Sickness and Updates

I started feeling under the weather right after New Year’s. By Friday of that week — the fifth, right? — I felt so awful I ended up staying home from work. I felt a little better that weekend before it really hit me. I broke down and saw a doctor last Friday. The nurse I saw was sure I had the flu, but the doctor said my results were negative. Regardless, I ended up with three prescriptions (two pills and a nose spray) and have gone through three bottles of cough syrup over the past two weeks. The doctor told me to discontinue the nose spray after four days and one of my prescriptions has run out, so it’s down to the remaining one and a few remaining cough drops. I got out a couple of times this past weekend and the cold air felt like a knife to my chest. I’m definitely on the mend, but still not 100%. I’d say I’m at 70% right now.

A couple of days ago, WordPress notified me that the email subscription plugin I use was so out of date that it wouldn’t work with the latest round of security updates. I tested it, and they were right. I’ve replaced the old one with a new one. If you haven’t signed up and would like to be notified whenever new blogs are posted, you can sign up here. Each email contains a link to unsubscribe as well, in case you ever get sick of receiving them.

While installing that plugin I added another feature back to the site that’s been missing for years. At the bottom of the lower left hand menu column, you’ll now see a random quote each time the page reloads. Actually, you probably won’t. It’s tucked out of the way and very few people will ever notice it.

Back when I first started playing around with HTML, all the pages I created were static — that is to say, the code on my side represented what visitors saw. It wasn’t until the late 90s/early 00s that I began to discover scripting; asp first, followed by php. I became fascinated by the fact that the code on my side no longer resembled what was being served up to visiting clients. One of the first things I experimented with was a script that would pluck a random quote out of a text file and display it to visitors. I always enjoyed the idea that even if I hadn’t updated my website in a while, visitors would at least see a different quote each time they visited. The randomizing code I used back in 2000 is the same line of code I used today when re-adding that feature. The list of quotes its pulling from is pretty outdated, but it works. Maybe I’ll update them once I start to feeling better.