MAYDAY! MAYDAY!

Been mucking with the website layout a bit more, but I probably don't have to tell you that because you can see for yourself.

Now that my so-called diary has grown beyond a few pages, I've tried to organize the older stuff so it's easier to archive. I'm not lazy but I want to do minimal maintenance work for instance when a month rolls over as one just did. I don't want to edit a bunch of files. I want to type in some three letter command or click a button and archive the old month and start a new one. So I created a system to do just that. The "Archive" link on this page takes you to a listing that's generated on the fly, so I don't ever have to edit it - theoretically. But here's where software gets to be challenging... The listing is not sorted. At the current moment the entries are in a reasonable order, but it's pure coincidence. It looks as if they are in a reverse order, but when May gets added it will go to the end of the list (not the beginning) and will look pretty strange. Sorting them all is going to be much harder. First there's the issue of reading all the names into memory to sort them. An alpahabetic sort won't work because they would come out apr,feb,mar. Numeric sorting is just as bad because it comes out 1,10,11,12,2 and is less intuitive than month names. Oh well, I'll live with it for the time being. The real solution involves month tables. Yucko. Either I'll have something worked out by next month or I won't. Right now I have an improvement. The question is if the automated solution to archive the previous month is going to be harder to pull off than editing a bunch of files every four weeks. How much time am I spending on an effort to save time? It's the classic tech trap.

To put this into perspective: many years ago I wrote a "color file" program for the Commodore 64. You could make post-it like notes in any combination of color, save them, print them, etc.. This was cool stuff at the time. It took months to write. One day it dawned on me that everything I had slaved over could be accomplished with a notepad and some colored pencils - which I could buy at the store for under a buck. Looking back, the paper files probably would've survived in a readable state over time. Even if I could read the Commodore floppy discs now, it's useless without that operating system.