This is the name of the new site backend I've been working on. Now, for anybody who's been paying attention I haven't written a web engine since Tetra 2. The last time I worked on it was sometime back in '05 I believe. Back then I was extremely proud of my little creation but I look back on it and think to myself "that is one bloated piece of crap". It really was. Over 2500 lines of code. In comparison my new engine is only one or two hundred lines of code and almost as powerful (or it will be).
From a design standpoint Purple Fusion is way different from Tetra. Tetra was built around an object-oriented core. From an interface standpoint this was very clean. However, it did lend to some slowdown and made adding new modules cumbersome at best. It also limited what you could do with a module (to a degree). The new engine completely throws objects out the window (almost, the main class is PurpleFusion and that's the only one) and goes for a scriptable approach. Each page is it's own seperate page script that makes calls for getting data, displaying templates, etc. This makes creating new pages incredible quick and eliminates redundant code. Here's the script for the front page:
<page title="Home">
<template:page_head>
<db:entries limit="15" sort="entry_date" order="desc">
<loop:entries>
<dblink:category_name table="categories" link="category_id">
<field:entry_date type="date" format="m-d-Y">
<field:entry_body type="standard">
<process:data>
<template:entry>
<end:loop>
<template:page_foot>
<end:page>
As you can see it borrows from SGML's tag structure. Because of the tag structure it's very human readable and makes for quick prototyping. I'm incredibly pleased with the way it's going right now and hopefully I'll have it running this site in a couple of weeks. Now that I think about it I could even speed things up by generating a cached version of the source code and just include that instead of parsing the page all the time. Yeah, this rocks.
No offense to the state, just a little thing Dave Berry is always pointing out (you can't spell Florida without the "duh"). If I haven't mentioned the fact that Dave Berry is one of the funniest columnists alive, I will do so now and tell you to go out and get some of his books. The Guide to Guys and Money Secrets are my personal favorites. But, this all really has nothing to do with this blog post so I will move along.
I guess the first thing I want to say is that Guitar Hero II is pretty much the best guitar-based game ever created. I kind of sat on the edge about it for a while because the song list seemed kind of meh compared to it's predecessor, but I decided to give it a chance and GameFly'd it. I was unimpressed for a while and then I hit the boss song. Freebird. All 9 and a half glorious minutes of it. Needless to say I went out and just bought the game the next day and now I rock out on it all the time. Maybe I'll post a video sometime. Oh, and a sidenote, this whole Guitar Hero madness made Chris buy an electric guitar so maybe one of us'll be the next Van Halen or we can form a band and resurrect the glory days of the 80s. Maybe...
I'm back to my old self again and have created a new design for the site. With everybody going "Web 2.0" I figured I'd better jump on the bandwagon and stay current. However, in my defense, the original Tetra design used rounded tables before rounded tables were the thing to do, so I'm a trailblazer there. I'm going to wait to implement the new design until I've gotten a new backend written. Wordpress is nice and all, but all the spam (which you lucky souls never see) is really driving me insane. Besides, I can make a less bloated piece of software to suit my needs. When it comes to web stuff I usually trust my own work over that of others. Maybe I'm an egotistical jerk that way :-P.
Shifting to my public life, things at work ar fairly normal. However, I did drop the CSM charade and joined Robin Hood's Merry Men, or as everybody else knows us, cart pushers. You're probably thinking "Wow! Why did you take that kind of a pay cut just to push carts, a lowly job made for the slime of the Earth?". Firstly, I wasn't actually being paid CSM wages, so I lost a whole .40 an hour. Secondly, that .40 an hour has bought me some sanity and hapiness. The lot is a nice, quiet place to be. The carts don't complain about their credit card being denied, or that something rang up the wrong price, or.... you get the picture. I don't know about people in other towns, but Bartians seem to be a whiny bunch (I'll admit I can be whiny as well).
Well, that about wraps it up for this blog post. Tune in next Friday as maybe I'll make this a weekly thing. It would do me some good to get into some sort of schedule of doing things.
To celebrate my laptop being back I decided to finish up the new design and launch it. So, here it is! Everything is as it should be; my laptop is back, my blog is running on my own design again, uhhh.... other stuff... yeah. So, anyways, enjoy :-)
A while back I worked up a new design for the site and I've been working on getting it finished the last few days. Comment posting still doesn't work and the "My Digg" bar is broken, but I think this is probably one of the best designs I've had in a while. But don't take my word for it, see for yourselves. The comic page is also done in this style, though it's not quite working yet.
And I isn't ejucaded either :-P. Not much new going on over here. I'm still doing the Clear Creek site (sparked an idea for an ASP.NET wiki :-D). Also, did a bunch of work for the Schindler's again. Made a profitable $50 off of it which I've promptly used to buy myself a 120GB hard drive. Oh, and I got a free $20 Amazon.com gift certificate for taking a [http://www.gametap.com]GameTap[/link] survey. I'll probably buy Episode III with that (totally free :-D).
Jeff bought Jedi Academy last week. Awesome, awesome game that one is. Never thought I could get into an FPS, but I did. It's $10 software so if you see it I recommend picking it up.
That seems to be all. I know, short entry for such a long reprieve. Until next time :-P
