{"id":2194,"date":"2009-02-18T21:53:50","date_gmt":"2009-02-19T02:53:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.net\/?p=2194"},"modified":"2009-02-18T21:53:50","modified_gmt":"2009-02-19T02:53:50","slug":"on-being-a-code-monkey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/?p=2194","title":{"rendered":"On Being a Code-Monkey"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent part of my day at work code-monkeying HTML.<\/p>\n

I needed to create a table. Not a plain, simple table, not exactly. But a table. With headers. And column spans.<\/p>\n

This should be simple, right?<\/p>\n

Wrong.<\/p>\n

I had a webpage that looked… terrible. (There, that’s a polite word for it.) It needed a complete rethink. I sketched out my ideas, started building the table, dropped it into the company’s CMS…<\/p>\n

And that’s when the problems began.<\/p>\n

The CMS doesn’t like HTML directly. It can work with it, but then it will start changing<\/i> it. And even if it doesn’t get changed when it goes into the system, when it comes out of the system (such as when a page is rendered) the system completely mungs up the layout.<\/p>\n

Here’s how bad it is. I can’t define column widths. At all. Even if I do, the outputting routines strip that information. Where I would have liked to have broken this project into, say, six or seven smaller tables on a single page, the end result is something that looks weird, because none of the tables will be of the same width. I found a workaround. But I had to find<\/i> a workaround, that’s the point. My <thead> tags magically vanished completely. Width selectors are ignored. And tables take whatever damned width they want.<\/p>\n

Now that I’ve struggled with it, I have a better idea of what’s possible. The general format I’ve adopted for the table has been okayed, so tomorrow I can work with an HTML editor (I think I may use Arachnophilia, since it’s served me well over the years) and put everything together.<\/p>\n

The only problem I foresee is that what I want to do with this table is not a turnkey organization. It’s going to take someone with coding familiarity — like myself — to keep this maintained. The ancien regime<\/i> of an Excel spreadsheet->Word table->CMS wysiwyg isn’t going to work with this. What I want to do is too complicated.<\/p>\n

*sigh*<\/p>\n

Also, it was sleeting at work today. And that annoyed me. Made me feel bummed. Ten days ago, I had my clothes on the line and temperatures were in the low 60s. Today, sleet.<\/p>\n

On the plus side, all this code-monkeying at work put some personal code-monkeying with WordPress back into the mental queue.<\/p>\n

Essentially, I’m going to redesign the website this spring. I’ve done sketches, I know what it’s going to look like. The end result is something that looks more like a website that promotes me and my work — and less like a blog of whatever randomness flits across my mind that day. The blog component will still be there, but it’s going “under the hood,” so to speak.<\/p>\n

It’s not a WordPress theme I’m putting together. Rather, it’s more like an information portal that runs atop Tarski<\/a>, letting that do the heavy lifting, while I create some custom php pages that make use of Tarski to display specific content the way I want.<\/p>\n

That’s stage one. I have a tech demo of the front page. It runs exactly like I want it to. I just have to plug the content into the holes. It’s actually “live” in WordPress. Nothing links to it, I could give you a link, you could look at it. But… not yet. It needs work. It looks okay. It has the right flow<\/i>. But it’s also functionally useless.<\/p>\n

Stage two is different. That’s creating<\/i> content. For instance, I’ve had a page about “Make-Believe,”<\/a> my original series Star Trek<\/i> short story for a while, but it was only about a month ago that I wrote a page about my Doctor Who<\/i> story, “The Spindle of Necessity.”<\/a> Putting together content like that will be an ongoing process.<\/p>\n

Take, for instance, my About page<\/a>. There’s a page that needs<\/i> help. I’d say I hate writing about myself, but that’s not, strictly speaking, true. It’s that I hate writing about myself publicly<\/i>, because I feel like I don’t make myself sound interesting<\/i>. That said, I liked the bio I put together for Farpoint, and I may riff off of that. One thing, though — I am not, actually, a fan of Hibernian FC<\/a> as that bio claims; I just like being random. \ud83d\ude06<\/p>\n

These are some facts about myself I would probably want to include:<\/p>\n