For some reason I always put the cart in front of the horse. In this case, I'm referring specifically to the use of MySQL and its database storage engines. Since I was excited to begin my development on the new site, I blindly chose MyISAM as my database engine of choice for MySQL.

At the time, I didn't really care because I just wanted to get things of the ground and everything seemed to work. Hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it, right? Wrong!!! Once I got into testing and added more complexity to my web application, I needed transactional and foreign key support, something MyISAM doesn't support. I wasn't sure what I was getting myself into, but since I tend to be bothered when something isn't perfect, I decided to go for it and move from MyISAM to the InnoDB storage format.

Courtesy of a massive hardware failure, I embarked on a journey about 6 months ago to move from a Windows infrastructure to a LAMP infrastructure for the ePartment54 website. The language of choice on Linux was obvious at the beginning, PHP of course. PHP wasn't that much different than anything else I had programmed in, but I quickly learned it got ugly real fast.

Sorting through the gobs of code which was my initial stab at a PHP version of the site, I decided to adopt something that was being hyped in the programming community...Ruby on Rails. To my surprise, it was a kind language that preferred a framework that forced you to do the right kind of things instead of allowing you to make a mess of it. It uses an MVC architecture which stands for Model, View, Controller.

I've received a few inquires lately about the website, or what used to be the website. You see, most people are not even aware that this Rails beta site exists. Well, that is unless you are one of the few victims that I'm regularly asking feedback from. Needless to say, I thought I at least owed everyone an update so I took care of that a few minutes ago.

You see, for about the past four months, I haven't touched the site most people are familiar with. Prior to that time, I was regularly updating the site with information regarding my progress. Since I haven't done that in a while, I managed to scrape a few screenshots together and thumbnailed them for people's viewing pleasure, those that frequent the main site that is.

Other than that, I've revamped all of the already functional blog code so that it was more solid. With the changes that I've made to the code, the site has better performance, does the necessary validation, and manages tags a whole lot better. In fact, before, if you deleted a blog, there was a bug where both your personal tags and all tags for all users weren't being updated properly. Ewww! Only a few more bugs left to work out!

Alright, so this blog is a rant and dedicated to something known as the peek-a-boo bug in Internet Explorer 5.x and above. What I'm about to describe may not be exactly what people describe as the peek-a-boo bug, but that's what I'm calling it because it's close enough. I referenced it in a previous blog, but only now have I completely resolved the issue. At least I hope so.

I've spent the last 2 days, approximately 5 hours off an on, trying to figure out a way to overcome IE's poor CSS implementation, yet again. Click on the image above and look at how IE was punishing me.

After my weekly feeding of 24, I decided to see if I could stay awake long enough to add one more feature to the site. What feature you ask? Well, now when you click on the author of a blog, it will take you directly to all blogs by that user and provide you an instant link to the feed for that user It really was only a few lines of code since it is exactly the same as many of the other views for the blogs. I'll have to do some housecleaning sometime soon and apply the 'Don't Repeat Yourself' (DRY) concept to some of my duplicate code. I don't have that much, but there are a few areas where I could centralize some of the code.

So now if you visit a link like the following, you will be taken to all blogs by that user.

http://www.epartment54.com/user/dgm/profile

Cheers!!!