I was listening to NPR and there was some discussion about primary sources, and I thought about what I could be a primary source for today.

I am quite easily amused by what I observe and I suppose I've seen some things today that were interesting to me. It's certainly possible that not another living human would give a rat's derriere. That's okay too!

Today was the last day of a week long AP conference. For those who haven't had teenagers in the last ten years or so, or those of you outside the education community, that stands for Advanced Placement. I teach AP Art History, and gathered together this week with other art history teachers to share ideas and suggestions for shoving the entire visual history of the world down the throats of semi-willing high school kids in ways that will remain in their short term memory long enough to regurgitate for an exam in early May.

It's really a lot more fun that that for those of us who have taught it before and aren't shaking in our shoes at the sheer daunting thought of the task. For the newbies though....(wicked giggle).

This morning, as we were closing the conference, one of the newbies got up (with accompanying percussionist on the tambourine) and sang the AP Art History Blues. This is one of those times that I wished I was some kind of compulsive film geek who never goes anywhere without a video camera in tow. Does video count as a primary source if you catch someone in the act?

We were lucky enough to get out mid day which is a good thing because I think my brain is full. I'm looking forward to the month of "summer vacation" that is left for me (although I'm gonna be working like a Trojan for most of it).

I get in my car to drive the 45 miles from Ft. Worth to where I live in Dallas and I turn on the radio to NPR, and there is this very interesting discussion going on about blogs. Never having heard the term, and after a number of interesting images came to mind, I continued to listen. The speaker was Rebecca Blood www.rebeccablood.com who has recently written a book about creating a WebLog. She suggested this site for a rank beginner and here I find myself trying out another new web thingy.

Shortly after I started listening, I almost ran up the butt of the green pick up in front of me because the moron has no working break lights. Since we came to a standstill, I whipped out my trusty sketchbook and Industrial Sharpie and wrote "YOU -- NO BRAKE LIGHTS" and positioned myself so that I could let this guy know he was dangerous. It apparently pissed him off because he took off like a shot and was weaving in and out of traffic doing about 85. Then I see a little red car start doing the same thing and (I do not believe these complementary vehicles were related in any way) and get behind the aforementioned moron. Not just behind, but right up on his backside. I get over two lanes and slow down because I'm thinking that (in the words of my father) every SOB on the road is out to kill me, and I don't want to be part of the crunch that ensues with moron and moronette.

They got away I suppose, or took a different fork in the road because I didn't see them again (thank heaven).

As I continue my journey home, I regard the billboard that has a set of blonde twins sporting very bodacious ta-tas. I wonder why. It doesn't really do anything for me, but alas I'm not run by testosterone, merely caffeine.

I sit here and look out my window, and I see a lovely summer day. We are so fortunate here in North Texas to be having a COOL summer. Don't remember the last time that happened, but I think in later years, I'll fondly look back on the summer of '02, and remember the things that I've seen with my own eyes.

As part of a demo hack I did for a prospective customer planning to convert a website to Antville, I implemented a feature to interpret a content part as an image name and render that image, if it exists. This is useful when displaying images outside of the story text. You could still enter the whole image macro tag, but just taking the image name is much more comfortable for content editors and less error prone.

The feature is implemented by passing an as="image" attribute to the content part macro and the following code added to story.content_macro():

   } else if (param.as == "image") {
      var part = this.getContentPart (param.part);
      if (part && this.site.images[part]) {
         delete (param.part);
         renderImage (this.site.images[part], param);
      }
   }

Should I check this in? If so, we might consider doing the same for polls, files etc.

i rewrote the navigation-macro according to this RFC: basic navigation for all users is now placed in the main skin and the navigation-links for contributors and admins can be placed independently by using

<% site.navigation for="contributors|admins" %>

the new navigation-macro is backwards-compatible, so there shouldn't be any problems with existing modified page-skins (points 5 and 6 of the RFC are still open).

i also embedded the search-form directly in page.skin (as discussed here, but didn't write a macro for it). currently it looks like this:

default text disappears onClick, and search-keywords are echoed. let me know what you think!

the following has changed:

• implemented kris suggestions here and here (thanks, kris!). this should ease image- and file-upload a lot since it's not necessary anymore to specify a name - antville will construct one (this also works with hensos get-image-by-url-function). if a name is already in use, antville will add a number to the name and increase it until an unused name is found. also the checkbox for creating a thumbnail was removed: thumbnails are now created automatically if the width or height of an image are > 100 pixel.
• it's now possible to enable/disable comments for each story. i reinvoked the until then deprecated commentlink-macro because the link to "place your comment" now disappears if comments are disabled (same with the comment-counter). still wondering if it makes sense to be able to limit comments to contributors, admins ... (btw.: there's a new dbpatch that enables discussions for all existing stories)
• the input-macro moved from hopobject to global (it never made sense there) and echoes request-values by default).

still to be done: couldn't solve the nasty upload-error reported by smi and several others. any ideas out there?