April 16, 2010

Before the Games: The Site

I've got some things I want to do before I start with my next game and they're all about improving the site. The last week or so has been extremely productive with me throwing out a lot of wasted code, speeding up the site and adding/removing features and I want to continue with that and get the things done now when I'm in the flow.

You can find the whole source for the site, excluding a few security related files ofc, on github where I've also uploaded a small to-do list and some ideas I might want to implement.

Here's a small summary of the stuff:

1. Allow editing all the information pages without doing it through phpmyadmin, merge it together with the post editing.
2. Change the layout of adding comments and it's preview, try unhide it.
3. Fix the layout of search and possibly tweak the inner workings
4. Revamp archive page, maybe use it as a sitemap?
5. Add read next/previous posts on post and older/newer posts?
6. Make comment editing work, for guests too.
7. Statistics!! I have third party statistics but I want stats for the most active commenter and other stuff.
8. A greater 404 page
9. Refactor, remove garbage code and refactor some more.

I'm itching a little bit about a new game, but first thing's first.

April 2, 2010

Death to the Forum

Well it was fun while it lasted, but now it's gone and it'll stay gone for a long time I think. It was mainly a test to see if I could do it and I'm really proud of my styling of it but it's deader than in a grave, which isn't really surprising, and it bothered me that I didn't write it myself - like really bothered me.

phpBB is fantastic in many ways; easy, fast and easily managed but it just didn't feel right as I hadn't done it. Kinda the same as why I'm not using any popular blog tool but I've rolled my own. It feels pretty good to use a site you've written completely yourself...

And no I don't want to write my own forum now, for now I'll stick with a tweak here a tweak there on the site.

December 21, 2009

Now we have a Forum

In a burst of random energy I made a forum for madeoftree. Well okay I just made an awesome style for the awesome phpBB - the forum itself was up and running in say 10min and the rest of the latest days has been all about customizing. Now it's finally kinda complete so here it is!

Making it was the easy bit - now we need to generate some content! Where is the almighty sundb00m when we're in a desperate need for spam?!

November 2, 2009

An invisible Remake

What does a guy like me do when not working on a new game? Except living my life, being a coach for my little brother's hockey team and eating strawberries? The last week or so I've been working hard with my webpage, yes this page. If you've visited my site before today you'll know what I'm talking about.

NOT

There's practically zero visible difference. You might notice the 'Quick n Dirty File Download' or the little line of text towards the bottom of the page, or even the ability for multiple tags! That's kinda freaky stuff eh? And only +1 week to do that! :D

The big thing was actually a complete rewrite of the whole site. From really bad and random spaghetti code I managed to produce some half-nice code. I wrote the site with Kohana which was a blast to use! If you're making a page of some sort I can heartily recommend to give it a try.

Soon it's time for some game making again, I just need a good idea... hm.