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Catulog
I have been reading Lovecraft on Wikisource. At some point early in this endeavor (before I had put 2 and 2 together to realize that Wikisource’s URLs would be just like Wikipedia’s) I tried to search for “wikisource lovecraft” in Firefox’s built-in search bar. As you may or may not know, the FF search bar tries to offer helpful suggestions once you start typing text into it. Once you get to about “wikis” it has suggested “wikisource,” which is pretty much par for the course, but the second suggestion is “wikisource catullus.”
Now I know that this probably (which is to say, almost certainly) means that most people who go to Wikisource are taking a Latin class, but deep down I’d like to think the world is full of people seeking the most venal and lurid pornography that antiquity has to offer.
I spent yesterday assembling a new theme for the site. I think it looks pretty nice and, more importantly, so does my fussier counterpart. It’s not without its gaps, which I hope to be making another pass at soon, but for a first try I think it stands up.
When we first set this thing up I played around with writing the whole thing from scratch, as it’s my instinct to avoid frameworks. We got to the point where we had a roughly 75% functional framework I decided I didn’t really like working in PHP, and that we’d be better off with an install of ye olde Presse of the Wordes. After that I was inclined to leave well enough alone for a while.
But you know how things are. Inevitably we got fed up with how the thing looked, so I opened up the themes that came pre-installed in an editor and started extrapolating. Obviously I don’t know enough to say whether it’s good or bad in the grand scheme of things, but I was pretty happy with the level of obfuscation involved in dealing with WordPress code. Its classes are fairly sensible and having all the args be key = value pairs with defaults keeps the spaghetti level pretty controllable.
Nothing, however, was available as a buffer against the worst part of any internet-oriented project: CSS. Im not sure how this became the right way to do things, but it’s really awful. Considering how miniscule its task (styling markup) is, CSS is unforgivably complex, and its inheritence model is totally broken. It really promotes creating great masses of intractable code. I imagine I’ll go ameliorate that at some point, but the fact that I have to at all is pretty annoying.
Sour grapes aside, it was pretty fun overall, and the slightly more iconoclastic look is nice (although I can’t really take credit for any of the design decisions; I just put it together.)