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I didn't bother going to the theatre for Lord of the Rings (all three), or Episode II, Matrix Revolutions, none of the Harry Potters either.

For once, I went against the trend and saw Revenge of the Sith in the theatre-- within the first 24 hours of release. Shocking. I'm the wait-until-its-on-DVD guy. Actually, I'm the wait-until-its-on-DVD-and-on-special guy. But this was definitely worth breaking the cycle. All those outer-space battles and spaceship rides just don't mean the same when they're not on an enormous screen. Considering I've had a migraine all day it's a lucky thing the sound didn't make my head explode either.

As for the story, well they gave me everything I wanted and the stuff they provided for answers and tie-ins were pretty good. As usual, they torture you with an hour of faffing around before the movie gets really good. By the end you want to keep going. At least now I can continue on my own without waiting 3 years for another sequel.

I'm also glad I got to spot at least one Easter egg, the Millennium Falcon makes a 5-second appearance in the movie. It's late now so I'm not too sure about when it turned up, but I think it was when they returned Palpatine to the senate.

It really is late. I'm off to bed to dream about the pre-prequel to Star Wars, the Obi-Wan Trilogy... Yeah, you know it's going to happen somehow.

Tags: movies, star wars, opinion

1. Re-implement commenting. Optionally, make it AJAX so it's something speedy and useful.
2. Re-implement RSS feed.
3. Prevent arbitrary HTML markup in blogs from appearing in left-hand-side summary as sometimes it gets cut-off and disturbs the formatting of the rest of the blog.
4. Smarten up the management screens.
5. Make the site skinnable... *light* skinnable, just make the stylesheet easy to edit and leave gaps for artwork to fit in
6. Add options screen to manager, e.g. turn off/on RSS, comments, random photo display.
7. Let users register.
8. Protect commenters emails from spam harvesting.
9. Wrap it up so it can be downloaded and deployed by others.

Tags: web design, blogging, inspiration

1. Make an XML file that maps your website. I use one element per page, an attribute naming the page using a URL relative to the root of the website. Pages that can only be reached through another page would become child elements of the page that lets you access the child page. Also add a friendly page title as an attribute for each page element;
2. Write an ASP.net web user control that opens the Xml document and uses XPath to find the page element that matches Page.Request.Url.AbsolutePath;
3. Starting with the element returned by the XPath query, work your way up the xml document through the ParentNode property of the XmlElement, printing the friendly page titles as you go.

*Hint: to display them in the right order, you'll need to insert each page title into the beginning of breadcrumb, otherwise the path you read will seem backwards.

The best part of this technique is that you document the structure of your website in the XML file. This makes for an added bonus if you haven't begun coding the website yet, because you will actually sit down and *think* about what pages will go in your website first.

Of course, the XML file can also be recycled as a "Site Map" page that you can produce with an XSLT transformation, or it can help generate a site menu (by selecting only the children of the root node) or present the page title as a heading in the web page itself. By using one source to identify your web pages you can present all these elements on your web pages with consistency with alot less effort than manually editing breadcrumbs, menus and page headings.

In the next part, I'll put together a code sample that illustrates the above three steps.

Tags: asp.net, xml, web design, architecture