have been getting in that browser.  So I have disabled the gzipping of JavaScript files for IE.  Things may load a bit slower for IE users, but should stay the same for those using other browsers.

April 24, 2006

I’ve written a basic syntax highlighter script for JavaScript in JavaScript.  It’s primary feature is that it only used DOM methods, and so preserves existing markup in the code—mostly, at least.  Unfortunately, DOM methods mean slow performance for large files (such as the script itself).  I’m still dealing with these issues.

I’ve updated my JavaScript crushing/gzipping script to accept a new argument, ?pretty, which produces an HTML page that uses my script to do highlighting.  This can be seen at the link to the highlighting script, above.

Several weeks ago I added a script that spits out the content on this page as an RSS 2 feed.  The script now assignes GUID’s (permalinks, really) to all of the items, so I’m ready to release it into the wild.  The site now has autodiscovery <link>s, so it should be easy to add the feed to your RSS reader.  I’ll try to provide more granular updates in the future, instead of lumping together everything like I currently do to make this feed more useful.

The books page has also had a minor update.

I’ve put up a page listing the organization of Robin’s (hypothetical) cult.

April 11, 2006

I have added a documentation page for my Fader script.

There is also a new feature behind the scenes:  I have added a Python script that minifies and gzips all of the JavaScript on the site—this should help keep things responsive as my scripts inevitably balloon in size.

I’ve also added some new eye candy above:  the “Free Cog” text now fades on mouseover and focus.  The script moving the clouds has aslo been rewritten.  They should move more smoothly now, even when things are fading.

March 26, 2006

Okay, the technical problems of the last couple of weeks have been resolved. It turns out that my FTP program (SmartFTP) wasn't converting CRLF line endings to Unix LF's, which prevented scripts from running.  Some JavaScript issues related to Apache content negotiation and gzip have been fixed by removing the gzipped versions of scripts.

March 12, 2006

I have finally completed redoing the template system for the site. PHP has been replaced with much more legible Python, the directories have been reorganized, and numerous small JavaScript problems fixed.

January 16, 2006

I’ve added a new section to this site: books. This page contains a list of books that I’ve recently read, am currently reading, or will hopefully read in the future. The about page has also been removed, pending some major updates.

January 15, 2006

There have been a number of minor changes, including some stylesheet updates (now the navigation links look tabbish), the addition of the clouds above, and the full rewrite of the form validation script attatched to the contact page. I’m working on a larger update, hopefully to include an easier way for me to add pages—right now, I don’t update much because it’s more trouble than it should be.