This site hasn’t been very active recently, but I figured I could revitalize it a bit with a story of why I haven’t been making blog posts: for one thing, I’m preparing to spend a week and a half at the CTEQ summer school in Madison. I’m also involved in preparing a paper for publication (wooo getting published), which has involved a fair amount of proofreading and checking references.

There have been a couple of neat Mythbusters episodes recently which I would have loved to write about, including the one about surviving an underwater explosion. Unfortunately I don’t know enough about fluid dynamics and shockwave physics to say anything useful about it. (That may need to change) I’m also working on something about the older episode where they tested alternative solutions to a flat tire; there’s some interesting physics there, but the details haven’t been coming together as easily as I would have hoped.

And to top it off, I’ve been investing time in some other hobbies… which I should probably start writing about. So maybe that will provide some material to get this blog going again.

In the meantime, here …

jQuery, the Javascript framework, is like the ecstasy of web development: everybody’s doin’ it these days. (Well actually ecstasy was big in the 80’s, but a few months is like 25 in internet years. Just go with it.) When no two browsers seem to implement Javascript the same way, a framework is practically a necessity. But for a long time I held out and insisted on writing my own Javascript.

Why? Well, for starters, most of this site didn’t even use much Javascript, and the parts that did were only really important to one person: me. I used Konqueror as my main web browser, and its admittedly crappy JS support didn’t handle frameworks like jQuery correctly, so if I wanted the pages to work for myself, I had to write my own scripts. Besides, I wanted to support W3C standards. A simple way to do that is just to write code that conforms to the standard — at least, as well as anyone can tell what it means — so if you came to my site with a non-standard-compliant browser (*cough* IE *cough*) and it didn’t work, tough. Maybe it’d convince someone to use a better …

Since the beginning of version control, people have been using VCSs to manage websites. It works pretty well, because the process of web development is similar to the process of programming. Heck, with the advent of dynamic websites these days, often half of web development is programming. But web developers have one peculiar requirement that most other programmers do not: they have to maintain one particular copy of the site which gets continuously updated, but not always with the latest changes.

Typically, when you set up a version control system to handle your website, it works like this: you have a working copy on your computer, a repository on your server, and another “live” working copy on the web server which is the actual website content. Whenever you want to update the website, you push (or commit) changes from your computer to the repository, and have a hook script set up that makes the VCS update the live working copy with the latest changes. That’s the approach I found described in a couple of websites: http://danielmiessler.com/blog/using-git-to-maintain-your-website and http://toroid.org/ams/git-website-howto.

But once your site turns into a moderately complicated system, this doesn’t …

Regular visitors (yeah right, as if I have any) may have noticed that I've updated the site with a new, or at least pseudo-new theme. This grew out of an effort to procrastinate doing real work: I was bored with both the physics problems I was supposed to be working on and the endless Python coding and sysadmin-type-stuff that this web server is needing to become truly production-ready, whatever that means. (Warning: the rest of this is quite possibly boring, I'm mostly writing to test out the new features and so that I can remember what I did)

So I pulled up Inkscape and the GIMP and went to work creating new images. Most notably, I've gotten rid of that ugly blue/green aura that used to surround the blog posts and replaced it with a clean blue and gold border with pure white on the inside. And in order to make that contrast with the page background, I've got a papery texture created with the GIMP's airbrush tool (that, by the way, was all too easy).

Also, in the way of changes to the CSS, some of the blog post details have been reduced to a smaller font size …