testing

I've installed the xajax library for PHP. It's part of my nefarious plan to play around with Ajax outside of the Google Maps API. Unfortunately, I don't really have any forms that need dynamic validation right now. Maybe I can make one up. I've also been looking at unit testing frameworks for PHP.

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A List Apart came through for me again, helping me build a two-column ordered list for my resume. Getting it to work in IE was much more difficult, requiring the use of one CSS hack and one clever (if I say so myself) relative position CSS property that allowed me to use relative widths for the two list columns. Testing the code in IE brought a slight rendering problem to my attention: the title widget and white background were not loading correctly in IE, but only for pages, not posts.

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I ran my page through the W3C's validator and discovered that it was not XHTML 1.0 strict. It had several errors, and tracking these down led me to discover that my hack to get Democracy to play nicely with WP-Cache still had a bug: I was getting a MySQL error in the code for the poll form, where the form action would appear. This didn't interfere with the page rendering (as far as I can tell), so it was invisible until I looked at the source or, better yet, had a validator do it.

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How I got the Democracy poll plugin to work with WP-Cache

WP-Cache is a useful plugin. Although I've never been Slashdotted, other people who have and are using Wordpress swear by it. It does have a minor flaw. I have a poll plugin, Democracy, that is obviously supposed to be dynamic. It's rather lame to go to a page, vote on a poll, and not see any results because the page is cached. It turns out that WP-Cache has a mechanism for getting around this, allowing dynamic plugins on static cached pages.

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Hackwater is still being hosted on a Debian Linux server, but it's now being hosted by Dreamhost. I registered hackwater.net to continue to run a development server from my own Linux server, but DNS propagation seems a bit slow, so finding either of these sites is probably going to take a while. My biggest concern is my mail, as I had to play around with the MX records to keep the status quo, well, the status quo. More as this story develops...

It occurs to me that I don't know enough about routers and the web servers that love them. One of the minor annoyances I have with Wordpress is that I can't view the site as if I were accessing from outside of my LAN when I'm on my LAN. Wordpress uses PHP to fill out the paths for its various components (i.e. theme files, specifically stylesheets, functions, etc.).

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I recreated my Benzene web page (which was the freshman year Chemistry project that got me started on the web development path). I think I've figured out a way for the pages to link to images and not run into problems when I switch themes; for now, the pretty benzene molecule images are visible, as are the for-a-long-time-broken images in my Links page. The Links images weren't that important, though; the benzene images are much more helpful.

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Google Maps updated its API to version 2 on April 3, 2006. Trying to get my head around the changes (and possibilities of the new features). Also? Taxes suck.

The map page is broken until I can figure out why Google and Wordpress don't want to play together.

I've embedded a Google Map on this site after raiding Ricardo Galli's blog for his code (and getting an API key, etc.). It's basically a graphical visualization of my server access log, showing how puny my hits really are. It's buggy, but it's up.

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