The Revolution

Overdue Updates
August 27, 2006 7:01 PM
It has been forever since the last time I updated things here... although I can't say I haven't been busy with other things. Since the last update quite a few things have changed:
Moved to Florida
Started a new Job
Changed web hosting services
So now that things have settled down a bit I plan on getting back in the habit of regularily posting things on here. For starters, I've installed a photo gallery thing as a more efficient method of posting images. I've been wanting to post a bunch of images of my apartment, but this page isn't exactly designed for that - so I figure this is a good way of doing things.
Ben's Photo Gallery

Themes
April 5, 2006 8:30 PM
Quick update because I really should be studing for my comp sci exam tomorrow. You may have noticed that there is now a dock app titled "Theme Changer." As you may have figured out by now, this allows you to pick one of several themes listed there and blamo! things look different. It's pretty cool and I look forward to adding more themes to the side there in the future.
Also, you might have already noticed that the first time you access the page it picks a random theme other than rystyschki and that if you click random it picks a random theme including the rystyschki theme. I did this so if you're new to the site you can't be randomly assigned the rystyschki theme - I don't want people getting our web sites confused. Hopefully the random theme upon first visit is also welcome - just thought it would keep things interesting.

New, New, New
March 5, 2006 6:32 PM
Well, School has been in high gear lately and it's been forever since we've had an update. But, I've been working on quite a bunch of new features and this has been a pretty major upgrade. As you can see, changed the look and feel quite a bit. Hopefully it's a little easier on the eyes now. I think I like the leaves in the background but if anybody has a better suggestion I'd be interested in exploring other options. I'd like some kinda nature image for the background - preferably a high quality photo of nature. Like the leaves, it needs to be able to tile nicely so that the page looks good on large resolutions and loads quickly. You would be surprised how hard it is to find nice tiled background images. Also, if anybody knows how to make an image into one that will tile correctly - that would also be a good thing to know.
Much of the code has been made a lot cleaner and all the design elements have now been moved to a seperate CSS file. I've learned quite a bit about CSS lately and hopefully the page looks and loads better on most computers. (Note: Please don't attempt to load this page in Internet Explorer. I don't have the time, patience, or access to a windows machine to make this site load correctly on that POS).
As you can see on the right I've added "dock apps." This was a great idea by Russ to have little XML snippets on the side. My contribution was the idea of an RSS feed reader. That was quite a hassle to implement but we've got it kinda worked out for now. So hopefully that makes the page a little more interesting. Also you'll notice that the page is now rendered from XML into HTML by the server and not by your web browser. Hopefully this will help with compatibility as well.
Also, I've made updates to the politics and personal sections of the site. I've also got plans in the works for series of articles based off a speech given by Mac developer Wil Shipley at 2005s WWDC. Also, we're trying to get more people to use the new lastholdout forum - so if you're board - feel free to go post something over there.
Lastholdout Forum

Major Updates
January 7, 2005 3:58 AM
Eddie Vedder - Lead Singer of Pearl Jam
As you can see from the image on the left I've made some major upgrades to the XML/XSTL works of the web site. I've cleaned up a lot of my code and changed around a lot of the XML schema. We now have much more support for image formatting. For example. An image can be left, right or center aligned. If an image is left or right aligned than text will automatically wrap around the side of the image as it is now. If the image is center aligned then the image will be all by itself. Also, as we can see from this image we have support for a caption that will be centered under the image.
Other changes are not quite as obvious on the outside. We have added support for the id attribute of the entry tag so that entries can be sorted. Changed around the way lists and links are programmed to take advantage of attributes. Also tried to make the page more modular by creating more templates.

New Section
December 28, 2005 3:29 AM
Another update in less than a week! I'm doing good. Added a new section to the site. This one focuses on politics - everyone's favorite issue. I've been reading a lot of political stuff lately and wanted to get some of my opinions out there. Normally I'm kind of a political junkie although I haven't been following things to closely recently. I think I'm still a little hung over from the disappointing 2004 election.
Anyway, new content. Kind of a touchy subject but oh well. Deal with it.

Updated and Pictures!
December 24, 2005 3:57 AM
Finally an update. Yes I know, it's been way way too long. I've fallen back into my old habit of never updating anything. Well no more - I'm going to make an effort to frequently update this site. Really.
Back to business though, I've updated most of the sections of the site - and added a new feature - images! Now an image can be inserted into an entry like so..
This picture is stolen.
New Features, new updates, soon to be a new year - enjoy

More Features
October 6, 2005 7:31 PM
So instead of studying for my linear algebra exam I spend the last few hours adding features to the xslt/xml rendering of this web site. Guess what we have now?
The ability
to have lists
in the document
wherever we want them
It may not seem like a big deal... but it was a lot harder than it looks. Basically the key was figuring out how to use XPath with XSLT templates. if interested I would recommend checking out the XPath tutorial on w3schools. I didn't use much more than about 3 pages in - then I stopped reading. So I'm sure that I haven't even tipped the surface of the XPath iceburg.
That's all for now. Actual content will be comming to the other sections eventually. I promise!
XPath Tutorial