PolarLava::Blog

I've added a new Stock Quotes section to the site that is powered by a modified version of PHP-Quote.  This PHP class had the basic guts in it to retrieve quotes from Yahoo! Finance, but had some funtionality and display issues with it from my perspective.  These issues were resolved by writing a new get_single_table() function to replace the print_single_table() function.  This new function returns the HTML code instead of printing it and also is XHTML compliant.  I also expanded the table to include the date as well as the time.  Additional, I created CSS classes in my site CSS instead of using the Insert_Style_Sheet() function in this class.  Again, I don't like direct printing from functions and it really wouldn't work within my site's framework.  Seems to work for me and hope it does for you also!

As mentioned in my previous post regarding the CycleLog Search.  The Summary, Latest and Random Ride pages of the Cycling section (CycleLog), have been updated to the new code base.  Now begins another bigger task, the conversion of the "Add Ride" section to the new code base.  This section when complete, will also add the ability to allow editing of previously entered rides.  A much needed feature that currently does not exist.

[Updated: 07:47am EST, 24 Feb 2004]
One more hill climbed…I've now completed the "Edit Ride" feature and have linked it to all single ride display screens with a form button.  This now allows me to edit any single ride without having to manually edit the database.  This also covers 90% of the new "Add Ride" section that still needs to be completed.  What does this all mean to you?  Probably not much because you can't access that section!  But, it does allow me to correct any data errors so you can sleep well at night knowing that my cycling data is accurate.  ;)

[Updated: 12:44pm EST, 8 Mar 2004]
And here we are at the top of the "Add Ride" hill!  Also in the "you'll never see this" category.  I actually completed this about a week ago and never got around to posting this update until now.  I also fixed a problem in the Edit Ride section that occurred to me.  What happens to the mileage if you change bikes when you edit a ride?  Bad things, that's what!  I've now changed this to keep track of the original bike in the ride record and do a decrement on the original bike and then an increment on the new bike.  If the bike ID doesn't change, it does it in a single step.  Previously if you changed bikes, the newly selected bike would have it's mileage adjusted if that had changed and the original bike would not be affected.  Whoops!  All better now.

This effectively completes the CycleLog V2.0 upgrade.  Moving forward I would like to implement a "Bikes" section that will document my bikes and allow me to keep a maintenance history on them.  But that will have to wait as I've now decided to undertake a complete rewrite of this blogging system which will be known as "PolarBlog".  So until that is done, this project will be on hold.

[Updated: 12:33pm EST, 19 Jan 2004]
I know you were all concerned about the problem with the cycling search function.  What's that?  You weren't aware of a problem!  Well never mind then that the search results would return a link to individual rides by their date and not their entry ID.  Why is that a problem?  Well son, on those extremely rare occassions when I would have two rides on the same day, you could only get to the first one.  But don't you fret…I've fixed that all up.  And I've also fixed that annoying problem where entries without any heart data would display a Heart Data block with empy values!  I'm sure you'll rest more comfortably now.  You can go back to sleep now.  :)

A new and improved XHTML compliant THRAK homepage has been added to the site. The previous ugly version was under the SFFL site. But being that THRAK is the only active team to maintain a web presence, I felt it was time to bring it "into the fold".

I've added a photo gallery to the site. Probably of little interest to anyone other than me at this point! I've had a number of photos that I've been saving to put online for sometime now, but hadn't been happy with anything I came up with. Originally I had started to roll my own mostly to get the wedding photos up for the family. It worked, but not a good long-term solution. I then tried to a number of different web photo albums before finding Gallery, one that was quick, easy and suitable for my needs.

December 14th marked the one year anniversary for the PolarLava Blog.  Yeah, rah.  And what was that first post about?  The completion of entering my backlog of cycling data.  This was followed closely by the acquisition of a Christmas Tree.  An event that past uneventfully over a week ago (12/7) for this season.  Although I must say, this year's tree is bigger and better.