Recent Changes

The "recently changed pages" box on the side lists the five most recently changed web pages on this site.

A few times a day, a shell script I wrote will look at all the files which are eligible to be listed in that sidebar and get their modification dates. I grab the last five, determine the page titles, and write some HTML fragments with the appropriate munging to a file as a series of PHP array assignment statements. My magical makeRecentBox() function takes this and builds the list on the right.

This means that I never have to update that box myself. "Let the computer do it."

Of course, things like the news items you see on the front page aren't really saved as files; they're stored in a database. So you'll never see news items in the "recently changed pages" box. You can use the delightful news archive page to see when news items were created.

All this to prove to you, the esteemed reader, that I actually do update this site occasionally.

Unfortunately, there are modifications from time to time that have nothing to do with what the page actually says. Maybe I'm adding or optimizing some code, or I caught a typo. Or perhaps I wanted to rearrange things. In any case, if it's one of the five newest files on the site, it's going to show up on the right side over there for your amusement.