Honeymonster's Lair

So, I’ve got the urge to write a story. I haven’t got any inspiration though, so post your comments below for ideas that I can write about. I thought about maybe a story with psychiatric overtones/undertones and any other type of tones, as that would be something that I “know”. (They always say to budding authors to “write what you know”.)
The problem with writing about psychiatric events is that you have to be very careful to leave the reader satisfied rather than just depressed and upset about what they have read. i.e. you can’t have the protagonist commit suicide at the end of the book, as that is a rather unsettling ending that no reader will in their right minds think as satisfactory.
Just had an interesting idea as I was writing this blog post: aim at the geek market and write a thriller about the shady world of open-source development and the possible underworld connections that it so obviously has. Worth pursuing maybe?

COMMENT PLEASE. I NEED IDEAS: characters, places, events, twists, etc. anything you can think of, really, including complete story ideas.

I’ve been looking for ages for a way of getting wordpress to work with Adobe’s flash technology, to create a more powerful and dynamic site. To this end I recently discovered htmlwrapper from Motion & Color. This unique project takes xhtml and renders it using the flash runtime. The advantage of this is that the whole world of flash is then open to the site owner allowing much more dynamic experiences. Interactivity is created using JSON-based function calls embedded in the site’s CSS stylesheets. The big bonus is that the content of each page is still visible and browsable by the search engine spiders, while still keeping everything rendered by flash. There are even features to arbitrarily draw random “sprites” such as stars/ovals/etc. without having to create (possibly large) images of each with transparencies where you need them.

Now for my news: My blog will eventually be ported across to the flash rendering engine, but more than that I’ve been accepted as a member of the project’s team. With some spare time on my hands this evening, I’ve been answering issues raised in the bug-tracker and fixing problems that I’ve discovered in the sourcecode.

I’ve been playing with the CSS layout code of my site, and have now made the display capable of complete screen resolution independence down to screens running at 640×480.

On another note I tried Qumana, my blog editor of choice, under ubuntu 9.04. However, it would seem that the application can’t spawn any new windows. This is rather essential, as the initial display doesn’t include any editing capabilities, requiring a new window to add or edit blog entries.

Tags: css, display, layout, blog editor, qumana

I thought I’d post a revelation I’ve had while designing my brother’s site (as was briefly mentioned in my previous post). HTML and CSS based designs are actually more versatile than I originally thought. I’ve long been aware that you can use `media=”print”` and `media=”screen”` to separate out differing CSS rules for print media. However, I didn’t know just how useful this can be..

Take links, for e.g: in print media a piece of blue underlined text is pretty useless, as you cannot determine where the link originally pointed, only that a link existed. However, with a small snippet of CSS wizardry, you can get the browser to insert the link’s URL after the textual content of the link itself.

a:link:after, a:visited:after {
content: " (" attr(href) ")";
font-size: 80%;
}

As you can see in the above snippet, I’m using the “content” attribute to specify that “ (<link URL>)” be inserted after (:after) the initial content of the <a> tag. I am also specifying that the text be 80% of the normal text size so that it is more obvious that the URL is not part of the original content.

The only problem with this, is that links will be printed verbatim, so any “rooted” URLs will just appear as “/internal/path/to/document.html” instead of “http://www.site-name.com/internal/pa…”. This can be solved with more advanced CSS in supported browsers with the following rule set:

a[href^="/"]:after {
content: " (http://www.site-name.com" attr(href) ")";
font-size: 80%;
}

This snippet takes all <a> tags that begin (^=) with “/” and insert “http://www.site-name.com” before the local URL to make it “canonical”.