Sunday, February 24, 2002

Well, not a lot has been going on with the site. I'll need to investigate the issue with the counter. Not sure what caused it to reset, but I am guessing it had something to do with multiple users accessing the page at the same time. A good site for information about PHP is PHP Help.com. The forums are constantly monitored and the advice is elaborate.

What a pain in the ass it was this weekend trying to get the laptop to be able to access the internet via the desktop. What I decided to do instead of simply buying a cablemodem/dsl router-hub was to install a second NIC into my desktop and buy a back-to-back (or crossover) cable to connect the laptop to the second card. Well, I couldn't get it to work. I know a couple of people who might have some suggestions regarding this, so I still might be able to get it to work. Although, it might be more convenient to have the ability to add addtional computers to the network with little difficulty. I wonder if I am missing a step, or if Win98 (desktop) and Win XP (laptop) have problems communicating?

I was surprised that a couple of people signed the guestbook this weekend. One of them I knew, the other I didn't recognize. I'll have to investigate where she found my site listed. I suspect somewhere at Blogger.com.

How sad. The US lost the Gold. But, if I had to pick a country other than the US to win, it would have been Canada; they are a neat bunch of folks. :)

Saturday, February 16, 2002



Added happy little New icon and ability to be replace text with image by using <NEW>. It is case sensitive.
 
Updated the choose style page. Now you can decide which page, either The Daily Monkey, or the Silly Monkeys, you would like to be the default.


I should have a lot of time to update the site this weekend. I really don't have a lot of other things planned.

Ryan and I had a good time with D2 tonight. If anyone else has D2X and would like to join us in a game, email us; we'd be thrilled to have another along.

Thursday, February 14, 2002

Kendra and I watched Scary Movie 2 tonight. It was one of the worst movies we have seen in a long time. We were both really disappointed, since we like the original.

And, that was about the most exciting part of the evening. At least Ryan got ice cream and beer.
:(

Wednesday, February 13, 2002

Ouchy! I way over-did the workout on Monday! My arms are so sore that I can barely bend them! I guess I should be a little more careful when first starting working out again. :(

On a happier note, I have updated the counter so that the error where it would not display the number of hits the first time to the page has been fixed. Additionally, the value is incremented if the page is viewed by someone else while you are at the page; before it would remain the number that you first saw for the entire duration of your time on the web, regardless of how many would come and go. :-D

Tuesday, February 12, 2002

Worked out two days in a row! It is almost a personal best! :-D

I have updated the counter so that it will only update once per session. If you want to see it increment now, you will need to close down your browser and restart it. Great. Good job. Was it worth it? :-D

Monday, February 11, 2002

For the first time in a long while, I actually worked out today. It is amazing how quickly I felt the effects as I was working out. I am certain I will be sore tomorrow, but it is all good. :)

As you can probably tell, I have added a counter to the site. In its current state, it is pretty simplistic; every time you refresh the page will count as a hit. All I had to do was fiddle with permissions for the counter file to get it to work, since I had already written the script several days ago. I'll spend some time and adapt the script to handle multiple counters and also disallow refreshes as counting toward the totals.

Although it may seem trivial, the counter is the first step in creating many wonderous marvels here. :-D It makes use of reading and writing to a file, and knowing how to do that opens a world of possibilities. For instance, I have noticed that Blogger is becoming busier; I had a hard time actually logging onto the site to post this because of the heavy traffic. Thus, it may be possible to replace Blogger with my own Blog script. I'll probably start by replacing the html-gear I have with my own guestbook script and poll script, although you can feel free to continue to create and post any polls you want from html-gear.

I love PHP. :-D

Sunday, February 10, 2002

Kendra and I had a good time tonight. We went to dinner with Court and Dave at Camp Ticondaroga. Good food and very large portions. After dinner, we all hung out at Border's for awhile.

The neat part is that I am going to be the baby's godfather! :-D Hopefully that little bugger will come out soon.

Saturday, February 09, 2002

I didn't even think about the website last night; too busy watching the Olympic's opening ceremony and then playing Diablo II with Ryan.

