Fortunately, my hangover this morning tapered off as the day went on. After a nice, long, late morning nap on the couch, I felt much better. I suspect part of it was caused by the fact that I when I did get to bed, I didn't sleep very well, and kept waking up throughout the night.

Yep yep. But what would life be without those moments?

I've been tinkering around with the Lounge code in between surfing websites and getting increasingly hooked on bloglines. What's really sweet is that after you've built up a bit of a profile by subscribing to enough sites, collaborative filtering kicks in, and it can start recommending more sites that you might enjoy. Subscribe, and let the content pour in without having to recheck each site every $interval. RSS, though it's been around for years, is finally coming of age.

At this point, I think I've got enough sites to keep me busy. Don't you?

I want to get comment previews working, but thanks to the way-too-clever way I did things (but less than 2 months ago) with my form object code, it's proven more cumbersome than it really should be.

I think the Bitscape's Lounge code is perhaps an aggregation of all the worst perl coding I've done over the years. I use it to experiment with all sorts of strange ideas (which often turn out to be duds) that pop into my head, but still manage to end up with something somewhat usable.

I don't like the navigation as it currently exists. One reader who was honest enough to say something about it in the comments after I dispensed with the old cover page was right. If you only visit this site once or twice a week, and it happens to be one of those weeks when I type a rambling (or two) each day, finding out where you left off is cumbersome.

Making it default to last article read + 1 for logged in users would be a half fix. But it still doesn't take care of people, with or without logins, who like to hop around and get a nice quick overview of what was posted recently.

I see 2 possibilities. One would be to expand (and rework) the "Nearby Content" box. Another would be to surrender to the trendy blogging style, and list all the recent articles on 1 page, starting with the latest. Since I often tend to be verbose, it would probably be wise to put the first paragraph on the "main page", with links to pages with the full rambling (think slashdot, kuro5hin, ad nausium).

Of the two, I think I like the former option better. But I'm still not totally certain. (Actually, a slightly fancier, modified version of the former option is sort of in my head right now, but before that happens, I need to work out some stylistic issues. Ho hum.)

It also occurs that it might be really cool, but probably not likely, to do some insane Javascript-driven DHTML thing that puts the whole thing in a big dynamic page, where you click on a navigation item, and instead of loading a whole new page, it would grab fragments from the server, go through the DOM, and repopulate items as necessary. (Kind of like kuro5hin's dynamic threaded mode, but with the whole page.)

Of course, even in this age where cruddy old Netscape 4 has finally become a virtually extinct species, this has its problems. Right now, we're at the stage, where for pretty much all basic stuff, if you code to the standard, everything mostly much works across all browser implementations. (Nutscrap 4 being the exception, but see extinct species comment.) But the fancier you try to get, the less true this becomes.

Though Mozilla has pretty much got the DOM, CSS, and ECMAScript standards covered (though even it isn't at complete 100% yet), I don't want to make the page unusuable for people who wander in with varying degrees of conformance such as Opera, Netpositive, Konqueror, Safari, Lynx, or, heaven forbid, MSIE. (We know you're out there. The logs prove it.)

I'm happy using standards to their full extent to beautify things, and if certain browsers (ahem, I'm looking in the Redmond corner again) aren't up to snuff on their rendering capabilities, at least the content is still viewable, even though everything might not quite look as nice as it would under a correct implementation. That's a compromise.

Anyway, enough ranting on that.

Though we're still in what amounts to the planning stage, I'm actually finding myself fairly excited about this latest scottgalvin.com thing. We'll call it a "venture". If the market is where he says it is -- and I have reason to believe he is right -- we may actually be able to pull this off and make not an instant dot com fantasy fortune, but a decent living.

I'm hesitant to reveal details here at this stage. Though I have signed no NDA, nor taken any vows of silence, it think it prudent to wait until something resembling an official press release goes out. Hah!

I do think he is onto something here, in a way that I never have before. Last fall, and earlier this year, I felt like I was mostly along for the ride, largely for lack of anything better to do. Though scott sang the praises of the hosting business to the high heavens, I wasn't fully convinced, which is not to say that I was unconvinced either. I was just there, doing bits of coding, coming to the occassional meeting with him and Jaeger, supplementing my lack of cash flow, listening to scott pontificate, and occassionally making suggestions. The viability of the business, though not outside my sphere of casual interest, was largely moot to me.

With this new deal (could we call it "Project X" without giving anything away?), emotionally, I feel like I have a stake in the outcome. Suddenly, I've been thrust into a position where my ideas are not only politely listened to, but necessary. It's an opportunity to use the skills I've been developing for years, not just in the capacity of a hired drone, but a key contributor and shaper. That in itself is very invigorating.

Self-doubt makes me wonder if I've gone into my own mental fantasy land about this. Perhaps I have. Perhaps it's just too painful to continue to think of myself as an unemployed bum with no money in the bank, no prospects, and no worth to society, so I get together with another delusional friend and we tell each other stories about what great tycoons we are.

But I've got the technical skills. He's got the business knowledge and the contacts. So maybe, just maybe, we could pull off a real success.

I hope so.

I'll be out on a mountain tomorrow. Too much CRT radiation is bad for the brain.

Lights out.