View From the Bushes

One of my big weaknesses is that I'm easily distracted by shiny objects, literally and figuratively. Though it seems that many people are literally distracted by shiny objects, and as a consequence pick them up, leading to a real shortage of shiny objects just out there waiting to distract me. As a result, it's normally the figurative shiny objects which distract me. The current shiny object distracting me is Mason. It's a tool for embedding PERL into text, most often HTML. It takes its name from a book I quite enjoyed, called Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett (which, according to my wife has too many nipples in it, as if such a thing were possible).

In many cases, Mason ends up doing some of the same things I did with the Xenogenic System, and if I had unlimited time or ambition or if I were stark raving lunatic, I might consider rewriting the Xenogenic System using Mason, but since I am only a raving lunatic, I think I probably won't. However, it might be nice to redo the DireKobold website using Mason, we'll have to see how well my wiring person does at getting out the next adventure. One feature of Mason in particular really got me excited. It's called the autohandler. In the old days, when you want to have a persistant border for all your webpages you have to include the code for that border on every single page, which makes change difficult. More recently people store borders in a seperate file and then each page has to have a command which pulls that file in, but this isn't that much of an improvement.

With Mason you can define an autohandler, which if it exists is automatically wrapped around the content of the page. So rather than having to include a line of code in every single file you merely have to put an autohandler file in the directory and it will automatically wrap the other pages. Now, admittedly it's somewhat more complicated than that, but the complexity I'm leaving out actually increases the utility of this insanely awesome feature. In any case, if you start seeing changes to the website, that's what I'm doing.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross