25 February 2017 -
Walkabout
By Jason M. Knight (aka Deathshadow)
It has been 14 months since i last posted an update to this site, I'd like to get into that, but first some quick news:
elementals.jselementals.js re-launched
This small JavaScript library of mine has been relaunched. I killed it off a little over two years ago because it was sitting there rotting after a falling out with those who I brought in to help maintain it, repeated struggles to fix bugs inherent in a methodology I let myself get talked into by others that was flawed to the core (extending the Element object that of course IE can't extend without a ton of workarounds), and finally my health taking another unexpected turn south.
I brought it back at the urging of a few folks who were genuinely interested in it, and in two weeks with just one person running around double-checking me (well, another person did step up to the plate via the contact form) we have accomplished in two weeks what six months of struggles by a team of six could not... a release bug-free enough for me to label it as a release candidate!
So please, go over to the elementals.js website, have a look at the library and demos, and any feedback, comments, advice, or just plain bitching, feel free to use the contact form over there.
This site
Again, 14 months is a long time to leave a site hanging, but I covered a lot of ground filling the site up with content I'd been gathering for years during that first three months. The real killer though was that I have other projects, paying work comes before non-paying, and haven't been in the best of health.
Simply put, I'm fighting Parkinsons here, and a host of other conditions such as non-24 sleep-wake disorder that makes me... less than productive. I can't even maintain a normal 24 hour day, and have to try and maintain a 26 hour schedule... and when I end up off that schedule it can trigger siezures, depression, and many of the nastier side effects of my Parkinsons. That I can type at all is something of a miracle, but as I often say: "IBM Model M. When you have to type every Joe-Blasted letter in ASCII7, accept no substitutes!"
As such I dropped the ball on keeping up with this site, particularly as a number of projects planned for it landed in development hell, as I had people who promised to help back out on me, and again my own health issues. One large project in particular began to consume more and more time with the payout never seeming to be in sight, so I've shelved that for now so I can get back to putting up "smaller" articles and projects here. Smaller being a relative term in my case... of for the days before cheeto fingered TLDR twitter generation mouth-breathers when folks used to bitch about the 32k post size limits on forums being too small.
So hopefully in the coming month I'll get back into belting out some relevant content here, in addition to adding more demos and useful sub-libraries to elementals.js. For now I did a quick code revision here so that this site is in fact using elementals.js to pull the FaceBook and Google Plus share/like counts, and post-load disqus and advertisements AFTER the rest of the page has successfully loaded. I should probably do a quick writeup on how to do that while I'm thinking about it.
