I've been meaning to learn to use AJAX for a while, now. It's a very useful thing to have a web page interact with the server without the need for a full page load. I had a general idea of how it worked, but I hadn't spent the time to learn the specifics.

The bug bit me a couple of days ago, and I had an idea for a fun/easy test gadget, so I got to work.

I'm proud to present: Letterboard. It's a pointless little diversion, but I think it's amusing. The best part is, you can mess with people as they're laying out letters in (almost) real time. It's stupid, but I'm proud of it. The best part? I can make a dress-up Jesus or whatever with very little change to the code. Woot!

You'll need to have Javascript enabled to play, and also to see the notice that says Javascript is required. I should probably make that visible regardless, but then I'd lose the cool fadey-inny-thingy.

Want to keep up with what tidbits I choose to share, but don't really care to see my Haiku of the Day clogging up your RSS reader? Fear not, gentle reader. I have created an alternate feed that you can use. It filters out those annoying little poems and leaves you with the pure, unadulterated drivel you've come to expect.

Let it never be said that I am not a benevolent webmaster.

Wherein I continue to put way too much effort into this little blog.

So, I have decided to join Twitter. Not so much because I intend to use it with great frequency, but more because I was hoping that its interface would let me follow my friends' twitter conversations more easily. (It does, but only marginally) I have now had 50 attempts to post a tweet fail unceremoniously on the Twitter site today (literally; I was trying to post something to the effect of '3/x posts successful; that's not too bad', increasing x with each failure), so I'm not enjoying it a whole lot right now. Is there a better way to post tweets?

As such, I wanted to put a "recent tweets" bit on the ol' main page just so's I could keep track of them, be reminded to tweet, and let people know that I'm there. And since I was going to put that on the right side of the screen, I might as well put up the recent comments as well, so you (read: I) can see at a glance if there's any scintillating wit that requires your (my) attention.

And, as long as I had the guts out, I might as well make a few more changes. First, you can now add your own website address when you comment. Your name in your comment will link people back to you. Second, and more importantly, if you use the "remember me" cookie, you will now only have to defeat the captcha once. Hopefully that won't lead to abuse, but if it does, I have a solution in mind.

And that's it for the Ch-ch-changes. Let me know if you see any rendering weirdness with the new right sidebar or any bugs and I'll try to straighten them out. Unless you're using Internet Explorer.