Who is Thorne?

Thorne Huw Lawler is a geek. I am reluctant to say too much that is specific and changeable here because I am such a slob about updating the static content on these pages. So, fixed vital stats (excluding things which might be used for identity theft, sorry):

Height

~6ft

Weight

BIGNUM

Eye colour

blue

Hair colour

brownish, minimal

Religion

agnostic/curious

Geek

Geeky, geeky geek.

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Why a blog?

The front 'main' page here is a weblog. This is my direct reaction to the enternal problem of maintaining web content. I have had several differently structured homepages before now, all with grievous levels of staleness: I would write a page, then leave it to fester for years. The blog ensures that what little time I devote to doing stuff on the net is all up front, ensuring that my page is at least minimally interesting most of the time.
If the question is: "why blog?", my answer is more like: because this geeky trendy thing has finally convinced me to write down my thoughts on a frequent-if-not-regular basis, where innumerable personal disciplines have not. That it's all public is just an added openness and honesty bonus.

What is Trouble?

Trouble is my own little contribution to the internet. It might one day become an IT consulting company, or it might not. It is also (at least one) home-server, usually (although not at time of writing) running at my house. Trouble hosts many services, and aims to be available to all, for free or for very cheap. Trouble runs Linux.

Sane / Crazy? Huh?

The Sane vs Crazy thing was just my answer to the layout I decided I wanted: a heading, a footer, and a column of menu-ish stuff / border on each side. The actual purpose of the distinction is this:

• "Sane" stuff is the various internal pieces of my website and my life that are the customary fare on any homepage.
• "Crazy" stuff is the links that really get their hooks into my mind on the net, plus a smattering of mostly pointless and silly things that I concoct in my idle time. I update my "Crazy" stuff quite often, and old "Crazy" gets archived as such.

How? (technical)

The saga of learning to build and admin ones own fully autonomous all-singing, all-dancing internet server is too long a story for me to be bothered telling, and you would learn nothing from it. Everyone does that stuff their own way. This page, however (all the content under "/~thorin/") is rather more easily explained.

• Headings
  The headings in these pages are generated on-the-fly by a trivial little php script which uses the imagettftext function to render the needed titles as images. I am disinclined to give out the source code until I've given it a decent security audit, but the font at time of writing is called Grunge.
• Layout
  The layout of these pages is a terrible hodge-podge of modern, CSS-ish, standards compliant xhtml and ugly, layout/content using tables. The html and CSS you see here is almost all hand-written, even when it's machine-compiled, because I like it that way. This is also why the mish-mash; I had a certain look and feel in mind from before I started writing the thing, and have repeatedly tried to implement it in standards-compliant CSS, only to find that it falls to bits on obscure browsers like the one on my Palm Pilot, or that it requires so much hack to make it work properly on both IE and Firefox that I go mad. The table-based layoutworks. It's robust and easier to maintain than complex, multi-browser-tolerant CSS. So Nyeah!
• Structure
  This is separate from layout, because I'm actually talking about how I maintain this nice layout across multiple pages with regular updates. This is all done by a very elderly web innovation called Server Side Includes. This enables me to have a title variable which gets handed around, a standard left-side/header and a standard right-side/footer, each of which I can include in my plain-old html for each page. SSI is why these pages have the ".shtml" extension, rather than ".htm" or ".html".
• Timestamps
  Another venerable trick, and also a feature of server-side includes. With SSI enabled under Apache, you can use a line like this:
  

  <!--#config timefmt="%A, %B %e, %Y at %T %Z" -->

  to specify a preferred date format, and this:

  <!--#echo var="LAST_MODIFIED" -->

  to actually display the last modification date on the file.
  It even works when embedded in a sub-included standardised footer!
• Blog duplication
  The front page here seems to have a current copy of my real blog page embedded in it. This is by far the ugliest and most comfortable hack evident on these extremely ugly and comfortable pages of mine: It's a common-or-garden cron-job, which uses a web-client AP to scrape my main blog-page directly, and feed the relevant part of the page into my static shtml homepage. There are two ways you can tell, if you looks closely:
  1. The date of my last post is generally unrelated to the 'last modified' date on the bottom of the page. In fact, the 'last modified' date on my front page is completely spurious, and just tells you when the cron-job last ran. D'oh.
  2. Posts to my 'real' blog take a random length of time up to ten minutes to appear on my homepage. Cron-job interval is... you guess.

Can I have one too?