I probably won't do much tonight, either. Kendra and I are going to dinner with Courtenay and Dave. That is, of course, unless she decides to give birth instead. If that happens, I imagine it would become a very interesting evening.
:-D

Thursday, February 07, 2002

Kung Pow: Enter the Fist was hilarious! The previews made it look like it could go either way, but rest of the theater and I were dying. I highly recommend it. The way they did stuff made me think of the old Woody Allen movie, "What's up, Tigerlily?"

Not enough time to work on any new stuff tonight. I should have time this weekend to fool around with my site.

Wednesday, February 06, 2002

Red Wings rock. :-D

Tonight I added the Shakespearean Insult generater and added it to automatically display when the page is reloaded. Give it a try.

I know that this has been done before and if you do a search of the web you can find a bunch of such insulting scripts. However, back in the day when I had the "Domain of the Andyman" hosted at umich, I had received the Shakespeare insult email and immediately decided it would be a good perl script. So, although it really isn't original, I was one of the original implementors of such a script, so it is kinda original. Hmm... At any rate, it was very easy to write in PHP. In fact, some of the built in functions of PHP make me wonder if it was designed with the thought of creating such a script.

Some other things I have been working on is a third template option. This one displays my two blogs side by side in the old school format. I have some addtional tinkering I need to do, but I should get that up tomorrow.

I also have been fooling around with writing a counter script. The way it should work isn't too complicated, and it was very easy to write. The difficulty I am facing is that the script does not have the necessary rights to create or edit a file. There might be something I'm missing, but I need to investigate further.

If anyone has any suggestions for neato things they would like to see here, please post at the Damn Dirty Apes (aka Silly Monkeys). I will be sure to promptly ridicule your suggestion and make you feel dumb. :-D
Kendra and I went to see "Mamma Mia," the play with the music of ABBA. It was a lot of fun and very interesting; they did a good job of working the songs into the play in a meaningful way. I give it my approval. :) Only down side was that the seats in the Masonic Temple are the most uncomfortable I have ever encountered.

I have made some corrections to my scripts so that they work better. I also cleaned up the scripts and set the groundwork for addtional features. Unless you are really observant, you will not notice any of these changes. You'll just have to trust me when I say that they're there. :-D

Monday, February 04, 2002

Since I love my honey, and she preferred the original name of The Damn, Dirty Apes, I have created an option under Choose Style that will allow you to select the name you prefer for the Silly Monkey/Damn Dirty Apes blog.

I love you, Kendra. :-D

In doing so, I needed to make a couple of additional changes that will make it easier to adapt additional features onto the site. Most of these changes will not be visible to the user, since the change really just breaks the visible webpage up into several smaller components which are then easy to rearrange without a lot of duplicated effort.
I have been working on my site a lot lately. It is just a lot of fun. Kendra has been saying that if I put forth the kind of effort I have been on developing this site into everything I do, I would be a dynamo of efficiency. I guess it all depends on how you look at it. I really enjoy playing around with stuff here, so it doesn't feel like work at all. I guess if I could "find the fun" in stuff, like Mary Poppins said, stuff I have to do wouldn't be so bad. Hmmm....

At any rate, the latest item developed for the site is my implementation of smileys. Right now, you can use :), :-D, and :( by typing in : ), : - D and : ( respectively. (Without the spaces.) I wrote a nifty little script that searches for those items and replaces it with images. Try it out; it is nifty. :-D

Saturday, February 02, 2002

It's been quiet around here lately so I have been playing around with the layout. PHP is a really powerful scripting option for the web. I have enabled cookies and now you now have an option as to which style you would like applied to this site. Currently, there are only two, but if you see a setup elsewhere on the web you like, I could easily add a third option.

Friday, February 01, 2002

I have discovered a fun online game called Sanctum. It is a "collectable card game" in the tradition of Magic: the Gathering, but done entirely online. Free to play, and a free deck of 60 cards is enough to check it out. No limit on amount of play, so feel free to take a look. You can find me under my handle, "A-Feeble-Mind".