Now that I've finally gotten around to the part of the fest that involves a little bit of code development, and wanted to add a new feature or two, I had to come to terms with what a terrible mess the lounge codebase has turned into.

On the last fest, back in December, I began work on the overly ambitious task of attempting to convert the entirity of the Bitscape's Lounge into xhtml strict compliance, with all layout and presentation controlled through the beauty of css. It was a wonderful idea, but I only got about half done. Thinking I might pick the rest up after the fest was over, I left the code changes sitting in my test directory without committing the changes to cvs or uploading them to the live site.

Since then, I've found myself wanting to add or change little bits of this and that, here and there. Maybe I should have setup a separate cvs branch. Maybe I should have done a lot of things. But what I did was move some of the converted files into things with names like "aquarium.pl.backup1", then pulled the running version from cvs, and made my little changes. Sometimes, I would commit them, sometimes not.

Today, wanting to go on to something else cool, but unable to handle the payload of my mess, I said to hell with it. Either this css-based layout stuff gets committed and goes on the live site, or I trash the developments from the last fest and remain in the world of html tables forever.

This afternoon, I slopped what I had together into something that resembles working, reimplemented some of the forked changes into the css-based version, hacked a little of this and that, and now what we have on the server, as well as my my cvs repository, is the css layout version, albeit not as finished as I had wanted it to be.

If the page looks a little or a lot different, that's why.

If my irresponsible and largely untested changes have turned something that worked before into total shit on your browser, I beg anyone and everyone to PLEASE inform me. Just a tiny comment -- anonymous is fine -- to the NeoContent Solutions column to let me know if something doesn't work for anybody. If there's a problem, I'll do what I can to make it better, even if you're using a browser I don't have or hate.

Even in my browser, a few things look a little wierd/different at the moment. But in the long term, I believe this change will be very beneficial. It's long past due.

So anyway, happy festing to all and to all a happy fest.

P.S. Oh yeah, by a semi-accident in the forking, the Bloglines box is back again too. I can't decide whether I'm happier with or without it. I guess I'll leave it there for the time being. Any comments about that (like / don't like) are welcome as well.