i'm sure this will elicit a grimace of some sort out of brian, but i've been puttering around the back office here at bipolar the last few days. My most recent accomplishment follows on the heels of a post (or two) i read earlier today about the "spread of weighted lists" or some-such nonsense. anyway, i saw it and immediately wondered if i could wrangle a quick thing together for the categories index of ye olde bipolar to implement the concept. it only took me about 5 minutes to get the basic code worked up in the movable type template for the category index, but it then took me about three hours to figure out the formula to properly weight the percentages so that the lowest-post-count categories would actually be readable. check it out, or wait 'til you get to the end of the post and click the "categories" link. obviously, the more posts in a category, the larger that category appears. pretty simple and visually intuitive (if visually chaotic) method of displaying more complex data than a simple list.

and i figured out the other day a quick painless workaround for that annoying non-scrolling div firefox bug: just click in the area to scroll, hit the tab key (to put focus on the next link), and scroll away! if you mouse while leaving one hand on the keyboard (as i usually do) then you can do this almost without thinking about it. of course, yes, it is a kluge and suboptimal behavior, but i think you can hack it. besides, not everyone has a scroll button on their mouse anyway, and a fix is on the way (an *no* i don't expect people to go out and download a nightly build *just* so they can use their scroll wheel on bipolar… i just offered that as an option for those inclined to it)

finally, i've been working for the last several days on some more improvements and additional functionality for the bipolar gallery, and you can get a glimpse of the work in progress (if all you wanna do is browse thumbnails at this point). the improvements were just in the "multiple subdirectory 'folding'" code (if you really care, ask and i'll explain), and the added functionality is something brian's asked for for quite a while–a "latest images" option. the page i linked to shows a main index of just the latest photos (currently set to show pics uploaded/changed within the last 10 days). eventually i'll make a seperate function that will take this and spit it out in a limited single set of thumbnails (so that i can, for example, have the 4 latest images in my gallery automatically show up on the most recent post). as i said, very beta work in progress at this point. but progress nonetheless.