Finally!  After quite a while, the new version with the new look and feel is up.  I’ll work out any kinks over the next few days.

Sorry for the delay.  A deadline at my day job pretty much sucked everything I had leaving no desire to be on the computer.  And then the weekend before last I was just too burned out to work on things.  So this last weekend I worked hard to get through the system and … finally … you have it.
I think it looks much better.  Hopefully it was worth the wait.

I know it’s been a week since I’ve last made a blog entry, so I’m making this entry for a status update.

The new design is finished as I mentioned last time.  Currently I’m through about half the pages.  I had planned on working more on the weekend but a combination of computer-burn-out and other activities worked together to keep me away from the computer.

If I convert a couple pages each evening, then the new design should be 100% and I can go live with it by next week this time.

It is coming … I promise.  I’ve been a bit tied up on my day job, but the new site is designed I just have to rework each of the pages.

Unfortunately, I’m under deadline at work and won’t have much free time until February 15th.  I’ll try to get the new pages up before then though.

I haven’t updated this blog in a few days because I’ve been “heads down” working on the new site design.  The new layout will be cleaner and easier to use.  Expect a major update by weeks end.

Also, there are some very cool features coming.   But don’t expect anything new (besides the upcoming new site design) until mid-to-late February.

I was going to add some monthly reports for the progress meter, but I’ve been wanting to add readability statistics for a while.  So this is what I concentrated on today.

I use the GNU “style” command to come up with the readability statistics.  I spent several hours writing my own parsers in PHP, but the stats didn’t come out exactly the same as the style command.  This led me to check some text on several different readability utilities on the net.  My thought was at least some of the stats would be the same.  Like the Flesch Reading Ease or the SMOG Index.  I discovered something interesting … nothing matched up exactly.

One reason is hyphenated words.  Sometimes hyphenated words are treated as one longer, multisyllable (and therefore complex) word, and sometimes as multiple words.  So if the word counts and syllable counts don’t match, then nothing else is going to match because of this.

Another reason for word count discrepancies could be ellipses.  How are ellipses treated by the parser?  Does it actually determine the difference between omission ellipses, beginning ellipses and ending ellipses.

There’s bound to be another dozen reasons why the figures weren’t exact matches.

Generally the number of sentences matched up.   And that’s about it.

I believe these statistic generators can be pretty useful.  But comparisons between different implementations of the same algorithms sometimes varies much more than one would expect.