January 06, 2004

New Look for the New Year

You're looking at a brand new version of rohitsrealm.com to go along with a brand new Rohit, altered from the inside out. First, and most importantly, let me talk about the site. If you're not concerned with this and only want to read about my New Year's resolutions and stupid shit like that, skip down.

New and Improved Rohit's Realm.
I've been working on this new release since early December 2003, and have attempted to streamline the site and fix outstanding problems by redesigning the backend from the ground up. Following is a brief listing of the major changes I made:

• The most noticeable is the design: I went with a new color scheme because some people had been complaining that the white on black design was too high contrast. I never had a problem with it, but I aim to please. I researched some color combos and this new color scheme has been approved by enough people that I think it's a marked improvement over the old one.
• I rewrote the entire site from ground-up, ridding myself of the hacky (by design in my opinion) PHP code and wrote everything in Perl. I also made ample use of the Template Toolkit package for Perl which I have found to be one of the best tools I have ever used. The abstraction it provides between HTML content and CGI code is great.
• I wrote an archiving scheme for my blog entries, which generates static HTML files for each entry, based on month and year. What this means: Way faster loading of entries and comments, because no more database access on each load. Of course, this means there is a performance hit in writing entries and comments, but I optimized the common case.
• I resurrected the old articles I had written about a variety of subjects, including Tools and added a separate section for it. Unfortunately, the articles section was not ready to go for the initial release of this new version because of problems with computers (my fileserver in Berkeley is offline and I don't have all the old articles, if you must know), but it should be up and running soon.
• Stuff like my Duty Calendar system now integrates seemlessly with my site.
• I switched my RSS feed to version 0.91, because the latest library from CPAN only has buggy support for version 2.0. This should only be temporary.
• There are countless more changes and undoubtedly countless more bugs to discover: please, please, please, if you notice a problem or a bug, please email me ASAP: rohit@rohitsrealm.com so I can fix it!

New and Improved Rohit.
Not really. I just thought I'd pretend I was changed because some arbitrary event such as January 1st happened. But a new year is a good way of deluding yourself into thinking you're going to change, so I thought, why the hell not? Here are some of my resolutions for the New Year which I won't keep:

1. I'm going to gain weight this year. I swear. This is the year. This is the year my metabolism slows down. I'm approximately 140-145lbs now and just slightly shy of 6'2'', depending on how much I have eaten. This time next year, I will be 175-180lbs. It's going to happen.
2. Concurrently with gaining weight, I'm also going to regain cardiovascular fitness. In 9th grade, I was able to run a mile in about 6 minutes. Now I can't run a basketball game without panting.
3. I'm going to stop spending money. I need to stop. I will stop. No more buying stuff! Especially electronic stuff!
4. I'm going to try to stop being an ass. Wait. Ok, that's not going to happen. I'm going to try to be nice to at least one person every day. (Ha! We'll see how long that lasts...)

Lofty resolutions - yes. Will none be accomplished by Dec 2004. Probably. Any harm in deluding myself? None whatsoever.