Sometimes I just build it for me. »

The bad news is that I spent a lot of today slogging through bad HTML and messy ColdFusion code. The good news is that (eventually) I get paid to do that. Even better is that I was finally able to clean up all the HTML and am now left just with the task of replacing the older (non working and bloated) code with my fresh and much leaner (move over bacon) code.

Of course that will now have to wait until tomorrow I guess since I'm wrapping up the day with this here blog post once again.

Before I officially call it a night though, I wanted to share a couple more tidbits on my personal projects:

First, I did a handful of small, mostly visual, updates to BotFu today.

The most obvious is a change to the header/navigation. I scaled the logo down, moved the links up to be beside the logo, and put back the simple search box (which is only performing a VERY basic SQL search).

Overall it saves some screen space for the more important things - I mean really, once you are on and using the site, the logo really doesn't add any value (even if I do think it looks cool).

Within BotFu fight, I also moved around some various bits in my continued effort to make the most 'usable' game interface possible for the game. You'll have to play around with it to see just what I'm talking about!

I also put in another attempt at fixing the fight action alerting bug...for some reason I was having a lot of trouble wrapping my head around the real problem for this. What I wanted to have happen was to only send out alerts when there were two or more real people (ie. not bots) in a fight.

My orig. fix for this didn't quite work because it didn't account for the situation where there were only two 'real' fighters in a fight (which currently happens to be the usual case!)...and my fix to the fix didn't work because I wasn't thinking about the bots turn.

That is, alerts were not sent on the user's turn. But when it was the bots turn the alerts were still being sent. Which basically meant that all the alerts were always sent!

It was a bit of a pain to debug because I couldn't really display the status in the middle of a bot's turn like I can for a real fighter (ie. myself). What I ended up doing was sending myself some debugging information via email during a bots turn, and that helped me to reveal the real issue.

Once I knew what the problem was, the fix was as simple as adding in a check to see if the attacker was a bot or not; and then act accordoingly.

Outside of all that stuff, I recently got a copy of "Practical Ruby Gems" from Apress as part of their "Friends of Apress" program (of which I'm a member). The idea is that every so often they are going to send me a book related to my area of 'expertise' and I'm supposed to at least do a book review and if I like the book, help to promote it in whatever way I can.

I like the overall concept of that, and I've been meaning to do some book reviews anyway. Before I got started on that though, what I really wanted was to first catalog just what books I actually have in my personal library.

Actually my thinking is that book publishers should make this much easier for everyone. I *should* be able to register with each publisher (or one central place like Amazon) and tell them just what books I own in some simple/standard way (maybe via ISBN or at least by title/publisher).

Once I do that, I should be able to search the full text of all of my books (they have digital versions of the full text anyway, so just index it all). And since it's hard for me to prove what books I actually own, you don't need to show me the actual full text of the books, just tell me what pages my results are found on!

A simple system like that would be huge for a developer like me. As it stands right now, I had shelves and shelves of books...when I want to look something up that I *know* is in one of my books...it takes me a lot of time and energy. This type of system would solve that problem.

Additionally the publishers could show me books that I don't own but that also have solutions...and that just might get me to purchase those as well (or at least purchase that chapter/page from them if they offer that type of thing)...oh and of course, it would be a great way for publishers to have even more data about me, my interests, and what books I own.

Anyway, that was all a bit of a tangent to my own personal project related to book reviews. The first step I wanted to take was to actually get a digital list of what books I actually own. And I wanted that list to be something more than just a list of book titles.

Luckily, I had done some ad-hoc scripts awhile back for my friends over at ourmesh.com that involved pulling book data from Amazon. With some quick hacks and updates, I was able to customize that code to quickly build a first version of my book digitizer.

What it basically does is read a book title and publisher from a text file (that I manually generate) and pull down the information I care about from Amazon.

It all gets stored into a database table right now so that soon I can write some simple tools to allow me to organize, tag, and review them as I see fit. And then I can share all that great data with my awesome readers as well (including a link over to Amazon so you can get your very own copies)!

Eventually I'm thinking that I will take advantage of my insider access to reviews.com and the Amazon API to build a simple system that allows me to publish my reviews to both systems (and here) with one click.

Of course that's all way down the list for now...first I must sleep.