Jaz's journal

The new site is progressing very well and I'm having a blast with my new found love of Perl. Object orientated programming with Perl is not for the faint hearted, but once you get into the rythm it's total ownage. I can hardly believe that I'm actually churning out clean, safe and pretty code in Perl.

The design has completely changed since my last journal entry. It's white! It's an exercise in elegance and understatement. I'm very satisfied with it.

So far it is possible register, login, logout and display a list of all sections (forums). Also there's a pretty cool plugin system already in place which lets users select the info boxes they would like to be displayed on the sidebar. Like everything else, it's pretty clean and extensible.

I would probably be farther if I had chosen the Path of the Hack because I'm now spending a lot of time building tools and working on the framework. But with every tool that gets finished I'm picking up more speed, and I'm already saving a lot of time by not having to spend so much time hunting down bugs.

That's all for tonight.

Bouncing back and forth between programming the framework and doing design drafts on paper for the new Netalive.org, I cannot help but feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of me.

First, I'm beginning to realize how much effort into creating the site in the first place. I have been stacking up layer upon layer of new ideas and changes for years and I can't just do it again in a single week.

So I've decided to put aside all the "would be nice if" features for now and concentrate on the stuff that really matters. One can always put more icing on the cake once it's out of the oven.

Second, the new ideas I'm having are turning out to be a real pain in the ass to implement the right way.

You must know that it's not particularely difficult to write web applications. A well-trained monkey could come up with some kind of message board software in a day (of course providing a sufficient pay of banana plants). However, creating a web application with an uncluttered interface that is easy to use and has pretty looks, well that's where it really shows what you're capable of.

I'm still not sure whether I'll be be able to beat the monkey.

There will be a time when loud-mouthed, incompetent people seem to be getting the best of you. When that happens, you only have to be patient and wait for them to self destruct. It never fails.

- Author unknown

• You cannot simply slap the "community" label onto something and wait for your vague idea of "community" to appear out of nowhere.

• You cannot force feed community to people who are not in the least interested in each other.

• A concept that looks like a business plan of a new economy startup will also work out like one.

I want to try out something new by keeping a journal about the process of rewriting Netalive.org from ground up. Let's see if it works out.

After spending many hours figuring out the weirdness of object orientated programming in Perl, I set up a raw framework for the site's engine, which shall answer by the name of Triskweline. Everything is stuffed into neat packages - I'm not sure if I could ever go back to the chaos style of programming I have done for the past six years.

I wanted a more powerful template system for the rewrite, so I first tinkered with the Perl Template Toolkit which is used by many prominent engines, such as Slashcode. However, the Template Toolkit is quite a heavyweight. Merely including the libraries quadrupled the compilation time of my neat framework. No way. I'm now using Text::Template, which is a lightweight, no-nonsense approach to doing the same thing and I'm quite happy with it.

So, basically, all that Triskweline does right now is printing out a "Hello World" template, but, hell does it this in a structured way :)

Visual design issues are keeping me away from the real programming. I know I could postpone that to later, but somehow I cannot look away when I see something ugly.

I've been experimenting with font sizes a lot. I intended to have a much larger default font with the new site, but everything above 11px looks really bad on a black background. I've tried out using a white background (Netalive in white! Heresy!) but it didn't look a lot like Netalive style. Also I really dig how the header panorama blends with the black color of the site.

So it's probably small font sizes as today, font size switcher as today, and a black background as today. Something that actually might change is the width of the pages. Right now, the display area is only 750 pixels wide. I'm experimenting with allowing the site to use the full width of the screen. Let's see how usable this turns out to be.

I did something bad. Little harm was done, but yet it was a bad thing to do.

Although some actual evidence helped me talk myself into it, I shouldn't have done it. Ends shouldn't justify the means for me, ever.

Sorry for this short and uncohesive post out of context. I don't want to talk about it, just have it written it down somewhere.