Stardate 20021129.1725

(Ship's log): I made some internal changes today which shouldn't be visible to you. The side bars used to be handled as macros in CityDesk, so that they were stored in one place in the database. When I changed that it would propagate to all files. That also meant that it would upload all the files again, which isn't much of a problem across my 100 megabit LAN (taking maybe 20 seconds for about 1300 files totalling about 12 megabytes), but that did have the effect of updating all the file change dates on the server and making it look as if all of them had altered. Which, in a sense, they had – but not in any fashion anyone would be interested in.

So now the two sidebars are kept in files and included through Apache server-side includes. (After some googling I discovered that "include virtual" is a lot more useful than "include file". Wish I'd known about that a long time ago. Some time when I get ambitious – say, about the time the next ice age starts – I need to sit down and actually read the entire NCSA HTTP tutorial, and then read the entire Apache specification. And then study CSS and use it on this site.)

I also found this Fog Creek knowledgebase entry about creating an RSS file quite a while ago but I was afraid that the way I was using the macro would affect it. (I don't know for sure. Anyway, now it's moot.)

I can control what files CityDesk includes and doesn't include when it decides which ten entries to put in there, and right now I've got it set up to only show the permanent files for individual log entries. I'm deliberately not including any of the three versions of the main page.

Another thing I left out is the "description" field in each line of the file, because I'm not currently creating such a beast and don't really feel like doing so in future. (That's one of the many capabilities of CityDesk I haven't been taking advantage of. It's easy to do but I don't.) So what you'll see in the RSS file is the title of the log entry, which is the same thing that shows up in the archive listings, and which CityDesk uses to construct the permanent file name. However, I gather that the main point of it is just that it will signal changes. I've got it linked in the sidebar with a nifty button I stolefound on the web:

I gather you're also supposed to provide a site button, and I created a rather uninspired one which may be larger than it's supposed to be, since it's 100*20. I don't really have any idea what the norm here is, but it looks like this: (The CrackerJap button is 88*31: Is that the size I should aim for, like this? I think the other one looks better, quite frankly)

I've also recently added several entries to the "frequent questions" page as they've come up in mail I've received, such as "Why do you link to ABC so much?" and "Any comments about this Register article which slams CDMA?" (Short answer: "No.") If you haven't looked at it in a while you might want to give it a glance.