I started work on a news page that readers could go to read the latest blog posts without having to click on them individually and I was encouraged by my husband to make it into a proper search page rather than just a most recent stories page. I ran into several troubles along the way. First it seems that the Criteria objects used by symfony only allow you to add 1 constraint per object field. Thus saying that I want the entry date to be both after a set start date and before a set end date is impossible to do with the given interface. Unfortunately this took me an hour or so of trouble shooting trying to figure out why my searches were returning somewhat random results. I've overcome this issue with a bit of sql rather than just using the Constraint->add interface by itself.

The second problem that I have not yet overcome is that the search page can only be accessed with the frontend_dev.php script (ie the url http://www.cleverbit.org/frontend_dev.php/search) rather than with the standard frontend.php which is how all of the other pages are accessed (including the one you are looking at now). I have no idea why this is and I've spent at least a few hours playing around with the routing and have made little or no progress.

Overall this experience is leading my in the direction of regretting using symfony at all since the documentation is proving to be not nearly as thorough as I was hoping, in fact much of the documentation found on the symfony website is out of date which is particularly frustrating - documents should not be labeled ver 1.2 if they contain information that will not work with ver 1.2.

So I've been working on these socks for a while and I finally go to the heel part and I kept having to slip stitches around to get to the bit with the heel and then I accidentally made the heel wrong twice in a row so lots of frogging and slipping stitches to get to the right bits and I finally got it in my head how to put them on the needles I could go back to two at once but I fotgot to check the yarn and when I tried to get back to knitting I looked down and realized it was a tangled mess and I also accidentally picked up an extra stitch in the heel so I've called it quits and I'm going back to one at time and maybe I'll give it another go when I have two balls of yarn and a longer circular needle.

I made these socks this past winter, I don't remember exactly when I finished them but the date on the photos is November. I made them out of wool-ease and I'm reasonably happy with how they came out (from an Interweave Knits Fall 07 pattern). They aren't quite as warm as I was hoping but they do make nice lounging-around-the-house socks.

I have recently discovered that walking nearly 4 miles a day can be hard on your shoes. I have a hole on the inside of both of my shoes in the same spot. Seems rather a strange spot for a hole, but there it is.

Here is the yarn, its Manos Del Urugua silk blend and I really love the colors. I've had some experience with silk stretching a bit during blocking so I'm thinking I might actually knit up a guage square and block it before I start knitting.

Well I'm making some progress on my socks although I keep getting distracted by other things, like new projects. I'm still not crazy about the pattern I chose but perhaps I'll be happier when I have a whole sock instead of just part of the leg. In the future I'm going for plane ribbing with self striping socks.

So this pattern calls for a gauge of 24 stitches to 4 inches. What was I thinking?? In order to get that gauge I had to use size 4 needles (even though I'm using the yarn the pattern called for). Suffice it to say my progress is slow.