You probably know that it’s my hobby and as of now my only income source to make websites. While doing so, i often meet problems that are complicated to solve, not because of their complexity, but because i have to optimise for all the browsers i can: FireFox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Netscape, just to name those i can test with. Having a couple of versions for each (especially IE is problematic), that’s at least four browsers to optimise to, and that already makes the creation of a relatively simple floated layout a nightmare.

But what was even more troubling for me is the usage of JavaScript. I know there are loads of possibilities in it (think of the dynamically created websites, the reload-less page loads and such), but i also know there are people, even if just a few, who browse without JS—not to mention that search engine crawlers don’t have JS either (nor do spam bots), which is useful to know when you’re protecting your forms from spam, but troublesome when you need to develop a website for the top of the search engine result list and for the everyday “lame” users.

Speechless. A bit hard to start writing a post, when i sit down in front of the keyboard, and look at the screen, and nothing comes across my mind. Some ancient and funny Pendulum-remix doom-dooms its way out of the speakers, and after a nine mile bikeride i’m “caught somewhere in time”. I’ve done a layout, that’s probably the future skin of all valerauko.net sites (most of which is not yet present, or not in the form they will be). It may end up an open-source content management system, since that’s exactly what i need. A small and powerful back-end, which can be converted virtually into anything using modules and plugins. This idea just popped out of my mind, but i think i could integrate my current blog plans into this script. Based PHP and MySQL, it’s going to be simple (as simple as could be), customisable (absolutely), powerful and fast (i hope). It’s not going to come out fast, i’m afraid… My summer is a bit stuffed already. I think i’ll only have free time in the end of August, i mean free time more than a day. I like it if i know what’s going to happen around me, but i don’t like it if i have no freedom, because everything’s planned, and each day has something to do. The next: math exam, monday.

The thing is, i still haven’t started learning for my exams, though they are nearing scary. I’ll have to start with the grammar questions, then come math… Math is the closest, ninth of june. The others are the end of june, but i just borrowed the grammar ones, that’s why it has priority. Tomorrow in the morning and in the early afternoon i’ll be working on my current job, a website for a textile merchant, which will be completed in the matter of days, then come the registration process, which takes a while in hungary—at least it took a while when i first registered valerauko.net at a local registrar. After that i’ll be reading, i still have about a hundred pages from the book i’m into nowadays, i want to finish it. Later i plan to start copying the grammar questions (that’d be enough for a first turn of learning), then complete the new version of the past vDesign, which is everything but up to date and good-looking. It was quite a while since i did that one, and it was only in a few days that i realised that the top banner at Athina’s blog is made using the same pattern. The very same. I’m proud (joking). By the way, the new version will be very trendy web2.0 style, but i tried to make it a bit original. And from now on, i’ll be paying close attention to my projects, so they’ll look good on my reference page. Yeah. Business is getting more speed.

Remember the great Iron Maiden song Hooks in you (from their No prayer for the dying album)? Though it’s indeed a significant piece of metal history in itself, i’m not going to write about it now (there’s a lot behind those links anyway). If not that, then what kind of hooks? I just realised today that using the same method for plugins as WordPress, hooks (or event triggers) to be exact, is not that much of a bad idea. It’s the fastest way i think. Even if i’m doing OOP, and they’re just partly that. I’ll have the core objects (database, posts, output, and one with everything else such as string modifiers, date and time, and basic authentication — and most importantly plugin management — since it’s so “huge”, i’m thinking about splitting it up or putting most of its stuff into modules or plugins) and the dynamically loaded plugin library. Here and there in the code, there’ll be trigger points, where i trigger a registered event (if it’s unregistered, a notice level error will occur), the plugin handler checks which plugins’ which functions are registered for that event, and executes them. It gave me a minute’s trouble to figure out how to pass variables, because they need to be passed by reference. But there are cases, when no parameter’s required, and then it’d raise an error, because parameters passed by reference cannot be left empty. I think. ‘Tis so fun, i finally get it on the way. This part i really enjoy.

I’m getting very trendy, so i’m taking part in this CSS Naked Day craze. This means that for this one day, no design will be applied to the blog at all (i’m way too lazy to edit all the other pages too). What’s the fun in that? Very good question. Claimed to call the attention of the designers, the admins and in general everyone to the impotance of semantic, valid markup, well designed code-hierarchy, which are very important in case someone’s using a visually less capable browser (eg. from a mobile phone, or uses lynx or one of it’s relatives, or by chance an aural browser).

Challange: write the shortest code to display the Fibonacci numbers up to 5000.

I’ve made a code that displays them, though the pairs (1-1, 2-3, 5-8) are all backwards (1-1, 3-2, 8-5). I don’t know how to solve it (it’s 55 byte by the way).