Wednesday, December 15, 2004

When One Column Is Short and the Other Column Is Long

Because recent entries have been shrinking, sapped by nothing other than personal deficits in time, energy and attention span, and because I've managed to steal five minutes here and there for the minutiae of blog-tweaking this semester--a visitor hitmap, Geobytes IP locater, a Flickr thing, and now a feedlist (java-generated from RSS Digest) from my del.icio.us account--the right column exceeded the left column, forcing me to change the threshold of recent entries from nine to twelve so the centered bits from the right column wouldn't be floating freely at the bottom of the screen.  Probably it's time to convert to a three-column design, eh?  Or I could reverse that shrinking trend.

On another break from project writing, I recently dropped a robots exclusion file in the main blog directory to curb bot-traffic hunting through extraneous stuff I keep on the server. It corrected the visits by 200 on the first day, so the stats are slightly more indicative of actual site traffic, for whatever that might be worth.  Also, I'm trying out a rotate.php file to ease into some understanding of what PHP scripts make possible.  For now, it's just a simple image randomization cue, which pulls from jpegs in a designated sub-directory (on refresh, the pic of the Quad will flip between two dif't images...important stuff, really).  Over break I hope to have more time to play around with PHP controls for other aims and purposes.  But I only know enough to get frustrated, and I've got plenty of other stuff to do, like reintroducing myself to family.

Posted by Derek Mueller at December 15, 2004 9:23 AM to On Weblogs