So much to say, so little time. Spent yesterday in London at my Dad’s funeral (which was actually a lovely service, and huge numbers of people turned up to pay their respects, which was nice). I do find travelling by train very civilised, even if they have stuffed up Kings Cross tube station while they do whatever their doing. That said, the plans for the new tubey bit do look quite nice, and it will be ace to be able to get a train to Kings Cross, and then change over to get a train to Paris! Yorkshire to France in 4 hours or something.
I’m never sure if it’s better to have long rambling entries, or to split up entries into sub-sections by topic. I guess back when I first started this diary thing (January 2001) I decided against having a title for each entry, mainly because it started life as a side-bar to my webpage, with one or two line entries. In those days I did it entirely manually, by hand-editing the HTML each time I put in a new entry! Wasn’t very long before it went semi-automatic, with various source files being ‘compiled’ together whenever I changed anything. Now, of course, it is fully automatic, and each page is generated on the fly from my database of diary entries, reviews, etc. I do sometimes wonder about introducing topics or titles, but I figure bandwidth is so cheap these days I may as well just serve a whole year’s worth of entries in one go. One day I might get around to writing a web interface to my database, but it’s not too hard to just ssh into my machine and enter stuff into the database directly (and probably also more secure). I guess it wouldn’t be too taxing to put a search feature in here, that brought up any entries that matched said search string. Nervous about allowing too much access to the database though…
On a related note, I’ve switched back to using CSS for the layout of this site. It’s a much nicer solution, and I decided I would rather hack a solution for naughty browsers than bodge the entire site. The result is not entirely satisfactory for browsers like Netscape 4 or IE 5, but it is all legible now, and approximates the layout I designed. Early versions of IE 6 aren’t quite right, neither is Netscape 6, but c’est la vie. It’s perfect in Firefox and Opera (as long as you don’t mess with the user-agent setting!)