More leaps and bounds (or, to give them a better name, tiny footsteps) were made with BH/e today.
The filesystem ‘engine’ is pretty much done now, and it’s a lot better than the BH2 one. It’s your standard files/folders heirarchy, but with a windows-esque separation into several top-level directories (i.e. ‘Your Files’, ‘Andrew’s Files’). There’s none of the database buildup caused by bad implementation before, either, and as a plus there’s folder sizes (as in actual, recursive ones) with very little processing power thanks to a gradual update system. There’s even a rescan function if it all goes horribly wrong, which works quite well as well.
Now I need to start on the interface to this lot.
I’ve redesigned the ByteHoard website again; for those of you who’ve missed its last two years this is about the seventh design. This new one focuses on clean lines and readability, as well as saving a lot of bandwidth.
CSS is still a bit behind where it should be, although that’s obviously not the specifications’ fault (I’m looking at you, IE). However, I only had to make one change to my CSS to get IE to play nice (and it’s not a hack, I just had to set only one of a bunch of nested elements to display:block), so there is that.
Apart from that it seems to have gone well. My usual basic txt CMS is driving it, with my new submenus which I first developed for the Aeracode main site thrown in too. With some RSS fetching optimisation (i.e. only do it on the news page) it’s also a lot faster.
The logo also got an overhaul; I finally found the right font, NeoSans, and used that to make a much cleaner logo.
Overall, it went pretty well, I think (well, for only 4 hours of coding that is). Now back to ByteHoard proper.
Now for my first item of the day. An update on the progress of ByteHoard.
It has been an interesting few months for ByteHoard; however, progress now seems to be on track.
For those of you who haven’t been keeping track (i.e. everybody), I started off with a complete rewrite in Python. While that got to a good stage, it wasn’t going to work on all servers and was getting far too modular and clunky.
Then, I got the idea of using this strange new thing called AJAX nobody had heard about before. So I got out my editor, and started writing a PHP/HTML/AJAX/JSON version.
I then scrapped that one, because I’d gone too complex again, and started again with the same basic principles. And, as if by magic, I actually got somewhere; a working php-html ByteHoard3. However, I’ve since renamed it ByteHoard/e, to avoid confusion with the Python codebase (which is called BH3 now).
So, we now have BH/e. Currently there’s sessions, login, logout, and basic file stuff, but the real work is still to come. You can find a preliminary screenshot below (click to enlarge)
This, as you should know by now, is a blog. I’ve refrained from writing one before; after all, who wants to read about my rather boring life? However, in my lack of interest for the greater good, I now present to you the unimagintavely titled “Aeracode: The Blog”.
What will it contain? Among other things, ByteHoard news (because you know you don’t get enough already), life news (boring, skip that if you possibly can), and random babbling (may cause dementia in small animals).
Thankfully for you this first post is short, so you can stop now.
