After far too long, I finally found time to make some of the planned improvements to my gender-bending index.
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.
A couple of weeks ago, I got it into my head that the death of Blinkenlights was a bad thing. My primary PC already has a little LCD on the keyboard (I got a deal on a first-generation Logitech G15 gaming keyboard… not just useful for gamers) and, combined with LCDProc, it makes a great diagnostic display for figuring out why your newest creation is freezing up the GUI before you kill it.
…so I went on eBay and ordered an inexpensive Chinese LCD display for my experimentation machine. The PCIDEA 20×4 USB drive-bay LCD. As the manufacturer claims, it IS fully compatible with the CrystalFontz driver in LCDProc… but they neglect to tell you which of the three CrystalFontz drivers to use and how to configure it. Here is your answer in the form of an LCDd.conf snippet:
The key elements which aren’t default and aren’t immediately obvious to the layperson seem to be the use of the CFontzPacket driver, Model=631, /dev/ttyUSB0, and a 19200 bitrate.
As most people who read this will probably have noticed, I haven’t had the time or will to post full-fledged fanfiction reviews in quite a while. However, I have been amassing simple out-of-five numerical ratings in a private collection for some time. I’m not sure when I’ll be able to share said collection, but I didn’t want to leave people without reviews of some kind.
As such, I have now created accounts on Identi.ca and Twitter and fanfiction reviews are tagged with the #fic_rating hashtag. (The above links point to the hashtag timelines rather than my profiles for added convenience)
Also, In the interest of making useful fic ratings a more common thing, I’ve laid out a suggested standard format for #fic_rating notices/tweets (which also gets embedded in the Identi.ca sidebar for the hashtag). Hopefully, if anyone who wants to use the hashtag listens, it’ll also make machine-parsing of ratings feasible.
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 bad news is, my main site is down and I’m too busy to update my blog.
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’m not really on top of my time management yet, but this was hard enough to find that I think it warrants a blog post anyway…
Have you ever tried looking up how to use Javascript to get the selected HTML in a browser window in a form that can then be sent via XMLHTTPRequest or fed into an ordinary form field? (eg. for POSTing to a quote-collector tool) It’s a surprisingly difficult piece of info to find. (Hence why I’m partly writing this as a reminder to myself)
First, you’ll probably end up visiting the QuirksMode Range Intro to learn about window.getSelection() in browsers like Gecko/Firefox and the equivalent Internet Explorer scripting, but all you’ll learn there is how to get the selection as plain text… and that’s no secret.
Once you’ve got the selection/range, things become a little trickier because, once again, Internet Explorer and everyone else do things differently. In Internet Explorer, it’s as simple as range.htmlText but in other browsers, it’s a little less obvious.
First, you call range.cloneContents() to get a DocumentFragment object. This is more or less equivalent to Copy (Ctrl+C) when copying and pasting things. Then you create a <div> element, use div.appendChild(clonedSelection), and then grab the HTML as text from div.innerHTML. Don’t go looking for ways to serialize DOM nodes to XML. It’s non-portable and a bit of a red herring.
Here’s my solution, descended from the complete code fragment I eventually found on a thread on the FCKEditor forums:
Now that you know, why not create some interesting bookmarklets?
