Maybe when I've generated some ninja cool graphics as a result of reading SOE, I'll use them to make this page look prettier. Maybe I can even replace Fireworks with some functions. Now that would be cool.

I got bored of orange, so I ditched it. The new design sucks for several reasons. It's just the front page rehashed, and I don't want the nav cluttering up the top of the page, but obviously I can't do without it (answers on a postcard). Also it's really just a bit dull. Still, at least it's a change.

I need to tidy up the code behind the journal a bit as well, but that's just another thing on the huge list of things that will never ever get done :-).

Sync a folder to a server to which you have SSH access (and which has rsync installed). The options include compressing, checksumming, being verbose and archving, which does a bunch of stuff. Also, I don't want to put Vim's swapfiles up to the server, so by excluding them here I can run this command while editing. Excluding .DS_Store is a must for OS X users. Pesky .DS_Store files.

rsync -cavz --exclude=\*.swp --exclude=.DS_Store --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh folder server.com:dest

I have just returned from a week spent working and partying hard in Norwich. A week which culminated with one of my friends getting married. I had the pleasure of going along on the stag night as well. I also had a meeting with an accountant which was pretty informative.

I spent the week staying at Greg's and had a pretty good laugh hanging around and doing bits of coding. On Tuesday I met up with Rob from Studio Soup and Mike to have a drink and talk work at lunchtime. Afterwards I went over to Studio Soup's new offices to have a look around and say hello to all the gang. It was good to see them all again and I jabbered and jabbered with them all. I discussed plans for business quite a bit and got some interesting advice from the management.

On Wednesday I went to see Ben Th's new pad in Norwich, very nice. Afterwards we went down the pub and talked about making replica G5 cases. Ben is an apprentice welder and is fast learning skills. He wants to be a bit more enterprising however, and one day will probably strike out on his own. Hopefully the G5 cases will give him an avenue to start thinking about his own business and making some proper cash.

Thursday the accountant came. He was a nice guy. This was a free initial consultantion, but he stayed for a good few hours and we got some really good advice. He told us the pros and cons of starting a company. There aren't many cons and there are some good pros. We would be limited liability for a start. Also, trading as the company would tighten things up in terms of salary and such. The more I think about it the more it sounds like a good idea. Just to formalise things and create a platform on which to build and build. For a while I wasn't sure whether I wanted to go the full ambition route. My main reason for going freelance was that I wanted more time off :-). But I've realised that if I really want to put my feet up then I will need a support group in the form of a company around me. Greg and I can only handle so much as well. In the longer run employees would also allow us to concentrate on thinking up cool software, getting the employees to do the implementation.

That night we went to Peter's stag do. It was fun. We went to a casino in Great Yarmouth. We expected it to be a dive, but it wasn't actually too bad. The gambling was quite fun once we'd had a few drinks. Roulette sucks, you just throw your money away, but Blackjack was much more fun, there being some element of skill. Plus it involves cards, which is always a bonus.

We all lost a moderate chunk of money, the mode average being about twenty pounds. Greg managed to win himself twenty quid mind, which was damn impressive all things considered. Gambling is funny. After having been in there for about half an hour I spent a good few minutes discussing with Greg the fact that the most sensible thing to do would be to just stop gambling. I guess he proved me wrong though.

After the casino we went to a lap dancing club. That was kind of weird, but, honestly, pretty good. The girls were beautiful and the dancing very sexy. The atmosphere was interesting, the men all being completely docile and the women being in control. We bought Peter a dance and also got one for Norm too, as it was his birthday. Rich, Greg and Charlie also got private dances. Only the single guys (and those with excuses) got dances though, so we were pretty well behaved all in all. We didn't even get too drunk and I was only marginally hung over the next morning. That didn't stop it taking us three hours to get breakfast though.

Yesterday Peter and Lucy got married. Congratulations to them, they looked very happy. We all went down to the Arts Centre in Norwich and got merry with them and many friends and family. It was really nice actually, good beer, lots of people to talk to. Even the dodgy music didn't stop Louise and I dancing. There was a party at Thickthorn afterwards as well, which was a bit weird as Peter and Lucy had of course gone to spend their first night of marital bliss in a hotel. The party was good though, involving some very fine hats.

Take one much-maligned transformation language and throw in some functional style. XSLT has functions, you may know them as templates, but that doesn't stop them being callable objects that have parameters and return values. You just have to know how to use them.

I have been convinced for some time that making brochureware sites should be reducible to making some images and an HTML template and using XSLT to combine those with a XML definition of the site structure and content. It's something I've tried before and succeeded. The first time I did it it didn't take me any longer to write the XML and XSLT than it would have done to make the site, and changes are still easier to apply. This time I'm making the XSLT more general with functional templates and cleaning it up a bit. I'm also limiting the scope of the work done in XML/XSLT to the text processing part, rather than moving files around and that sort of thing.

A thought that just occured to me, this would be an interesting strategy to employ to power a basic CMS. Currently a CMS stores everything in a DB and uses scripts (PHP etc) to retrieve that data and make a page. An XSL-powered CMS would store content in XML files and whenever one was edited would use XSLT to transform that XML into an HTML file which would then be stored on the filesystem. Voila, instant caching. The file editing would involve a bit of script glue, but that's nothing special. Might be worth trying next time I do a CMS.

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Last updated at 15:53, Tuesday August 12th, 2008. All times are shown in 24-hour clock format and are BST.

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