September 9, 1998
11:55 PM
I'm proud of myself! I accomplished something today I wasn't sure I could do. It took some trial and error, as well as a large chunk of time, but I succeeded, and learned a thing or two in the process.
I mention Frontier every now and then, as a scripting tool that I use to maintain my site. It takes some time to get set up, initially, but once you have your page templates, you just type in the text that you want to appear; for example, I'm typing in today's entry, just adding paragraph tags, and the header tags and an occasional hard rule. Really simple. So simple, in fact, that as I mentioned in yesterday's entry (I did?), I'm starting to forget some of the HTML I once knew, from lack of use.
Anyway, since I was tinkering yesterday, I surfed for Frontier info, and found a script for it that someone had written, that makes a calendar table. You tell it what month and year, and it organizes it all properly. All you have to do is type in a simple outline like this...
- 2
- lunch meeting
- assignment due
- 4
- Meet with boss
- dentist appointment
... and it puts all your events into the calendar. This is all well and good, and much faster than my method of making my entry calendars, but it doesn't let you make the numbers into links; and if you want to link something, you have to hand code it all, which is somewhat time consuming. In other words, I thought the script was a cool idea, but it really didn't help me much. Still, it was on the right track.
Jokingly, this afternoon, I told Jev about the script, and hinted that maybe he might help me modify it. He said he didn't know the Frontier scripting lingo, and that was that; but it turns out he knows the guy who wrote the script (such a small world!). Being too shy to ask the guy if he might be interested in making a similar script, and realizing Jev really didn't want to try, I decided to tackle it myself.
I got frustrated, I got stuck, and I got lots of errors and far from perfect results when I first tested things. But I figured it out, all by myself, and I'm quite happy with my little script. Granted, the guy who wrote the original script did most of the work for me; I just changed a few of the less complicated portions of it, but I did succeed. Not bad, if I do say so myself.
With the permission of the original script's creator, I may post the new script here to my site, in case anyone else is interested. Might be handy if you're a journaler using Frontier, anyway.
I'm late getting to sleep, so I'll try to start a bit earlier tomorrow night.
