Wikipedia resolved my confusion regarding the correct usage of the em dash and the ellipsis (including HTML entities!).
Mom also showed me a good book by Patricia T. O’Conner entitled Woe Is I. It’s a thorough grammar handbook covering everything from word usage (oral vs. verbal) to punctuation (what to include inside quotation marks). I was interested because I’ve started preparing my database for the move to XHTML and TextWiki and this will be a good opportunity to fix problems.
Titus introduced me to a couple cool PHP libraries: Smarty and Text_Wiki. Smarty is a templating engine designed to completely separate the presentation layer (i.e. HTML) and the application layer (i.e. PHP code). Text_Wiki is a PHP library capable of transforming text in Wiki format to valid XHTML. I messed around a little with both but had neither working at the end of the day. I don’t have full access to my hosting so installation could require special considerations.
I also tried to do a little 3042 homework but didn’t really finish that either. Where does the day go?
I added an RSS feed to the site at http://rss.acpstudios.net/. RSS is a spin-off of XML designed for web content syndication, which makes RSS ideal for news and weblogs. This site is primarily a vehicle for my blogging so in a sense the addition was inevitable. A little friendly competition from Titus also helped to motivate the process. To take full advantage of RSS you must have an RSS aggregator, otherwise you will just see an unformatted XML file. I use the freeware NetNewsWire Lite for Mac OS X.
Edit: RSS link removed
I feel old all of a sudden. I did some investigation into the issue of whether two spaces or one space should be inserted after a period at the end of the sentence. I have always been taught that the former approach was correct and this site has reflected that; but, it seems the times have changed. I read a thorough report on the subject, which would indicate overwhelming support for the usage of only one space. The report establishes that the two space approach was a relic of the typewriter days; a hack, if you will, to improve readability. You can still see the effects of using two spaces when dealing with monospaced fonts. They make some valid points for the usage of a single space and I have updated this page accordingly.
In the morning and early afternoon I made final preparations for statistics before heading out to take the exam. The problems were daunting at first, but I struggled through it and came out feeling cautiously optimistic. After the test I went to the third floor ECE labs in the CoC to work on my VLSI project. I only worked for about an hour but I took care of some minor design changes and general housekeeping so it was time well spent. The next deadline for the VLSI project is now less than two weeks away, which has me somewhat worried.
Having all but ran out of food stores, I begrudgingly made a trip to Publix in the evening. I grabbed a tuna melt from Blimpie on the way home for dinner. Titus and I finished the D.N.Angel series. The ending was good and typical of the series with only a few small surprises. Looking back, it’s a very enjoyable series with a little action, light humor, and a cute romance at its heart. Highly recommended.
I went through the CSS yet again and changed all the font-size attributes to use em’s for relative sizing as described in the Sane CSS Typography tutorial. This technique should yield consistent sizing across most browsers. It’s also easier to manage as a designer than using the smaller/larger inheritance model.
The front page post info text has also been fixed in IE browsers. The absolute text positioning properties were removed. This also fixes a case where the post info could overlap with the subject text if the browser window was too small.
In addition, all pages should now validate without error for HTML 4.01 Strict. Visitors can use the links to the appropriate validators at right to validate the current page at any time.
