• On Life and Love

    Tastee (del.icio.us) links! (June 12th)

    6/13/2009 /

    Links for June 12th from 06:33 to 09:47: Most used CSS tricks | StylizedWeb.com – Neat tricks here, and often cleaner than I tend to code them. xWisdomHTML.com – Handle PHP Dates beyond 2038 – In developing my WP plugin, I needed to be able to handle futuristic dates. This little class took care of that nicely, working up to 3000 CE.

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    Initial story management plugin done

    6/12/2009 /

    My initial pass at the story management plugin is in place. It doesn’t do the fancy things I want it to do yet, but it can note the root page of a series, output a list of stories in story-date order on that root page, note the arcs, and give Next/Previous links using the actual story names in the individual stories. Not bad for about 3 hours of work. Especially having to code around my elbows in WP. Interesting note: PHP stores timestamps as integers, which means that to get dates beyond the year 2038, I used this nifty little Date class. Dropped in like a charm, doesn’t seem to…

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    More on the story engine

    6/11/2009 /

    I started working up the story engine last night in Ruby. Greg suggested that XSLT would be perfect for it if I stored my stories as XML. Do a simple transformation, and voila, a story in XHTML with layout and everything. I was hoping I could knock it out in a single evening. Turns out Ruby and XSLT are two more separate critters than I thought — there’s no default library to handle it, and the three or so available are older and lack documentation. Better yet, the one easily available as a gem doesn’t use Ruby’s nice REXML, it uses LibXML. Combine all that with never having used XSLT…

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    Story engine

    6/10/2009 /

    I’ve always loved the simplicity and pleasantness of whatever must be under the hood of Elf’s stories — he seems to have easy management of story arcs, multiple sortings of stories, multiples sets of stories, next and previous buttons within stories, etc. I’m debating how I want to build my own little story engine. Right now, my stories are in WordPress, published as page. One avenue I could take would be to write a WordPress plugin to allow me to manage stories the way I want — keep them as pages, but add the fluff I want. Another avenue would be to roll my own — make a separate little…

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