';

Previous Page

Table of Contents [ Show]


Easter Eggs

I pointed out earlier in the explanation of the domain name that you can click the domain name or logo in the header to explain the fact that the domain matches my name if searched as a regular expression. I also described in the article discussion that there are a couple of other architectural components that are not prominently exposed, but which can alter the user experience. These are some that are provided by URL arguments:

  • I described the "offset=X" argument in the the Table of Contents and Pagination sections as the mechanism used to determine where to start rendering. You can select any section you want and it's mostly going to work, correct something out of bounds or print an error.
  • *new* Offsets can now be referenced by the heading. For example to the Easter Eggs heading.
  • A similar feature that you wouldn't stumble accross accidentally is the "items=X" argument. This will display an alternate quantity of sections from that offset. Using '*' will show everything.
  • Articles also necessarily have a "topic=X" argument which tells the system which article directory to grab content from. Because only articles with a meta.php file will get loaded into the article lists, it is actually possible to find "unpublished" or "hidden" articles if you know their topic identifier. An example of this is the "About Me" article that is linked from the home page, but not otherwise listed.
  • There is also a "debug=1" option that is currently understood, but has little utility. It is required for some error messages that I use during development, but otherwise any possible errors that I have written debugging for should pretty much be wiped out by the time it gets to production. There are also errors that don't require the debug argument. For instance, try to define an offset or items argument that is not an integer and it will yell at you.
  • If you hit an error page, for example a 404 you get a random fullscreen image from the Horsetheif Canyon, AB gallery. It provides the error and lets you dismiss all of the window-dressing to see just the image (and a little X to get the window-dressing back).
  • Support for users in Australia

To Be Continued...

The site is relatively stable, so development has slowed but it is still ongoing. Updates are pushed to the site quickly when written, but you can also view the develpment branch of the site by specifying the 'dev' subdomain (this version of the site has new features, but the content is not updated there). Some things I'm thinking about adding are:

  • Accept an offset equal to the section heading text. Determine the offset to that heading automatically. This would allow for easier linking to relevant content that will remain accurate if the index of that section changes.
  • Dark Mode. At the moment, the tricky part with this is persistence across pages. I refuse to use cookies, so I would need to implement this into URI requests which means that every single link would need to have an argument appended. Certain links are manually written into pages, so I'd need a function to feed all imported content through a re-write function and pass all static content there as well before writing. Setting up appropriate css classes and overriding their attributes is easy enough, but time consuming.
  • Duplicate "items=*" for list pages. Currently this only works for articles (but I don't have enough to hit the page limit yet anyways).
  • Add tags to articles so that the reader can find "similar" topics. Add tag filtering to the list.php pages.
  • For "offset=" greater than the number of elements in the array, correct to the total number minus the item count (or 0).
  • More debugging code! Included the output in a block at the bottom or top rather than in-line
  • Add a "lang=" url argument. I'm currently working to improve my French and translating the site might help build that skill. My French is still too bad to confidently add that. I also gave a decent effort to learning Esperanto and might translate things to that if I get really bored. This would require a separate "meta.php" and "content.php" file but other than that it would not be terribly difficult to select which file to load, fallback to English if necessary and suggest alternate languages on pages that provide it. This would probably be done by adding a language box to the left of the footer (similar darkmode), with a pop-up for available languages.
  • The initial revision of this site was written almost entirely in JavaScript (Proof) including a lot of wizz-bang flashy stuff. I do as much processing as possible server-side to reduce page sizes and so most of the JS got chopped out, except for this single file and a couple of things in-line). One flashy thing I did kind of like in moderation was weather effects to the home page. Now that there is a dedicated forecast page, I might add those back there. At the time I had effects for cloud, fog, sun, snow and rain.
  • Optimize formatting in Firefox Reader View (I don't care about whatever browser you use).
  • Create a unified internal linking function. Currently the handling of url arguments, variable sanitization and so on are sloppy and done all over the place. I need to make a function that takes the current page and the target, then have it do all of the sanity checking, cleaning and copying of persistent arguments (theme, and lang). Have shortcuts for links that only modify a single url argument (eg. theme, offset, items)
  • Redirect non-existent "topic" to either applicable topic list with an error instead of to 404.
  • Make 'tag' persistent into the body of the article and when moving back to that category's list.php page. This way the user will not need to refilter. Also modify the article switcher to suggest only articles with the same tag.
  • Add a "break" option for the content arrays and a "manual" option in meta.php. When breaks are set to manual, display all sections until a manual page break is requested. This would allow for more flexible segmentation of articles into sections. A default number is sort of silly. Pagination in general is silly, I just thought it would be fun to engineer.