dang
ovan
.com

Whoa, it has been ALL GO on the webdev front. The homepage is done and all nifted up, though there's room for more work. The blog is looking all nice right down to the blockquote styling, the return of "random thoughts" and an awesomely compact archive navigation which leaves no need for jquery shenanigans! I'll have to use them elsewhere instead. The info page done with an overly detailed site history that nobody in their right mind would be even vaguely interested in, the 404 apology page is done and pointed at, the only big pieces missing are the CV and the "past work" page. The former's going to take a while to get up to scratch and I've been collecting screenies for the latter.

Other things I'd like to add:

• Navigational "here" state that also turns off the link, with a js/css combo.
• Dynamically swap out the intro text on the front page for nifty hints on mousing over other parts of the page.
• Pull out date of last blog post somehow?
• Get that and other hover-behaviour to fade in and out.
• Draw in more tweets and get the area to scroll down on hover
• Homepage details: border along the top etc.
• Poster-ised photo of myself on the info page.
• Both "work" and "cv" will probably featuring a nested-list nav on left and entries on left structure.
• Hide "commenting not allowed" copy from single-post blog pages.
• Snaz up the 404 somehow. Giant punctuation?
• Style the (horrible) blogsearch section. For some reason ExpressionEngine makes it a separate, table-ridden subsite. Ugh.
• Contact details? Though I don't want a spammable link and email forms always feel crude...
• Suddenly become a genius at typography and refine all the fonts throughout.

I'd delete from thingbox if I could still bagsy the relatively early account number, but I can't. So along with my recent endeavour to stay away during office hours, I've also cut out the blurb from my profile, leaving it blank. This was it:

Photo-snapping, foot-stomping, "music-loving":http://www.last.fm/user/mynciboi, gig-going, computer-game-playing, web-mongering, black-wearing, over-analysing, quiet-speaking, loud-laughing, terminally-curious, rabidly-relativistic, hyphen-abusing muppet.

My name's Dan, I'm a meandering web-geek born and raised in Edinburgh, now living in London, playing things by ear and generally checking out this and that.

I'm at a computer more often than not, whether at work putting websites together or tinkering with photos, playing games, trawling for infos, conducting illicit downloads and/or chatting on messenger. I'm online a lot.

I much enjoy chatting shit over drinks or dinner before heading out to an indie/electro/pop-type club for dubious dancing. Houseparties and PiE&MASH are aces too. I tend to be the designated documenter/photographer for such ventures which can be fun but leaves me with a lot of photoshopping to do.

Sweeping generalisations/assumptions/tribalism wind me up no end. That and X-Factor. Soz.

Music, last.fm, film, cinema, subtitles, internet, computer games, RTS, RPG, WoW, photography, flickr, indie clubs, cake, coffee, indie, electro, popstarz, ghetto, trash palace, design, history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, Song of ice and fire, Nightwatch, computer games, canasta, books, black books, eddy izzard, Bill Hicks, pop-psychology, philosophy, zen, websites, futurism, lolcats, anything shiny, naps, naruto, true blood, dexter, heroes, photoshop, mimbling about, CAEK.

Coding: A combination of a lot of downtime and quitting thingbox at work means work on the website has moved forward a lot recently. I’m settling into a kind of iterative pattern of working; there’s still a lot of tweaking I’d like to do on the landing page but it works for now, and as there are other pages needing attention more I’m going to shelve the shiny jquery-API-fetching php-twitter-caching goodness that is my homepage. There’s a been a steep learning curve with both, particularly just the utter confusion of getting php to work due to various clandestine permissions on the web hosts side of things. Still to do: hatched border at the top of the page, re-jig the layout so it doesn’t hang to one side, fix the last.fm script in ie6/7 and get rid of its superfluousness, and maybe think up some other niftiness to be done with the feeds. A clicky to make the flicker pics random might be fun. Mouseover panels with more details on the pics and albums is another idea.

Next up, blog front page and similar single-post page including concertina-d archive links. Then CV page, then a Work page with a lot of screenshots in some sort of gallery arrangement I haven’t thought through yet.

Gaming: I tore through the single player campaign of Supreme Commander 2 in a few days: not bad, though not that interesting. Better than Command and Conquer 4 though, I deleted that in frustration, I wish I hadn’t bothered. The “single player” campaign can actually be done with two players, which is nifty I suppose but it means it’s really frackking difficult to do with one. Balancing fail. The multiplayer bits seemed like a crappy version of Dawn of War 2 so basically: game fail. Similarly I finally got around to reaching the tier 3 ship I wanted in Star Trek Online, a nifty little one with four nacelles, and was disproportionately disappointed when the warping animation only lit up the top two. The bottom two nacelles stayed dark. It’s nicely indicative of the laziness of the game, and already disillusioned I deleted and unsubscribed. Browsing Steam I saw called Nexus: The Jupiter Incident, a Hungarian-made near-future sci-fi space ship game a couple of years old. So far it’s surprisingly good, and after the fail of Star Trek little details like directional thrusters firing to manoeuvre your cumbersome ship in a physically plausible way are much appreciated.

This hasn’t stopped me watching lots of Enterprise though.

Books: Again with the tearing: I read the sixth book by Trudi Canavan, the last in her first trilogy. Easy read but you can tell she’s a noob, the ending was rushed and clichéd. Her second series is much better, and I’d be tempted to give her future work a look. Having read so much recently it’s given me a nice run up to finally get my teeth into a massive hardback tome that Laurie got me a year and a half ago: Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I found it frustratingly impenetrable until now but am suddenly enjoying the jarring metaphors and drip-feeding plot.

Fitness: Well I’m walking 4 or 5 miles and doing about 45 minutes of weights exercise 4 or 5 days a week, which is good I guess… Not doing too well resisting pizza and/or pasta for dinners though, and I’m finding it difficult to push myself beyond “exhaustion” to an hour exercise… So I’ve levelled out at 71kg, but I’d love to get down to 70. Sigh, so close! Gngngngngn!