April Fools, on February 11th?

A few of you noticed the premium member hats theme up this morning, but when you tried to record finds on unlisted finds, it didn't work. Sorry about that! If you're interested in the whole convoluted mess, it started last December.... I was updating the code on Atlas Quest to display themes on the correct days throughout 2010. Some themes never have to be changed--holidays that are always on the same day of the year such as Christmas, Valentines Day, or Independence Day. I like those themes because it means no additional work for me every year. =)

Other themes need to be moved each year. Think Easter or Thanksgiving. So every December, I sit down and figure out where each theme is supposed to show up for the rest of the year. Sometimes there are conflicts I need to work out--this year, for instance, Valentines Day and the first day of the Chinese New Year both hit on February 14th. Which theme gets precedence? It's sometimes gets quite complicated. It usually takes me a full day to get it all worked out. I decided the Chinese New Year lasts a whole year--as long as I get that theme up at some point during the year, it's fine. =) Valentines Day doesn't really move around, so I'd let it keep the 14th, and push the Chinese New Year theme to the 15th. Except.... Well, drats, the 15th is President's Day. And the 16th is the discovery of King Tut's tomb. I wouldn't be able to fit in the Chinese New Year until the 17th. Hmm.... Well, I could put it up for the Chinese New Year's "Eve," and give it the 13th. I liked that idea, and that's what I ran with. =)

Last December, I also made the decision to randomize the premium member hat theme throughout the year. Never to show up more than once in any given month. So I wrote a little program to randomly choose several days throughout the year for the 'free listing day.' It popped out as February 14th. Well shoot, that's not going to work. So I backdated it to February 12th which was the closest date that didn't conflict with an existing theme.

All was well.... until a week or two ago, and I realized--I really need to create a Winter's Olympic theme. I didn't have any last December to worry about, but I went ahead and created one last week. The Winter Olympics starts tomorrow, February 12th, which now conflicts with the premium member theme I had selected last December. NO PROBLEM! I'll just move up the premium membership by a day and open up the 12th for the Winter Olympics theme. After all, 'free listing day' can be ANY day of the year. No restrictions where that one could land.

So I updated the code so free listing day shows today and the Winter Olympics theme tomorrow. Except.... I forgot one small detail--the code that actually allows the premium membership functionality to work. It was still set to work on February 12th, and I forgot to update THAT code to today.

So, for the first 11 hours of today, the free listing part of free listing day wasn't working. Sorry 'bout that. I put the blame squarely on the Olympics. =) I feel a little bad about that, so I updated the code that provides the premium membership functionality so it'll work today AND tomorrow. You won't see the premium hat theme tomorrow--the Winter Olympics theme will go up tomorrow--but the functionality for 'free listing day' will be extended through the end of day tomorrow (Friday).

In other news.... I spent much of last night updating the look of my blog. What do you think? =) Any guesses what part of the country the image across the top of the page is from? I started updating my Another Long Walk blog for my upcoming thru-hike, and since I was learning how to make various changes to it, I decided to update this blog at the same time. I like the new look. =) I was never particularly happy with the old look--the pages were always too narrow for my taste, and the header was awfully hard to read against the original map background I had been using. I find this layout.... liberating.