My OS X Programming Blog

The transformation of my blog is complete: it now uses CSS for layout. I think the result looks cleaner and more contemporary without all those dividing lines. For comparison, I have kept the page I generated yesterday so you can see the difference. The code and templates are re-released in this Xcode project of FCBlog. See my blog entry on November 11, 2003 for information on how to use FCBlog. The weekly index pages are set up to look for the style sheet file FCBlog.css in the top-level directory of the blog. Of course the name and location of this file can be changed by editing the templates. Also the styles of all the sections and elements can be changed in the style sheet so you can customize your blog to look very different than mine.

No, my web page hasn’t been hacked :-). It looks different because I’ve converted it to use style sheets and made a few small changes to how it looks. I spent the day learning about and playing with cascading style sheets, or CSS. I’ve never used them before. I’m going to set up the web site for my shareware and it seems that using only HTML will give the site somewhat of a “dated” look. It turns out CSS’s are quite easy to use. There’s an abundance of information on CSS on the Web. The best place to start is probably W3C’s CSS page. Their Learning CSS page is very useful. On that page you can find many useful tutorials and tips and tricks pages. I’ve also found it useful to skim through the CSS level-1 specifications (the level-2 specs are too long to read). Once you’ve done this you get a pretty good idea of what you can do with CSS.

I then updated this blog to use CSS. You’re looking at the result right now! Thanks to how my FCBlog program works, I simply needed to change the template files it uses so that the index page it generates makes use of a style sheet. My templates still use table tags which should be changed to div tags that set the “float” property. This will allow me to replace the ruler lines that are now used to separate the columns with much nicer looking versions.

I took it easy for a few days and had a lot of Chinese New Year food after I released Carbon XEmacs two weeks ago. I make a scrumptious steamed Chinese radish cake (蘿蔔糕), you know. Spent the past few days setting up this new website for the release of my accompaniment generation shareware. I’ve also switched over to my ISP’s SOHO plan, which gives me a bit more bandwidth and flexibility. This blog has now been moved to the new website. Please take notice of its new URL:

  Right click and copy link.

Releasing Carbon XEmacs has resulted in a bit more work than I’d like. I think people too often ask for help too quickly. It’s sad that many just follow along with the instructions to build XEmacs and at the first sign of trouble post a question to the newsgroup or write me. And then there’s no shortage of opinionated people who write to say how they hate/love Carbon/X/Windows Emacs/XEmacs, usually with no justification whatsoever. Who cares? And then there’re these posts at MacSlash that rehash the “jokes” in the Emacs etc/JOKES file. No wonder scores there never go above 2. It also falls under the category of things one won’t dignify with a response. Has the computer science community really come to this? I have to keep reminding myself that they’re mostly just kids, or geeks, or both. I wonder how many people have actually tried to read my code. It’s pretty good code you know. Perhaps that’s asking too much.

I might as well just post pictures of deer on my blog instead of good programs: