XSLT Transformations

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This is something I’ve never tried before. Something told me to make my RSS 2.0 feed readable.

Since I’ve never formatted XML with anystylesheet before, I decided to try my hand at using CSS for my formatting. It was rather dull 😉 so I jumped to the dreaded XSL method — something I ran away from when I tried to learn everything XML.

To my surprise [and delight], it was a piece of cake. I’ve added a line of code to the files responsible for generating the RSS 2.0 and Comments (RSS 2.0) feeds, since more people use RSS 2 than Atom.

Hopefully, it’ll be easier to view from the browser :D.

The Farce

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I started a book last year — or deceived myself that I was starting one. It’s called The Farce and the plot’s a Niger Delta conspiracy in Nigeria.

I’m taking two unusual stances in it — writing in the first person as a young liberal muslim lady in Nigeria. I’m not female — and neither am I a muslim. As usual I do a lot of research before I write.

It isn’t coming along the way I want it to. I had to revamp a website throughout most of today, but I revisited the story yesterday and added a prologue which I shared with the MSU Scribblers’ Society. I’m going to start working on the book tomorrow, hopefully.

The first half of The Farce will be published online but I’ll keep the rest for my perusal — and hopefully for whichever publisher catches my fancy.

There’s nothing else to do with my time — Jodi Ocheltree, the Coordinator for Campus Life here at Mountain State, needed to see my schedule before allowing me to work during the interval between the spring and summer semesters. When I got there, I discovered she was on vacation, which is crazy at best.

She’s one damned un-approachable lady — I mean it :mad:.

Readability

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Two of my female friends complained to me today that my blog was unreadable. I’ve been posting only in code for a while now. I don’t like opening up about myself — putting my fears and my feelings online where everyone has access to it. Of course I could use private posts, visible to only me — but that’s another matter.

This is a ‘diary of a coder’, and I knew what I meant when I chose that title. I’ll still blog about code but I’ll do my best to make more posts in other categories. Not everyone who visits my blog is a programmer, however clear the posts are to me.

Yahoo and Ajax

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Google popularized Ajax with GMail. Yahoo’s taken it over the top with their new homepage. It’s just as well that Yahoo moved over to Ajax because I know Microsoft was planning something along that line with Live.

If Ajax doesn’t turn out to be another fad, then bby 2008, most sites will be more like applications.

I certainly don’t want to miss out on the fun — I’m glad I joined the band-wagon early.

Not Enough Time

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It seems I want to learn everything there is to know in this world — maybe it’s because I get my feeling of prestige from knowing a lot. I’ve always known I can’t know it all — yet, I keep trying.

I’ve always eyed hardware programming right from when I started out. Hardware has always fascinated me — how do you write code to tell a chunk of metal to do something? How do you build the hardware itself and interface it with something else? These are some questions I’ve always asked myself.

I find myself getting annoyed presently because I can’t seem to understand the C++ book I’m currently with. I think I’ll just skip it and moveover to something more challenging. I hate writing code for which I find no use — console programs.

Maybe my feeling of inadequacy is prompted by the fact that I’ve written programs in other languages that allow easy creation of GUIs.

With so much on my hands these days, I just might…