LostCarPark's Journal

Still have no Broadband, so this will be fairly brief as I can't be bothered going offline to type it and reconnecting to post it.

I've been doing quite a lot of web stuff lately. I'm working to update my websites, though there isn't really any visible change yet. One thing I'm trying to fix is the different versions of similar scripts that have propagated over various websites over the years. There have been small changes to provide a specific feature for a particular website, so that I have places where the same script might have five slightly altered versions on different websites. So I'm trying to pull them all together and produce one script that services all of the sites, correctly implementing the features each site needs. At the same time, I'm trying to tidy up some very old code, and take out old styles that are no longer considered good practice. This will allow me to turn on some security and performance settings on my new server, and ensure all the code is up to a good standard.

I've also been working on several bits web things different people have asked me to do, which are also proving good fun, but somewhat time consuming. Hopefully I can find enough time to keep them all happy while still having a bit to work on the stuff mentioned above. I'm working on a system that makes it fairly easy for the website owner to edit much of the content themselves, which should cut down considerably on the amount of time I have to spend doing it.

There's a lot on at work too. Mostly good stuff. The last while, I've been doing quite a bit of work on optimisation of some of our systems. It's fun taking a process that takes almost an hour to run and reworking it so that it completes in under a minute.

In other news, I took some time out today to go bowling with Angie and Jack and the two Austrian students who've been staying with us for the week. I'm not particularly good at bowling, though I did manage to get a strike (though this was more than offset by the balls that went in the gutter).

Gosh, four days into the National Novel Writing Month, and I'm just about keeping my head above in terms of word count.

If I could keep from getting distracted, it would help a lot. I spent a lot of this evening working on a web system which might eventually become profitable, but in the shorter term should make it a lot easier to manage all (or at least most) of my web sites. Early days yet, but initial results look promising.

The first chapter (I hope) is nearly finished. I'm still plan to stay up and write a bit more and maybe get the chapter finished. I think this chapter was one of the more difficult ones for me to write, as there's a lot of personal stuff in there, and not much of the SF stuff that will dominate the later chapters. Hopefully once I get past this, it should get a bit easier to write, and hopefully I can catch up a bit.