I’ve been puttering around the WorldForge web pages for the last couple days
trying to put the finishing touches on the first round of changes. Now in this
case “finishing touches” does not imply pretty – just functional :)

What I’ve been doing is going thru the major parts and making them css and xhtml
1.0 compliant, not exactly an easy task since the underlying structure is Zope.
Not to say that Zope is the wrong tool for the job, but rather to say that I don’t
grok Zope – or at least not yet. I’ve had to learn a lot about how Zope does html
and even have gotten my hands dirty by rewriting some of the dtml and python
scripts that generate parts of the html that is presented to the visitor.

Now that the structure is in place, it will soon be time to turn some of the
WorldForge creative media types loose to tweak things like layout, fonts and
colors. The biggest thing so far left to do, I think, is to make the font sizing
em based instead of percent based. I’ve done that to this site and it’s worked
rather well.

I must say I am rather pleased with the fact that the WorldForge site is valid CSS
and also valid XHTML 1.0 Strict — woohoo!

Ducky and sprout (osaf folks) were asking if I would be going to the pyCon in
Washington D.C. this March and to be honest I didn’t even know about it.

So I checked the dates, the house budget and lainens to see if any show-stoppers
could be noticed – none so far. Work said ok for those days as vacation, budget
seemed ok (tax refund check will be very timely) and lainens said ok.

hmmm, looks like I may be in D.C. soon :)

It will be fun to be with other coders – I haven’t been to a convention in around
6 years as my current job doesn’t have the budget for them and very few seem to
come to the Philadelphia area. I’m still kicking myself for missing the recent
XML convention that *was* in Philadelphia recently.

My lodging cost will be greatly reduced because I can crash at a my best friends
house … uhh, guess I had better call and find out if he has room!

You don’t realize how much your partner does around the house until you
have to do her chores also :) Lainens badly twisted her ankle yesterday
and because she has to stay off of it completely, I’ve been pitching in
and doing her weekend chores.

I’m beat.

While it has allowed me to spend some time on the computer, it’s not
what I would consider quality time since it’s in 20 or 30 minute chunks.

Got an invite to the beta test for the latest community site
“orkut”:www.orkut.com (thanks!) and so far it’s pretty cool. Kinda like
tribes.net and not — but then again I have very little free time to
really take advantege of these sites. Not like I used to back in the
CompuServ days :)

anywho, this looks like fun so I’ll probably check in to see how it
“grows”

As I expand the number of web logs, blogs and other online journals I
read a common thread seems to be forming. The people who have been
doing it for years are now dealing with the reality of what happens when
something hits the mainstream – you start to attract attention from
people who do not share your concern about or for the issue. They
either want to use it as yet another cool-thing-to-do or they want to
abuse it because it is drawing plenty of attention.

Maybe it is a sign of my age but I’ve seen this happen before with
usenet, bbs’, irc, …

Like the others, blogging will survive the akward stages and mature.
Much to the dismay of the early adopters.