Code relief, off the grid

So, it's the first blog post of the new year and moviequips.ca appears to be pulling a Garbo today. Inaccessible. Off line. Wanting to be left alone. 

It was fine, up until this morning. The problem - for now - seems to be with the server in B.C. Hopefully all the bills have been paid at my end, and that the Canadian West Coast hasn't slid into the Pacific overnight. Happy new year... sorry about the weirdness.

The retooling of moviequips.ca continues. I'd point you to the latest link to see the progress, but it's on the same server as the current site.

Much of what could be updated and added using feeds displayed on the main page has either already been done or is being debugged. I've decided using Google Feedburner is an odd adventure. It's partly my own fault. My HTML editor doesn't seem to like style sheets, and style sheets are pretty much required when handling the typography of the feeds I'm building in Feedburner. I don't want to go back to school. I needed to find a workaround.
 

It turns out RSS feeds processed through Google Feedburner end up gaining some attributes when then aggregated through Yahoo! Pipes. Why? I don't care. It could be a proprietary thing: Yahoo Vs. Google. I don't care. Web design talk is boring. I'm just mentioning it because using that Feedburner-to-Pipes process has let me handle typography without style sheets. A nice added bonus is that a total non-coder like me can add inset photos to certain RSS feed lists that apparently don't.

Blah, blah, blah. Get on with the movies...

Salt was fun Fugitive-like eye candy. Jolie and cast were pretty good throughout, but I found the camerawork to be lazy and the storytelling to be plain goofy.

In part, the same goes for Wall Street 2. Douglas and cast do a good job with their characters, but the story itself gets bogged down by a lot of fluff and nonsense that merely inspires audience exasperation. Douglas' Solitary Man is much better than Wall Street 2.

Also, check out The A-Team. Loads of fun, and enormously better than The Losers or The Expendables.

It looks like the updated moviequips.ca site will need a couple more weeks of gear tightening. The existing version should be back on track by the end of this week - if it's back online by then. I'll keep you posted on this blog.

Thanks for checking in.