Apparently @Home is going to be shutting it’s doors in the very near future, so those of you who link to members.home.net/greg-mitchell should change your bookmarks to www.nodecam.com at your earliest convenience. There might be a bit of a delay in me switching over from members.home.net to someplace else, but if you link to www.nodecam.com it will still go here eventually :)

I was home sick yesterday, so that’s why no update. Mind you, this means that there’s nothing new either, cause I spent most of the day in bed. I’m back now though, and feeling fine. I even did one of the ugliest hacks in the history of hacks to a web page in order to work around a serious design flaw in a product that we’re using.

If you’re not interested in stupid programmer tricks, stop reading now. This search product that we’re using allows you to search multiple databases simultaneously. For the most part, the demo worked just fine, except we couldn’t customize the results, and that meant that the results were ugly. We bought the full version (for $500 US no less) and got it installed. I tried out the customization, and it didn’t work at all on the web server that we wanted to put it on - because the server wasn’t on port 80. Fine, I parked it on a different server for the time being, and the customization works fine - until you hit a link to go to the next page of results - there were two different links for paging, one which is auto-generated in the non-customizable part of the page, and one which was in a customizable part of the page. The first kind very kindly generated a new results page with all the proper results, but with none of the customizations. Pretty dumb. The second kind took the header customizations, but ignored the footer customizations. The way that the header and footer customization works is that a hidden input tag is placed on the form with name=Header and value=”file.txt” - the problem was that these tags weren’t propagating properly into the results pages. I tried to do some nice little DHTML scripting, to automatically add the required tags in, but unfortunately the document.forms object didn’t behave properly, because there were a whole bunch of forms that weren’t closed (ie there were 6 <form> tags, but only 2 </form> tags.) This caused me grief, cause I couldn’t just append the new input tag to the end of the form’s innerHTML attribute. How did I get around it? I appended the tag to one of the other input’s outerHTML. For whatever reason, this was the only way I could get it to work. The results from the search thing are now hacked up to actually behave the way that they should out of the box - though they still only get rendered by the browser because the browser is too forgiving. Boring enough for you?

Tomorrow: tales of the new coffee machine

Simpsons quote of the day: “You love Shake n’ Bake! You used to put it in your coffee!” - Marge