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What do you do behind the scenes when you update your website?
Last updated: Sep 27, 2006
1 Basics and preparations
1.1 The style
The style of the daily entries is much like that of the headlines with only a few differences. Like the headlines, the color coding system is used. Rather than how major the event is, it's how eventful my day was. Rather than numbered headings with titles, it's just the month and day. Following it describe the day's events. The last part is when I woke up and went to bed on that day. The time I wake up is the time I actually get out of bed (or start writing details on a dream if I got one), usually 20 to 30 minutes after I officially wake up. The time I go to bed is the moment I declare that I'm heading for bed and it's usually 60 to 90 minutes later by the time I fall asleep, 20 to 50 minutes spent writing the day's events at the end. The spacing system is otherwise the same, but there are no tables, images, or other such things. If a table or image is used, they're in the headlines as they're often associated with just that. The daily entries just give a day-by-day look at what I was doing on that day.
1.2 Preparations
1.2.1 Setting up for a new month
When the month changes, I make preparations for the daily entries much in the same way as the headlines. I get the basic format set up and copy it. There are two differences though. One difference is that the color and description must be that of when that day hasn't arrived yet. Because, most often, I'll have more days with that than days without. The second difference is that I paste ten times to get the ones digit from 1 to 9 and back to 0 again. With my hypercount ability, I can count the ten times I paste (one for a backup) within only 3 seconds. The upper limit of my hypercount ability is 8 counts per second where a sharp drop in accuracy increases, but at 4 and under I have great accuracy making almost no errors. I can change the day numbers as needed, first starting with a leading zero (such as noting the date as Jan 07), so it's easier to edit. I make these edits 2 per second as I use the keyboard and I've done this so many times. I then select all this, copy it, and paste it two or three times, depending on whether or not a month has 31 days. August, having 31 days, has it pasted 3 times to get up to 40. April, having 30 days, is pasted 2 times to get up to 30. February, the oddball, also gets 2 for 30 entries. The extras are just deleted. The leading zeros are also deleted, of which I can make 4 deletes per second on average (hint: up arrow, delete key (not backspace key), up arrow, delete key, up arrow, (and so on)).
1.2.2 Preparing for entries
At the start of an update, I delete the "Yet to be added" notice as shown in the screenshot. I can delete an entire row within one second using only the keyboard. At the bottom, you may notice something a little weird. It has "Frequently used symbols from character map for quicker copy paste....". Why do I have this you may ask? Bugs and an annoyance, that's what. When I copy a character from the character map, such as the degrees symbol, one I use frequently, it causes Wordpad, even in text-only mode, to cause the font to change and every time I save it, I get a notice saying that "you are about to save in text-only mode...". This behavior never occurred in Windows 98 SE when I had it and I could freely copy characters. If I use something else not in that list, which is quite unlikely, I first have to copy it into Notepad (starting it up if I don't have it running), paste it in there, copy that character from Notepad, then paste it in Wordpad where I need it. It's very annoying and it only happened the moment I switched to Windows XP Pro. The issue involves the character map - it should only copy the character(s), not all the formatting stuff with it. I can't just use Notepad because it has two bugs in it, one of which is new to Windows XP Pro. The first bug, present in both 98 and XP, is when large files are opened or a file grows very large. 35KB of text shouldn't cause "out of memory" notices, considering I've got 1.5 GB of it and there's also swap file. The other bug, present only in Windows XP, is when saving. By enabling word wrap in menus above, saving it, then typing something within a long paragraph (like this one), odd extra lines are added. When this happens, first disable word wrap and reenable it and it goes away. It's very annoying and this behavior never happened in Windows 98 SE. So, to prevent from having to deal with these bugs, I place this at the bottom. To prevent it from displaying on the webpage, I make it as a comment tag instead.
2 Adding the entries
2.1 Woke up and went to bed times
2.1.1 Preparing to add the times
Originally, I would just type the times I woke up and went to bed right after finishing the details of that day. With the extreme redundancy, I found a faster way and this is how I set it up to utilize the shortcut. I have four spaces after it as, after any period, there are two spaces, and after the month and day indicator, it's two more spaces. This way, I can just type the text starting from the center. With the odd spaces in the center, I can just quickly reference the times and insert them without having to bother searching for it when details are on the back side of a page or on another page. It's another trick to speed it up and make it easier.
I set it up by first typing the basic stuff - having four spaces at the start, the wake up time with a gap where the time would be, the bed time with a gap before the dot. I then copy the whole thing leaving out two spaces on the left then, with the mouse, I click where I need to go and paste. By doing this, I can do about two pastes per second.
2.1.2 Adding the times
Adding the wake up and bed times is easy at this point. I first start with the time I woke up then continue on with the time I went to bed. Here, you can easily see how it shifts constantly about 100 minutes ahead each day with occasional jumps and stops along the way. You may also notice that August 3 and August 14 are missing. On August 13, I was awake more during that day than on August 14. When I went to bed then woke up again, I remained awake for most of August 15 than 14 and thus a day is skipped. If I didn't skip days like this, it would get rather awkward as I'd often overlook the day switchover at 12:00 AM (midnight) or I'd be adding an entry for late June when it's actually the middle of August. Generally, every 13 days, I have to skip a day. On August 2, I woke up at two different times and went to bed at two different times. This is rarely encountered (and it's certainly not my first blog entry with this). It happens when I actually do wake up and do normal activities, but get too sleepy to continue on going to bed rather early, sleeping for a little extra time (about 90 minutes as shown here), then waking up and going to bed under my normal means.
After adding all the times, I have this:
Because I don't exactly recall the time I went to bed on a few of those days, I indicate this in parentheses after the time, again, copied from a base. By using a percentage here, it'd have a margin of error of 137 million years (for 1%, the age of the universe - doesn't include the future though as then it would be higher, likely infinity), otherwise meaningless as that's more than twice the amount of time since the dinos died out from that asteroid collision.
2.2 Adding the daily entry's content
Earlier, I didn't have the headlines numbered. At this point, I number the headlines. If you recall from the screenshot at the bottom of the first page (editting the headlines), you can see that a new entry has been added. Also, a small change has been made to another already-existing entry. Can you figure out which they are and what changes were made? Once the headlines are numbered, for reference when adding the daily entries as they're frequently referred to, I begin to add the daily entries. When much of the way into it, this is what I'd see:
This is otherwise the same as adding my notes from my dreams, only not as messy. The style is otherwise very similar in the written form. The time I wake up is at the top, just below the date and the time I go to bed is at the bottom. If I have second wake up time, I add that below with the second bed time at the bottom. In the very rare case where I'm awake for over 30-some hours, sometimes, two different days are mentioned together in one.
In the next page, we'll see how I do final touch-ups.
Introduction
Editting the headlines of the blog
Editting the dream journal
Creating images
Adding the daily blog entries
Final touchups before uploading
Uploading and testing
Footnotes:
None
