You're at Fat Camp. Second day. You're hungry, and it's really starting to hurt. Badly.

You're here because your Significant Other finally badgered you into doing it. "For me," they said. You've been 300 pounds for most of your adult life, after a traumatic incident at a health spa. You don't hate yourself, you don't have a problem being fat. You're just fat.

It's day two. You and ten others are standing in a rough circle in a courtyard, morosely kicking a ball around while the Fat Camp Organisers are standing watch. Everyones effort is half hearted, as though their thoughts were on weightier matters. Which they are, their next meal.

You don't have a problem with your weight, but everyone around you does. You don't feel unhealthy, no matter what your doctor says. Your Significant Other has really been getting on your case though, and it's been weighing on your mind lately. You only decided to go to the camp because you're sick of the nagging.

You miss the ball, and watch as it rolls slowly past. You turn to walk after it, when the door to the courtyard opens. One of the camp coordinators carries out a small table and a plastic bag to the center of the courtyard, right in the middle of the group. From the bag he pulls a something that's familiar to all the people standing around, a packet of Tim Tams. He opens the packet, and puts it down on the table and steps back to address you all.

"There's a Tim Tam for everyone. Don't rush in yet." He pauses. "One of them is poisoned." And with that, he turns and walks back through the door.

You all stand around looking at the packet for a while. You know it's not a bluff, as you've lost other people from the camp from similar exercises. Still, everyone slowly reaches for the packet and takes a Tim Tam. You're all holding the Tim Tam's nervously. You don't want to be the one that dies, but you're really hungry and a Tim Tam would really hit the spot.

You meet eyes with everyone, as if you're weighing up the risks. There's eleven of you, and eleven Tim Tams. Someone is going to die. You know that it doesn't matter though, you know you're going to eat the Tim Tam.

You eat the Tim Tam.

(Inspired by Girls Are Pretty.)

I bought my own naginata at training tonight. I don't strictly speaking need one, but it's much better to use and maintain your own equipment than to use the club equipment. And it was a good excuse to whip out the camera and play with Photoshop again.

And I also did another banner image for the new template. I also updated the old banner image to make it more "wide browser friendly" (plus using a bit of css). Overall, I'm happy with the template. It actually gives me motivation to actually finish the site design / re-implementation.

I think I need to invest in a tripod. And yes, perhaps I am going somewhat overboard with the de-coloured images...

I've spent some time over this weekend playing with rationalising the site layout in terms of html and css. I've struggled a bit with it, but after some work I've separated out the relevant parts and put together a nice template. (you know, instead of actually working on the cms).

I put together two designs: one that looks very similar to the sketch I put together, and one that looks very similar to Subtraction.com. Of course, I'll be using the second one. Here's a look at it when it's running without the menu bar on the side. It's even valid XHTML 1.1 Strict!

I really do like that image I use at the top. Took it myself, ya know...

The first layout is crap. The second benefits from the crap in the first one. For instance, I finally read up on the visual formatting model for CSS, and used the first one go to play with that. When the time came to the second one, I had a much better idea what i was doing. I also determined the correct separation of content, layout, and CSS that I want to use, and defined 5 content regions that form the page, which are substituted into the template. They are: site navigation, page navigation, site menu, page menu, and finally page content (the real meat). This actually help with designing the CMS itself, as it shows that there are a few (more) things that need to be taken into consideration. For instance, page navigation can occur in multiple places. If you have fancy javascript (or whatever) for the navigation, then you need to make sure that your code can generate something that the browser will like having two of.

Anyway, enough playing for today.

You might have heard me mention it in passing before, but the site is going through a rather severe re-implementation at the moment. I haven't finished the design yet, and there's a number of things that I still have to figure out how I'm going to do, but it's progressing nicely. The main goals of the new design are:

• XHTML 1.1 Strict compliance (Currently not even strictly HTML 4.01 compliant!)
• Separation of data and layout (ie: good use of XHTML and CSS)
• Content Enrichment and Consolidation
• Templating
• Address usability issues (eg: the Blog comment system)
• Add per user (both hosted and guest user) functionality
• More Features!

Actually, there's a whole lot more reasons, but I just can't think of them at the moment (edit: except for an inline spell checker - thanks Michele).

That's all backend stuff. I could feasibly leave the front end looking pretty damn similar (only a few changes), but the current one is kinda dodgy in places. It needs fixing. So I've done some scratching around on a whiteboard for a general sort of look and feel. Looks very familiar doesn't it? Subtraction is the main influence, but there are influences from other places too.

In the past year or so I've been tinkering with html, css, actually reading through the standards, reading a lot of design themed blogs, and working with Michele. I think I'm developing a fairly solid foundation in web design skills and principles (for an amateur anyway). The new Content Management System (CMS) that I'm designing / writing should help make my corner of the internet a lot better. I've got a lot of ideas for it, and even though some of them are pretty ambitious, I'm fairly confident I can pull it off.

I get the weirdest bugs flying into my house from time to time...