The acronym script I discussed in my last post is now finished and ready to go. Check out the acronymit function if you think you have someplace to use it. I have to stop naming these things myself, it gets worse as time goes on :).

Also there are tons of new photos in the photolog so check that out if you haven’t yet. Note that some days have been updated!

I believe that in the weblog medium, nothing should come between the world and your words. Ideally you should be able to type a block of text, and it will be presented in a typographically sound, semantically meaningful manner without any intervention from you, the blogger. Unfortunately, everyone is caught up in presentation. Personally I’m very familiar with this because my aesthetic compels me to do things like curl my quotes, define every single acronym, and use paragraphs instead of multiple break tags, but this is a barrier to publishing. Before I had the curly quotes script, I would manually type in the HTML entities every time I used an apostrophe or quote, which as you can imagine can be very tedious. That’s been taken care of, and the code has even been integrated into Cafelog, the classiest weblogging software out there. I’ve addressed the paragraph problem in a rather superficial way that needs some looking at, and today I decided to take a look at the acronym problem. I’ve got it working just fine, I just need to hash out a little code that sorts an array based on the length of its key, and then I’ll put it up on the scripts part of the site. After this I want to clean up the paragraph code to deal with block-level tags, and then maybe port this BlogTimes thing I’ve been seeing around to PHP.

Update: Darn recursive acronyms! How ironic that the acronym PHP is messing up my script!

Update: It’s now online.

There used to be a relatively nice random number generator on the computer where we do the HPUG meetings, but when they redid some stuff they took it off. We used to use it to pick winners for door prizes, and all was good. But since it’s been gone we’ve been resorting to less-than-random methods for picking winners, and the Web-Tech SIG was having the same problem. So I decided to put a little something together. Enjoy!