IdioC's Fifth Dimension
It has taken a long time but after five years, I5D is back up and running with something vaguely resembling content. Gone are the black backgrounds with lime green text, gone are the Flash menus that ripped off images from Civilization 3 as I couldn’t draw, gone are the frames, but most importantly, gone is the unholy mess and arguments I have had getting this system to work.
Let’s give credit where it’s due before I start taking excessive liberties; WordPress is powerful, versatile and has ultimately saved me a lot of time. I tried experimenting with my own engine coded in PHP and MySQL – the long awaited “Israkai” Engine to those who remember the name back from 2005 – which worked to a point, but getting it to manage content was something else. It also had more injection attacks than a heroin addict with a needle-based knuckle-dusters and was generally clunky, despite me being very pleased with the ultimately little I managed to achieve from it. It only proved that people seem to think you know what you’re doing if you give a project a fancy made-up word with no meaning. If only I believed I did, it might have worked!
The fun I’ve had making the I5D skin for WordPress is worthy of another post for another time. If anyone else wants the skin code for modification for their site, contact me. Details will soon appear in the “Idiography”. It’s a pun on “biography” involving “self”.
So what have I been doing over the past five years? Well, I’ve been occasionally swearing at the website trying to get something to work, for example:
“If I find an engine that’ll let me upload stuff I can work on the comment… This one seems to work quite well… that’s the same skin everyone else uses… oh I’ve broken it. Buggerigars.”
For the record, any random expressions I’ve come up with will appear in the “Idiolect” section at the top with definitions and list of posts where the word has appeared.
Work on the website has been generally slow for the past five years. There was an apologetic note from 2005 in HTML over how I gave up trying to update the old Flash site. I was proud of the design when it first worked and eventually subbed out the lime green for a dark blue to make it easier on the eye, but it was as user-friendly as a saxophone to someone whose hands are gaffer-taped together and the graphical interface was as smooth as cushion made of dead hedgehogs. The radial fills still haunt me in my sleep and updating the thing was a tedious chore as I’d not figured out the correct way to an object-based approach. Cue manual updating for everything in Flash. Cue disillusionment. Cue five years or relative silence.
My University course, society activities and being suitably wenchstrated (perhaps a fauxvinistic term, admittedly) have generally been in the way of me doing anything on the website. I’ve tended to be too busy, too drunk or too bed-ridden in a non-medical way to do anything on it. I’ve played a few games too and lurked on IRC channels, randomly photoshopping (or rather, GIMPing) things together – They will appear in the “Idiochromy” section for creative things – but nothing much worthy of note. More are to come from the older days but they’re on another machine. I might even put up some of the old Flash work. Might.
The name change I was working on was reversed because it didn’t make enough sense. It was going to be “Idiology” with a faux-academic aesthetic but then it sounded too pretentious. The main bulk of the site’s contents will be in the “Idiologue” but give me a random nonsensical name any day. For the website. Not myself. Ok, so the jury’s out but what’re you gonna do?
So the new I5D will have height, width, depth, time and stuff again like it was originally supposed to. To recap the sections:
- Idiologue: Will contain blog entries.
- Idiochromy: Will contain the more creative outbursts.
- Idiolect: Will explain what on Earth my silly little words mean.
- Idiography: Is my bio and contact page.
Have fun poking and prodding the site,
IdioC.
