'Music' in Prospect Park

1 comment (closed), posted on july 30, 2005, tags: entertainment, me, new york

Before tonight, I had never seen The Sound of Music. I am not a fan of musicals. In fact, one might say I have an outright hated for them. I've gone on wild, hour-long rampages before, yelling about how the very idea of a musical angers me. So when Katia told me she wanted to see one of her favorite movies, The Sound of Music in Prospect Park, I wasn't thrilled at the idea.

But, as it turns out, I could not have enjoyed it more. There's something about seeing a movie with 200 other people who all love it. I mean, they love that movie. People cheered when songs started, when something good happened, and they booed and hissed—hissed—at the nazis. There was an energy in the air, something that made my hatred for musicals melt away instantly. After the aerial shots of Salzburg, just as Julie Andrews is visible for the first time and just before she begins to belt out the title song, the audience began to cheer and scream and clap. It was crazy. I've never witnessed such excitement and love for any movie, let alone a musical from the 60s.

I'm glad I hadn't seen the movie before tonight. It was such a great experience to be surrounded by so many fans the first time.

Status Check

23 comments (closed), posted on july 6, 2005, tags: dev, me, site, summer

The design has gone over ridiculously well. In addition to the great feedback I've been getting from everyone, the new design has also been featured on CSSVault, CSS Thesis, CSS Import and Unmatched Style. I'm very happy with the outcome and I'm glad everyone likes it.

Over the past few days, I've been making modifications to the codebase (now at version 3.0.2) and I've reworked some of the primary classes so the site is now much faster to render. Load times for every section are much faster, including some of the ridiculously long tag-based archives (e.g. the "site" tag), which used to take nearly two seconds to render but which now take well under a quarter of a second. The speed boost is primarily due to a change in the way I handle Markdown processing for my content.

I used to keep everything in the database in pre-processed Markdown mode, but after many conversations with Gruber in the past I finally changed the system to keep two versions of all content: one unrendered, Markdown version and one rendered, XHTML version. While it seems strange to have two versions of everything, it's worth mentioning what John said to me: "disk space is cheap, CPU time is expensive." The total size of the database before this change was 5.1 megabytes, the total now is 7.2. A measly 2MB and my site renders nearly twice, if not three times as fast. Well worth the space. And, since I still have the Markdown version of content, I make changes to that instead of having to write any XHTML. When I post updates to the database, they're converted using Markdown and stored alongside their unrendered brethren.

When I rewrote the quick search feature for this version of the site, I simplified the Ajax component and cleaned up the code so it's now much easier to add functionality (e.g. you can now scroll down and up, left and right (except in IE) and across columns using your keyboard), and I have more in store. The next addition is something I've not seen anywhere, but it's really obvious. I'm also going to expand Ajax use to comments, which I meant to do a long time ago but haven't had a chance until now (and, since the Ajax code is so much cleaner now, it won't be a nightmare).

Aside from all of this, or unrelated, rather, is life outside the website. I started a new job about a month ago (yes, another new job—the second in 5 months), and it's going really well. It's nerve-wracking to move from job to job like that, but it was worth it in the end and I'm happy where I am now. Katia and I have also been spending a lot of time at the pool this summer, and I'm currently healing from a terrible sunburn I received last weekend. Hopefully it will be nearly gone by Saturday so I can go back to the pool. I think the swimming is helping my arm too, so that's a definite plus. I've also started going to the gym again, which feels really nice.

Maniacal Rage Gets a Tan

28 comments (closed), posted on july 1, 2005, tags: announcement, design, site

Well, here it is. The new and (hopefully) improved Maniacal Rage. I had hoped to have it ready when I announced my joining the 9rules network, but it wasn't quite ready. It's still technically not finished, in that the "USDA Approved" seal is really just a place-holder for something else in that area that I haven't finished yet. I dubbed this version "tan" in development (the previous version was "dark"), and I've really been enjoying the lighter look of it the past few days as I finished it up.

The most important thing about this version is the beefed up quick search, which now appears on every page and searches smarter, faster, and includes the see also links. Now you should be able to find just about anything on this site faster and easier than ever before. I also cut out as much of the useless meta content I could (all that crap in the sidebar was just too much) and simplified nearly everything. It feels a lot lighter (both visually and in your hand) and I hope you like it.

I've also changed from categories to tags, and I've included a fun tag "cloud" on the archives page. If you've been to Flickr or any other big site recently, you'll be used to this sort of thing. I really like the idea so I finally incorporated it.

There are a few things left to do, most of which won't be finished until next week. They include ajax comment posting, fixing the RSS/Atom feeds for tags archives, and some other little things here and there. In the mean time, look around the new site and tell me what you think.