This week has been interesting. In phasing out some stuff on Monday, I found I apparently missed some stuff the last couple summers and it made a bit of a mess. Oh well, I think it's mostly resolved now. If not I may have to write some scripts to go check stuff. There's been other stuff popping up which has kept me rather busy. Of course it happened right as I started getting into the swing of planning some major projects, so stuff is really piling up. Luckily I got some stuff in place where I just throw everything in my list and don't have to try and remember it. I can even set it up where things will disappear and come back over time so I don't have to think of them until later. I've created a monster that will hopefully just get better as I keep changing it.

Last night there was no Alias because some guy thought he was so important he should be on all the TV channels. I guess he's probably right though. I ended up taking advantage of the extra time to do coding. That coding led to my big announcement of the day, which was user stylesheets for our Incident tracking system. Basically I got sick of dealing with user requests for preference changes, "this would be cool if you highlighted that" and things like that. As I was doing major code cleanup lately I had been ripping out things, pushing them to css, and making the code xhtml. This meant not only a cool new look, but stuff like printstyles as opposed to a printable version, which saves both me and the users from a lot of trouble. Mr. Boyum and I have been sorta chatting over the past few months about the possibility of user defined stylesheets and how cool they'd be. So when redoing comments last night and making some major UI changes, I started tagging a ton of stuff that I didn't necessarily use with classes, made a style to return the "classic" look, changed the header script to include a user css link if the file exists, and an interface for people to change their stylesheet. The thing has turned into something like css Zen Garden. Boyum has his sharp professional look, brooke has an all-uppercase style, schdav has gone dull and boring with a The O.C. picture in the back (seriously, it's devoid of color - everything's white except the text, which is mostly black with a couple shades of grey. No highlights, table borders, link underlines or anything), Nick has a lot of black with some bold colors, and Mike J looks like a bunch of neon paint cans exploded in a nightclub (seriously, it's scary with bright colors and stuff flashing all over). Alyssa currently has a surprisingly pink designed-by-Nick style, which will be interesting to see if she keeps once she sees it (she agreed to have it made for her). I kept the basic for the most part as I need to keep a usable default (although css comments are great). I did however opt for a very light background image of an ocean bay at night with some alpha transparent pngs on all the shaded areas so it's always there. Yea, it doesn't work in IE, but who uses that anyways. :) I think I created a work day with a rather lower than normal work output though. I was joking today that by the end of the week we'll have a department full of CSS experts (I linked them to W3 Schools for the CSS help, and they definitely seem to be learning how to do a lot). Our webmaster joked I should introduce user-defined XSLTs next. I like that idea, although I probably should wait until the novelty of the CSS wears off. Have I discovered the new prefered method of training people in proper web design? :)