Working on Components

2016-12-14

I got a wild hair and decided to start writing custom components for the blog. The first one turned out pretty good. I call it the "holiday randomizer" and it cycles various graphics at the top of the left column based on the time of year.

Yesterday I only had 5 pictures in the rotation. Today I spruced up the code a little and added another dozen for 17.

The next phase of the project involves the date logic so that the blog knows which holidays are immediately pending. This way I can simply add graphics to the corresponding folder for the holiday and have the blog customized for the time of the season.

I'm also thinking about database support but that remains somewhat remote at this juncture. The flat file approach seems to be working nicely but the streamlining a database would provide is also appealing.

I have a "this day in history" app I wrote way back when — around the first iteration of the blog some 10 years ago. I nabbed a copy of it and have started thinking about the rewrite I envision. I still have the database so I can port the existing data items.

The new web server configuration broke my contact forms. It seems that my use of some of the new internals forced a "localhost" originating IP for everyone who used them. I found this to be quite unsatisfactory in my mind and wrote a nice workaround. It's in place on all three forms.

I do like to know from where this wonderful hate mail originates when I get down and dirty on some sensitive topic. Some of the you really like to go off on me from time to time and I swear it's a hoot.

So, aside from the little remaining low level work I will be writing a few nice components and likely a few more custom hobby apps as well. It helps to occupy the time away from work which is really where I'd prefer to be.