I’m not done, but this is a good place to stop for now and I can’t spare any more time,  so let’s focus on the good things rather than the remnants of the old look, like the ugly navigation box and the dated look for the randomizer’s tab box.

Here are the highlights of the new look:

• Both the randomizer and the VFFA look pretty good now. (I may still change the color scheme, but it’s acceptable now)
• Fluid layout tested all the way down to portrait-mode cellphones. (Developed on desktop development builds of Fennec and tested by a friend on his iPhone. One minor known bug still to be fixed.)
• Print stylesheets (especially useful for the quote randomizer but I’m surprised how many workarounds the VFFA needed for Chrome print renderer bugs)
• Tested with Fangs and tuned to work well with screen readers (I’m still a novice here, so I’m sure there’s more to be done)
• Information on how to help the site is now clearly marked and includes a “fics wanted” list (that I’m still disentangling from the other VFFA TODOs).
• Clear indicator icons for what will download rather than open in the browser.
• Lemons are clearly marked and will ask for confirmation before opening.
• Last updated dates for quotes and last checked dates for external links are now pretty-printed as relative intervals  if Javascript is enabled. (eg. 2 Months Ago)
• Fandom information has been moved out of the description into the story header.
• Stories without descriptions now automatically ask users to submit them.
• Supplementary text is more concise and to the point.
• Quote Randomizer’s tabs no longer trigger a full reload of the page if Javascript is enabled. (Known bug: The stats bar at the bottom stays on the category the page loaded on)

Of course, equally interesting (and time-consuming) is what’s going on under the hood. I’d have made these renovations months ago, but I was running in circles trying to “do the right thing” and reuse an existing static templating tool. I ended up deciding it was simpler and easier to just write my own.

It’s still got a lot of hard-coded stuff, but here are some of the things I’ve already got done:

• Exports over 21,000 quotes to gzipped bundles in 10 seconds. (8 seconds for Mako, 2 seconds for GZip)
• Validates HTML, CSS, and XML using OpenSP and µTidyLib, cssutils, and lxml, respectively. (JSHint and CoffeeScript support planned)
• Lets me define most of the site in a mixture of Mako templates and markdown. (Jinja2, Textile, reStructuredText, and asciidoc support planned)
• Minifies CSS using cssutils. (UglifyJS support and CSS/JS bundling planned)
• Is much easier for me to hack on than Blogofile since I wrote it and also try to keep the codebase lean and well-documented with EPyDoc. (With Blogofile, I couldn’t even figure out how I was supposed to hook in code that takes more than one file in the source tree and produces a single zip in the build directory)

Obviously there’s a ton of stuff I’m not talking about (like how it doesn’t yet rebuild only files that have changed) that makes this only useful to me right now, but once doing so won’t be a procrastination risk for my coursework, I will be putting it up on GitHub. (Probably under an MIT license)

tl;dr It’s pretty, it works nicely with cellphones and printers now, and it’s easier for me to maintain.

Aside from “coursework and other projects”, I’ve also been preparing to switch this blog from WordPress to Jekyll to make it more compact, easier to theme, and more secure. (After all, it’s pretty hard to perform a worthwhile exploit on a site that’s nothing but static HTML and a some JS includes for Disqus, FriendFeed, and AddToAny… especially given some of the security policy extensions on the horizon for HTML)

However, being the perfectionist that I am, I tend to get stuck on sub-problems that, while I can reorder them, must all be done before I can make the switch. (Things like making absolutely certain that no links will break)

To make things simpler, I’ve been working from a known-good export of the blog’s contents and not updating the blog. (Though, as anyone who follows my Identi.ca/Twitter review/rating posts will know, I have continued to work away at the same activities as always)

Given that my switch to Jekyll wasn’t completed before my Christmas vacation, I may reconsider that decision. I have built up quite a backlog of topics to blog on and it’d probably be better for everyone if I just cleared that out and let the switch to Jekyll happen whenever I finally get everything right.

I do still have projects and coursework to do, so I won’t begin posting again right away, and knowing my history with time management, I can’t make any promises, but I’ll try.

I’ve done some significant re-theming on http://www.ficfan.org/ and fixed a bug that was causing many of the quotes to not show their additional metadata.

While doing so, I noticed that, because of how wp-lifestream caches paths (though I can see no benefit to it), the switchover to the new fileserver caused it to get in a fight with PHP’s safe_mode. (Why doesn’t anybody tell me these things?) That is now fixed.

Finally, now that I’m on vacation, I had time to dig into wp-lifestream and add a workaround for the double-encoded YouTube links. YouTube faves in my lifestream now actually work.

Enjoy.

Beta 2 brings the following improvements:

• The detail expanders on the tables are now at least as comprehensive as the original “static HTML page” version of the site.
• The “Other Sites” list has returned, complete with icon-bullets denoting site types and a handy legend.
• I filled in author/artist/director names for almost every entry. (The remaining ones are a bit tricky, so they’ll have to wait)
• At least half of the data has been reworked to be per-character, per-incident-type rather than per-story. When searching is implemented, this will be very important.

The major remaining features left un-implemented are:

• Filtering and searching (You still have to make do with category grouping and adjustable sort orders)
• Spoiler-hiding (Occasionally, there’s a big plot twist that’s relevant to the nature of the gender-bending. This will require much thought because I need to decide how to classify something that seems to be X but is revealed to be Y.
• An interface for submitting new data and reporting errors directly rather than having to visit my usual contact form.

Enjoy.

Well, things are looking up. On a whim, I re-implemented most of the old gender-bending list’s functionality on the new database-backed platform I’ve been meaning to write for years.

I’m not sure how steadily I’ll work on getting the rest done, but at least it’s somewhat usable now. (I still have to hook in display of and filtering by types of gender-bending and the sorting can be a bit finicky, but it is possible to browse by category, see the degree of gender-bending in each work, and click them to see what used to be footnotes.)

The good news is, I’ve finally cooked up a tool which prevents me from procrastinating or getting distracted for days on end, so it’s only a matter of time before I’ve caught up to my real-life obligations.

The main site should be renovated and back online some time within the next month or two and, while I don’t want to promise anything, I’ll probably resume reviewing fanfics and commenting on interesting geeky stuff shortly afterwards.

I just pushed my attempts at RAR and GIF handling in Python to my useful hacks page.

The GIF one functions as a partial validator, but it’s main designed purpose was to tell static from animated GIFs without a ton of dependencies.

The RAR one is only really useful for identifying RAR files by header and listing their contents so far, but I eventually hope to add support for extracting files which were stored without compression. (Usually video files, as the docstring says)

Enjoy.

Update: I’ve since been made aware of an alternative Python package for reading RAR files simply named rarfile. When I can find the time, I plan to examine it and, if it meets my needs or can be easily patched to do so, plan a migration and retirement path for my own rar.py.

Update 2: Broken link fixed

Given how automated it is, it’ll probably get updated frequently. (I just drag-and-drop files into the FTP client and it does the rest)

Enjoy.

As a result, you’ll probably see a lot more non-fanfiction posts and a lot fewer reviews. Sorry, but I’ve had problems with procrastination in the past and fanfiction is the worst catalyst I’ve encountered so far. On the plus side, I’ll post non-fanfic stuff as soon as I feel like it, so there’s no longer a practical limit to the number of posts I might make in a day.

However, keep in mind that the contact form is still on my old host (I need to make some changes before it will work with NearlyFreeSpeech.NET’s mailer) so it may exhibit the same intermittent 404 errors that forced me to move the blog. If you have trouble with it, try again later and it will work. I’ll have it moved over as soon as I’ve got the script updated.

UPDATE: The mail form is now hosted on the same server as the blog, so there should be no more intermittent 404 errors.