Screw your contrast

Q. What happened to the wallpapers?

A. During the site redesign, I thought the wallpapers detracted from the purpose of the site, so I took them down. I wasn't going to put them back up but I had close to 10,000 hits during the first week of this month (June 2004) from people looking for the wallpapers. So, I've decided to put them back up

Q. I want to send you (hate/fan/regular) email.

A. I've set up an obfuscated email link at the bottom of every article that automagically adds the title of the article that [enraged|intrested] you, to the subject line. I've asked you people before to do this, as it helps me sort through the voluminous amount of email I receive daily, but you can't be trusted to do it, so I did it for you. Yea me.

If you can't figure that out, yell loudly and clearly at your computer monitor the cause for your complaint. Through the miracle of modern technology, this will accomplish nothing but it may be a little cathartic and help you feel better.

While you're at it, why don't you trundle over to the Disclaimer and scroll to the bottom to read my policy on email. It'll just take a second. Go ahead, I'll wait.

By the way, this website does not spam people. There are no CGI, PHP, Perl, Python or any other scripts for third parties to exploit and use my domain as an origin for spam. If you're getting spam from this domain, it's forged headers. I sign all of my email with GnuPG and you can even download my key if you wanna. Ergo, if you're getting unsolicited email from this domain that is not digitally signed by me, I didn't send it.

Q. I've found spelling/punctuation/grammar mistakes in some of your writings and I think this makes you a semi-literate, pretentious idiot. What do you think of that?

A. My sense of well-being exists independently from that of the opinions and commentary of faceless critics. Rough translation--I don't care. Seriously. And I'm not the only one.

Q. You sporadically update your site. When can I expect you to put up new stories or HOWTO's?

A. Initially, I intended to do daily updates. That didn't work out so well. So, I've switched to Mondays. I still put up new content sporadically throught the week, but I can (mostly) guarantee that there will be a new piece put up every Monday. And when I say I garantee that a new article will be up on Monday, I encourage you to hold your breath.

Q. Where did "grimthing" come from? You're not one of those "goth" people, are you?

A. I think Rob Malda explained this pretty well here. And no, I'm not goth. Probably the furtherest thing from it. Ask my wife. She's the expert in "all things goth".

Q. What browsers do you test your site in?

A. I've checked this site out in the following browsers, and it looked okay:

If this site looks like crap and you actually care, send me the OS/Browser combination you're using and I'll see if I can fix it, when I have the time.

Q. Well you wouldn't have a problem with <INSERT STANDAND HERE> compliance if you'd hand-code your site LIKE A REAL MAN!

A. I don't care. The W3C doesn't listen to developers. The browser programmers don't listen to the W3C and page designers don't listen to the W3C. XHTML, for all practical intents and purposes, is stillborn.

For the xml purists out there, yes, the site used to pass as XHTML 1.1 with the correct headers sent too. Javascript and the DOM wouldn't play well together and, of course, Internet Explorer acts brain-dead with XHTML content sent as application/xml.

So, I can't really see any benefit to using XHTML. Instead, I've opted to go the HTML5 route as per outlined by the WHATWG (google it).

Q. Do you use any CMS(Content Management System)?

A. Yeah, I use Bash Blogger, which I wrote. Keeping up a website is basically just adding new content and a bunch of small repetitive tasks, e.g. updating the archives, updating the front page, etc. Bash scripting is good for automating repetitive tasks, so this works out pretty well. Plus, if something breaks, I wrote it, so I know how to fix it.

Q. Can I sydicate your site?

A. Yeah. There's an RSS2 feed if you're into that sort of thing.

Q. Don't you support any other feed formats, if not, why?

A. Since the invention of the podcast, I can't find a news aggregator that won't parse RSS 2.0 feeds. Since this format is nearly universal, I see no compelling reason to further complicate code to support, in my opinion, unneccesary features.