One of the principles of having an online interface between you and the rest of the world that people find most difficult to grasp in this day and age is that it's not just a one time party. You can't just do it and be done with it. Nor can you work like an elf for a week and then do nothing for a year, then come back to it and work hard for a short while before leaving it again. It's an ongoing process of continuous creation, refinement, removal and re-creation. Yes, we can automate many of the processes for online development in order to make life easier, but it's not just an easy stroll in the park. Indeed, I have no doubt that every person who's started out online had ideas and fantasies of where they wanted to go, but I'm equally sure that 90% of those ideas fell by the wayside due to a lack of commitment.

And to that end I've been doing some more work on my own site both this morning and later tonight. After signing up to the Google AdSense programme a couple of days ago, I was trying to work out how to format the Google Adsense code into includes, such that I could have the required number of ads on my pages without the endless and ever so tedious code repetition. And now I think I've finally found a way to do it, and to integrate them into the forums as well. I'll play around a bit with it tomorrow and let you know the outcome, or maybe you'll just see it for yourself.

I also went back to working on my Ruby on Rails blog project, and am pleased to announce that the basic functionalities of creating, deleting and viewing posts and comments are now complete. The application by no means looks pretty, but it does the job. The next stage is to go right back to the beginning and iterate through the project adding more functionalities as I think of them or as they become logically necessary. I will look to upload a prototype of the application to the website for private (and maybe invited) testing later this weekend. The most frustrating part of Ruby development is the parser's sensitivity to hidden characters, such as the end of line marker. Java and C certainly don't have this issue. I finally had to download the Windows version of emacs, which is hopelessly non-functional with Supernova, before the file worked - I can only presume emacs somehow removed the annoying markers because the next time I tried to run the parser on it everything worked as expected.

Right’o, well I think I'm going to call it a night at least as far as me being at the computer is concerned; I'll join you all here later.