I was on support duty last weekend, which means there was little time to be social and stuff. It’s not like there is always something to do when I’m on support duty, but I have to stay within a certain distance of a computer connected to the internet in case the shit should indeed hit the fan. On Saturday one of our clients was streaming an international football match with a potentially high number of paying clients, so I decided to monitor that event instead of going to Katrine’s place and drink beer.

Of course nothing happened, all systems nominal, meaning that I could’ve been drunk beyond all recognition and it wouldn’t have mattered much. I’m way to conscientious.

Anyway, since football is one of the things in life I found the most boring, I used the time to do a little hacking on the site core. The blog is now 100% database driven, with no static pages whatsoever. A challenge surfaced with all links referencing to the static blog pages. By converting to dynamic pages, every link would be broken. After a bit of internet surfing, Apache’s incredible mod_rewrite solved the problem. I have no idea how the mod works, it just works. With a simple regular expression, every request to any of the static blog pages in the archive are rewritten into a query string request and sent to one single PHP page. I’ve also been able to remove the query strings from all other links. Have a look at the links for the calendar on the side bar, for instance. Marvelous.

I also tried to redesign the site, but I just have to face it - I’m not a designer. Or realigner, for that matter.