The website

The Bug

I am ready with tomorrow's page of Phill, so yesterday I thought that I might use the spare time on some of my many unfinished chores. So I choose to take the most difficult: the multi-langauge version of the Phill from GCHQ website.

So I sat for a while and read the simple code. Added some comments in English, translated others and changed some variable names, as I plan to publish the code as GPL (or other open source license). The problem was that last time I worked on it I used a lot of time on a stupid failure (I had pointed all links on my test-site to the real site, so when I pressed a link none of the changes appeared :(), and after having resolved this another strange bug appeared, and I did not have more time for PHP that week if the Phill-page should be ready Thursday too.

I was a bit reluctant to begin looking at my functions - so I began looking at the data-set which on my site is the image-files and their names. I erased all the pages already there and put in a new set... and what do you know? IT WORKED.

The thing is that my site has no database. It simply look at the pages in the pages folder, extract name and page-number from the filename and put it on the page in the right order. Elegant and simple. The only problem is if a page is missing - then you will only be able to see from 1 to the previous page.

I had simply done everything right but been sloppy with my data.

I still have a lot to do... French accents are showing as gibberish so I have to look at charset encoding, How do I store the text on the static pages in the best and most accessible way? XML? Am I going to have hand drawn buttons for each new language? Naming and editing the pages in the other languages. Looking into the RSS-stuff. Making the Danish translation so my mother can read it etc. etc. etc. But it works, and i hope that I will soon have the prototype running on the main site.

Design

Then I began working on the design. For the people who read my previous post I have decided for a RSS-link, and while I was at it I looked at other sites and they all had small buttons for their social media profiles.

You can see examples here:

David Revoy's Pepper & Carrot
Minna Sundberg's Stand Still, Stay Silent

So I tried to make a row in the black&white hand drawn style of the site:

As you can see it looks like hieroglyphs because the Facebook F and the Twitter bird is not there... which made me reconsider my boycott of both these sites. I never felt well in mainstream and has always been hanging out in the underground and avantgarde. But I got a bad seizure of the old dilemma. Should I just for once (I have done it many times) try to be reasonable and go where the bigger audience is? I am still not sure.

And then I was suddenly not able to work anymore. But the rework of the website does at least not look like an impossible task anymore.

All artworks in this post are made by myself, and are free to use under the creative commons licence CC-by