This aptly-named page will contain random ramblings, if and when I feel like writing them. To be honest, it's been added solely to complain about Google's handling of the previous XML+XSLT version of the site.
For the record, I have been using PHP for years. Almost every web project I worked on ended up being written in PHP, and the same applies to the project I'm currently working on. Some may have noticed that this website, which had been rewritten in PHP recently, had suddenly switched to Python a few days ago.
This is the reason. Not that this fact, taken on its own, has a major bearing over how bad PHP is as a language. It's just the latest in a very long series of bad design decisions and, as far as I'm concerned, the drop that caused the ocean to yell, "Screw it guys, I'm going home".
A few years back, I was using PHP4, and I was quite annoyed with the (completely borked) OO system. Then PHP5 came along. A lot of improvement in there - objects were finally passed by reference automatically, and some new features had potential. Still, many of them were either borked or, which is probably worse, ill-designed from the start. "Oh well," I said, "I'll wait, it will improve over time."
And I was SO wrong.
A few weeks ago I decided to rewrite this site using a bunch of XML data files and an XSLT. This sounded like a good idea at the time - only having to bother with a single datafile to modify, and having a bunch of "stubs" around that'd load the proper data seemed much easier for me to maintain than the old set of HTML files.
And then, one day, I googled myself. And noticed I no longer existed as far as Google was concerned.
Let me tell you - I was slightly beyond "annoyed" when I noticed it. So I googled for information about Google and its handling of XML + XSLT.
Turns out that, since my XML files were loading an XSLT file that then loaded a full data file but only displayed parts of this file, Google considered I was trying to feed it hidden data...
Don't tell me Google can't process XML data with XSLT. I simply refuse to believe that. So - what the hell?