I fixed a small bug in the code for leaving comments.

I am pleased to have finally made some significant improvements to my professional website.  There were some things that I had wanted to work on for a while, but have just now gotten around to.  The main improvements have been with some images which I have edited to look cleaner, and with the general organization of the site.

I've made a small security update to the comment form per gRegor's suggestion.  As usual, let me know if you experience any issues with it.

I just passed having posted 2000 blog/journal entries!  (I think this is 2002.)  I've been blogging for around six years now.

Anyway, fyi, I've updated a couple of things on my site.  The first is that I've added some code related to the leaving of comments, in order to filter out some odd blank comments I've been getting.  This shouldn't affect your ability to leave comments, but as always, let me know if there are any problems.

Secondly, gRegor pointed out a problem that I had in my RSS feed.  When I don't have a title for a post, I am using the date.  The date/time field in MySQL isn't very pretty, so a month ago I worked on the formatting, so that it would display nicer.  However I somehow or another accidentally put this in the wrong place, using the wrong field.  It seems like I must have checked it out and thought that I had it right, but I don't remember now.  Anyway, what was happening is that if the post had a title, I was trying to turn it into a date, which didn't work too well.  This should be fixed now too, but as always, let me know if there are any problems.

Fyi: in case you used the former IHOP at 16th and Meridian as a landmark (you know, the building with the odd steep blue roof), it was torn down today.

Yeah, I know, I'm making a lot of updates here.  I just made another one which allows for text wrapping in the menu to the left.

I've updated the way posts are displayed slightly.  There's shouldn't be a noticeable difference, but as always, let me know if you encounter problems.  Read on for the boring details.

Essentially the issue is in converting text to HTML.  I enter posts as plain text, though I allow HTML.  To make the posts display correctly (without going to the inconvenience of manually putting paragraph tags into all my posts), I convert new lines to break tags.  This works fine except for when I try to use tags which don't display inline by default.  For example with block-level elements, the spacing is out of whack because it's rendering break tags and the spacing for block elements.  I messed around with some string replacement, but there were always scenarios where it didn't quite work right.  Then it occurred to me that I might be able to doing something on the CSS side.  I had been enclosing posts in a paragraph, in order to get the automatic spacing at the end.  However when block-level tags came up, it would essentially end the paragraph, without restarting it afterwards.  If div tags are used, the div isn't broken when another block-level element is found, rather they are rendered inside the div, which is how I really wanted it to work.  So, I switched to using div, and set the vertical margins to be the same as a default paragraph.  I then made all block-level elements display as inline-block, with no vertical margins.  I began going through all of my posts to check and make sure this would work well.  I discovered that I wanted to make another change.  I set all break tags which are direct descendants of list or pre tags to a display type of none.

Fyi, I've switched to using Google Reader.  If you would like to see my "shares", I believe I need to add you to my list (or maybe you must add me to yours).  So, just let me know if you want to be added.  Also, I'd like to see what you are sharing, if you use Google Reader too.  I'm a little unsure how to do this though, I believe that you have to add me, or accept my request.

Since I was doing some design work anyway, I decided that I would try and "fix" the way I was doing layout on my site (in other words, quit doing it in a stupid ineffective way).  I thought this would be relatively simple, but alas that wasn't the case.  A full day later, I finally have finished the updates, and I think everything is working beautifully.  This has been my largest update since I created the site two years ago, and it feels good to have accomplished something and have positive results.

During the frustrating process of trying to figure out how to actually do things, I was asking why it is that CSS positioning has to be so difficult.  It does run by a set of rules, however they aren't always intuitive to me, and it's not uncommon to wonder why things are acting the way they are.  There's nothing else I've spent more time in a trial and error sort of fashion trying to figure out a way to make things work. 

My main problem in this case was that I was thinking of certain positioning properties as taking a coordinate based on a fixed zero point, the upper left hand corner.  I was wanting to create boxes that filled the entire width or height of the screen, whatever size it happened to be.  This proved quite difficult to do, because I thought I needed to know the actual height and width of the display area.  After doing some studying, I realized/remembered that the right and bottom properties are actually measured from the right and bottom of the containing box respectively. 

Once I figured that out, it just took a little while to implement and sort out the mess I had.  While I was working on this anyway, I generally cleaned up my style sheets and the way I was doing things.  I also figured out a way to add a bit of padding to the bottom of pages.  As always, let me know if you encounter any problems.

Links page has been updated.