It's alive!
As promised last week I'm going to bring back the Ongoing Collapse. It's a good project and people seem to like it so it's probably worth doing. Well, stage one is done so the easy bits are out of the way I guess. Renewing the hosting (ongoingcollapse.com) proved tricky since I don’t know where it is. Over the last few years the hosting has been bounced around to various folks and though I still own the domain I didn't have the patience to go around hunting down whoever is supposed to be hosting it at the moment (clue there is nothing at the domain). I was going to go for collapse.club but for some reason it won't assign the domain properly so instead I got the extremely catchy decline.online.You can go over there right now to have a look at the holding page if you like. The key stylings are done and some super basic d3 is implemented to just basically draw that red line across the canvas, but it all resizes nicely and should work on mobile too. In fact it looks even cooler on mobile.
Anyway the core of it's done, it's up, styling's done. So next stage is going to be really hard and it's going to mean re-building all the scraping and archiving. I'm not sure how to do that. Last time I used a PHP scraper being pushed by a CRON job into an SQL database every day. It works ok as a storage and retrieval method but the scraper was bad and any time someone re-styled their page it lost all the data and glitched out. I'm going to look back over the code from the last iteration and see what's salvageable but I'm up for suggestions of better approaches.
After that is implementing the visualisations. I never got that far in the last iteration, I want to set it so that if your mouse hovers (or thumb clicks) on a particular bit of data in the text then that graph is either highlighted or appears. Again, I've got d3 in the build and ready to go so that's just a case of playing around with some examples to find something that works.
Blogging regular
I set a recurring reminder to post a blog every Wednesday and have set up a note to just write things down in and then form them up into a post. This is supposed to be on Wednesdays but tomorrow is packed and I thought I'd do it today.
Term's over so it's the strange twilight of the university where everyone gradually goes off on holiday and very few of us are left in the building. It means there's some breathing room so I trudged through all my emails today to pick up anything I might have missed. There's some new projects coming up soon and I'm trying to figure out a mental calendar of the next six months and how everything's going to fit in.
Channelling
Another YouTube recommendation. Girlfriend Reviews. Basically it's someone reviewing what it's like to live her boyfriend who plays video games. It's very funny and has resulted in me an Santo saying 'hol up a minit!' around the flat a lot which is a good indication of strong cultural impression. Most of them are about video games and derivations thereof but this one for the Star Wars: A New Hope came out the other week and it made me snigger a lot so I'm sharing it with you.