I copied a new version of the site into the stable tree this evening. Here’s what’s new:
- PgSQL
- The entire site now resides on a PostgreSQL backend. Aside from giving me an excuse to learn about another DBMS, this change provides a true relational database that should make future additions like the comment system easier.
- Categories
- I haven’t implemented category-specific features on the frontend yet, but they’re there on the database. Eventually you should be able to filter content by category.
- No Dedicated News Section
- The news section is gone. It has been merged in with the regular blog entries and it will appear under a "Site" category or something similar.
- General Code Cleanup and Polish
- This is perhaps what delayed this update the longest. I’ve implemented many small changes and improvements as part of my continual learning process with PHP and Smarty.
Comments are next up, followed by a new layout. That’s the current game plan.
Tuesday brings new classes and new challenges:
- CS 4001
- There’s one unfortunate girl and a bunch of geeky guys talking mostly about privacy and IP concerns. Looks like lots of group-based assignments.
- JAPN 1002
- Well, Suzuki-sensei is young and semi-cute, but I thought Matsushima-sensei was cuter. I’m still kind of lost, though things started coming back when we started doing introductions.
- ECE 4006
- The professor (Schlag) seems to have no aesthetic sense at all. His PowerPoint slides were nothing but black Times text and carriage returns on a white background. I do at least have a vague idea of what I want to do for a project.
acpstudios.net has finally been transferred to Go Daddy as of late this evening. I played with the site colors some more, but I’m still not entirely sure what I’m looking for.
The site is in the middle of a major re-structuring to make way for a true development site and a more portable site in general. Old links will most likely break.
The RSS feed has moved completely to http://rss.acpstudios.net/.
The site image browsing capabilities are live. Now I can start the process of backfilling all my pictures from China. A dedicated pictures section with galleries is planned, but for now images will appear with blog entries only.
Progress on the site’s basic image browser functionality went well. (I’m about 95% of the way there.) I got past most of the stumbling blocks today. Images must be scaled to fit inside the DIV elements (otherwise, images extend beyond the boundaries of the DIV). Scaling the images in itself produced inconsistencies between browsers. The Mozilla and Safari browsers exhibited no apparent problems, but Internet Explorer failed to scale the image properly until the browser window was resized.
A severe thunderstorm rolled in abruptly in the late afternoon. A couple brief power failures put web development on hold until the evening. Mom was out running errands during the entire thing.
