Whew, lots of work going on in the background! Too bad it doesn’t translate very well into everyday content - didn’t realize I hadn’t posted anything in over a week! Here’s a *short* breakdown of what I’ve been doing during that time:

• Some unexpected site maintenance. I accidentally deleted the css file early last week and had a near heart attack. The cascading style sheet is the lifeblood of the site; without it, the site is toast. Fortunately I had made a backup about a month prior, so 98% of the site was intact, but that extra 2% has been a mess trying to figure out what was broken and how to fix it (again).
• WoW enchants project. The project is still going strong and it’s gone though another major under-the-hood revision. I was needing to display more information than I had space for in the requirements section, so I came up with the idea of implementing tooltips. After much hardship, I finally found a solution to get that functionality working (more detail on that process and others next bullet). Next I needed a way to show where those requirements were located. So I began making maps and came up with a way to put ‘pins’ on any given part of a map to represent the location of said requirement. Taking that one step further, I made a new set of tooltips for the pins to show in-game coordinates and any relevant information regarding that location.
• Learning Javascript. This has been the black hole of where my time has gone. In order to do all the fancy things I described above, I had to crash my way through a few online tutorials and learn Javascript, because no amount of html or css coding was going to do the trick. I should say re-learn, because I messed with JS back in 2001, but it wasn’t enough to master the language by any means. Fortunately I’ve found it to be a pretty easy language to learn and a lot of fun to experiment with once the fundamentals were understood.

Tying back into the WoW enchants project, I used Javascript to implement the tooltip (except the map tooltips which are css believe it or not… couldn’t figure out how to reuse the JS code, so I improvised), all the redundant information in the tables (crest icons, source locations, some requirements), and the pin points on certain maps (Blood of Heroes is my current WIP). I need to point out that I didn’t actually make the JS tooltip, rather I downloaded the script from this site. It saved me a ton of headache, but configuring it to my needs still took awhile to figure out. Everything else, though, I can claim as my own work. In particular, the code for placing pins on a map is my pride and joy. That transformed from a long, nasty, not-fun-to-maintain piece of hardcoded html into a couple of javascript functions that automate the entire process. All I have to do is feed it a map, some WoW in-game coordinates, and any additional information regarding that specific location and it does the rest.

So what’s next? I have a few more JS experiments I want to test and I have a LOT of data entry to do I had planned on converting my WoW enchant html table structure into JS, but I can’t figure out a good solution… yet. If that falls through, however, I’ll shift gears and start collecting/uploading data. I’ll also attempt to at least update my progress on a more frequent basis if I don’t conjure up any new content. Speaking of which, expect to see some new Susie Q posts soon!

Before I go, I thought of this song as I was writing and decided it would be an appropriate companion piece (hence the title) If you haven’t played Portal it won’t make much sense, but it’s still a catchy tune none-the-less.