Syntaxercises

New website! I've wanted to yank metoca.net out of the stone age for some time now, but never seemed to find enough time to do a proper job. I did manage to mock up this design between March and June of this year, and finally decided to code up a lightweight blogging engine to feed the design with words.

(The mockup also includes a picture widget that'll display sets of pictures fed from flickr, but I haven't had time to implement that part yet.)

Anyway. This week, while in the midst of the brain-frying end-of-semester push that is a CS major's life, I decided for some reason that I should write the blogging engine. It took a couple hours but came together nicely, and I'm pleased with it as a product of the thoughts that have been simmering on the back burner for months. But why do it now?

Partly because I'm really creative when finding ways to procrastinate. Partly to get it off the back burner; I need all my neurons in gear as I chug along into the last two weeks of my bachelor's degree. But also to give me the equivalent of a little cross-training. I've been working almost exclusively in Objective-C and Java for the last two months, and I needed a change of pace. Plus, I could see how sharp my Ruby was after not doing much in it since April of this year.

The answer? Not very! I kept on writing bits of code with semicolons and brackets - Ruby doesn't use those in the same way - and with new Object() instead of Object.new. It took a little while before Ruby started to flow naturally. I felt lost and rusty - luckily it's all better now. This came out well and now my mind is clear.

So - enjoy. Commenting and photos will be along eventually, but probably not before I close the books on all this schoolwork.