Ok, so nobody except my brother mentioned the site redesign.

Is anyone reading this?

I mean, I know the Crazy Insane Cat People are reading this, because every few months I’ll get some obsenity-laden email telling me what they think of me for posting that dogs are better than cats.

Anyway, the redesign took place in two parts: Part 1) a color change for readability;

Part 2) the former static masthead picture (a really nice picture of the 3 of us from March 2003’s Ethan Fest taken by Mimi Kahn) was replaced. Although I still like the picture, it was almost a year old (aka “ancient” in both Internet Time and Boy-Isnt-Ethan-Growing-Up-Fast Time)

So I decided to do something I had thought about doing for some time: rotating thumbnails (wow, I just realized that sounds like some torture procedure).

The idea is this: show a selection of pictures from the Daily Dose of Ethan, which is really the primary reason for this site to exist.

There are 7 pictures at the top because that’s how many could fit across the screen at 800×600, which I think is a reasonable compromise.

The first 3 pictures are static: Ethan at birth, at 1 year, and at 2 years.

The last 4 are dynamic and change every day. From left to right they show Ethan one year ago, 6 months ago, 3 months ago, and today.

Each of the pictures links to the corresponding page from the DDOE.

Note: the rest of the post is rather geeky.

The disappointing thing (to me) is that the pictures had to be in a table (1 cell down and 7 across) because there was no way that I could find to line up 7 images next to one another using pure CSS.

My original thought was to write a PHP function to pull up the images. Then I realized that was a total waste of processor time. Every time a page was accessed, it would have to run the PHP code, and no matter how efficiently I wrote the code, there was going to be a lot of waste. Why should it recalculate it for every page when the information will only change once every 24 hours? Like I always say, “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

So instead I wrote a simple /bin/sh script which calculates the correct dates. The good news is that GNU Date makes this fairly easy to calculate 90 days, 180 days, and 365 days ago using the –date flag. However, there was one catch: there is no DDOE picture on Saturday or Sunday. Therefore, if 90/180/365 days ago = Saturday, I added 1 to the date to make it Friday. If it was a Sunday, I subtracted 1 to make it a Monday.

The /bin/sh script then creates a static HTML document which is called by PHP.

Since the site is mainly controlled by MovableType, it was a simple matter of editing my template. Those pages which were not controlled by MovableType are controlled by PHP, and I already had a global header variable declared, so by changing that, I was able to change all the files.

All in all, only about 5-6 pages needed to be changed in order for the entire site (or at least about 95% of it) to be updated.

One of these days I need to update to MovableType 3, which I’m using on some other sites and is a huge improvement over MT2.