Month: April 2002

Once More Into the Breach

John Winkelman

Er, hello… I am so grateful to see so many of you have braved the weather to be here tonight. I have put a lot of work into the latest round of my site. Amusing and informing the public is the noblest of causes. Or was that True Love? No matter…

Why did I rebuild my site? Pure, bone-deep laziness. The less work I have to do to maintain this theng, the better. So I learned a little XML, and little XSL, a little PHP, and a little Javascript, and viola ! All I need to worry about is the words.

And why the change from .com to .org? No good reason, really. This site is a past-time… a pursuit… a hobby. A place to collect my thoughts and inflict them on the viewing public. I am a professional at work. Here… I am Your Host.

(sound of crickets chirping)

Hello?

Pre-launch Blathering

John Winkelman

I built ECCESIGNUM using a combination of XML, XSL and PHP on the back end, and XHTML and CSS2 on the front. Thus I have a site which I can change completely by modifying two files: the XSL stylesheet and the CSS stylesheet. One for structure and one for presentation. The XML file contains all of the information necessary for markup and structure, so I could, in theory, have a choose-your-preferences panel which would allow the user to set up combinations of preferences which would make the site look completely different from one user to another.

So now I have to go through and re-create the rest of the site in XML. The largest of the files (the archives) went together smoothly, and the rest await inspiration.

We at BBK Studio have been busy enough that I can hardly bear the sight of code or mark-up at the end of the day. We are meeting handoff deadlines at the rate of about two a week, a feat not easily matched in the web development world.

So to take my mind off of computers I have been reading Son of the Morning Star by Evan Connell. I may post a review when I have finished grokking. I can tell you this, though: Custer was an extraordinary individual, with a temperament and sensibilities more in line with East European nobility than with the men he commanded.

Hunkering Down

John Winkelman

Me again. My life is still mad busy, and I am plugging away at the design for the new ECCESIGNUM, launching May 1, or thereabouts.

I got all I could out of the Memetics book. After the first six or so chapters it becomes Applied Memetics, which is less interesting to me than the concept of memetics. So I have set the book aside, just in time to dive into AI Game Programming Wisdom, which shipped today and should be here early next week. Yes, I want to program games.

Updates will (obviously) be infrequent until the relaunch.