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.

I hacked together a StoryToolz WordPress theme so that the blog appears to be more integrated with the site.  And then I pulled the last three posts (the first couple hundred characters of the post, anyway) and put them on the sidebar of the home page.

I looks, well, okay.  Just okay, not great.  I think it looks better than just using a generic theme, but site design isn’t really my forte.  Maybe in a few months I’ll hire somebody to redesign the StoryToolz site.  Until then I’ll live with the current look and feel.

One thing I don’t like though, if somebody signs up with WordPress for the blog portion of the site, the person signing up may think they have a StoryToolz account, but they don’t.  Or, another variation of the problem, someone may sign up for one thing (blog or StoryToolz membership) and then try logging on in the other.   Hmmm, not sure what to do there.  I’ll have to think about it.

Today I installed WordPress to use as the development blog.

I’ll integrate it a bit more tightly into the StoryToolz site tomorrow. But now that I have the blogging portion working then I’ll be able to explain better what’s going on. Plus it gives people a place to comment if they so wish.

And … I can write lengthier notes instead of my little, one-sentence blurbs I’ve used up to this point.