Reading Jaz's journal

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.

'Yeah, That's what Jesus would do. Jesus would bomb Afghanistan. Yeah.' - snowlion