I have been lazily working on a side project off and on for the last couple of months. This project has been something I have been talking about and working towards for three odd years. Recent developments have been a delightful kick in the ass. Which reminds me I need to order some testing hardware...
No time to blog gotta work. Oh and that reminds me. Internet connection is spotty it sucks.
I have started idling in the IRC channels of the various online communities I'm interested in. It has been a long time since I have participated with the larger development groups that it felt nice to get bakc into it. The setup I'm using right now is a terminal application called IRSSI which is a terminal IRC application. The other application I am using is called bitlbee which is an IRC server that allows you to connect to your instant messaging accounts and social networks like they are IRC channels. I find it to be a very appealing interface and it puts minimal strain on my agin hardware.
Wow I havn't been so annoyed in sucha long time. It might actually be enough to get me off my ass and make me do something about the general state of my world. I'm gonna sink some time into my side projects. This site being one of them. Now considering that I havn't touch this site in a week or so and in all reality a bit longer than that I don't know what that will really amount too. Honestly this site is the side project of a side project so back back burner might be stretching it. Right now my side project with the highest possability of financial return is my main focus.
Well I managed to distract myself pretty well this last week. Am I finishing the login system. Am I working on a comment system. Am I building the blog interface for adding new posts instead of hard coding the entries. Nope none of these things. What I did find though was an intresting article from codeacadamy about making more responsive mouse over menus without hurting usabiity. By hurting usability I mean without the target dissappearing as you move over to it from your hover event. So while the article offered a jquery plugin ready made I decided it would be a good exercise to roll my own and this has eaten up my time.
I read a comparison of using flash vs html5 for games. One of the major complaints was flash compiles into one file which is easy for distribution. I don't think I have any Chrome or Mozilla developers that have added me to their circles but if any of you all know any ask them for me what it would take to create a Javascript archive format and get it pushed through as a web standard.
Now I am not suggesting that we should be compiling javascript into a binary I think we could compress the javascript files into a tar archive. I mean most web servers compress files with gzip before they are sent to the browser anyway I figure we could minify our javascript files and then precompress them into a tar file with a jsar file extension.
Why would we want something like this. Simple distribution of HTML5 games would allow for sites like onemorelevel, armorgames, and newgrounds to thrive delivering games in both flash and HTML5. This would be beneficial for these sites to serve content to mobile devices. Also it would allow the creation of javascript modules by content providers to make integration of their services into our website more convienient. As it is only compressed and not compiled it means the code is readable (not saying much if it is minified) however it means we can verify the code for security.
Last week I attended a Funeral and was able to meet up with some fanliy and while funerals are always sad it was so nice to see family again. I also got a chance meet up with two of the former contributers to the former incarnation of the website. I got to catch up with Trogdor: The Burninator (not actually affiliated with with hoemstar runner) and some time after that I mett up with Dorok. It has been so long since we used those names that I can't even remember how to spell them correctly. Dispite a funeral and a little bad news on the side I think Rangertom and I had an overall posative experience.
The bad news we got requires a little back story so let me give it a quick rundown. Ranger and I have been married since 2002. a few years after we were married we started trying to have children. We are currently pregnant with our first child (hooray for us!) however even through the sickness was mild there have been some issues with Rangers health. Now the news we got at the start of the weekend was not horrible and the baby is ok it still isn't good news.
Remain calm and carry on.
I have Sublime Text on my Droid X2. Now when I say that I don't mean that I open the program on my phone I just mean that I use my phone as a portable media storage device and the mobile apps version of SublimeText2 x86 and x64. Both with the same plugins and pointed at the same projects folder. it is handy when I find myself on campus and wanting to work on the site. However not a lot of time to sit down and put together a few coherent thoughts into a post. I removed most of the menu items as I have no other pages to link to. The login screen at this time just sends data to a simple echo server so there are no user lookups or even a database link at this point. The login slides out using jquery with a custom animation using elastic out easing fromt the jquery ui library as I feel this looks better than the normal swing easing. A neat little trick is how I remove the password text box and insert a actual password input on focus. when the field loses focus it checks if anything is typed in if not it removes the password field and replaces it with a text box with the word password in it.
Still a little minimalist I know but I feel it looks ok so far this way. I got to play with google webfonts a little bit and I found one that looks ok. Want to finish framing out the site and then i think the next step is to create a rest api and then turn the desing into a backbone.js just for the experience.
Yes yes I know the formatting is non existant. Yes I know the gradient yesterday looked horrible however I am behind on my css3 and decided to spend a little time playing with it. Yes yes I know I should have just fired up developer console and did a little local editing that way no one should have been forced to see how horrable it was. Well local editing is for people who are not toally slammed at work.
Just bopping around and giving the site a little structure. While I do that I am also playing with the Emmet plugin for Sublime Text. Strange results but I am starting to get used to it. Not a lot of time in between classes.
Quite simply I lost this domain six years ago. I was in a dispute with my then webhost/registrar and I fell behind on payments. They shut my account and I paid. I then attempted to move my domains and they let me move all of them except this one. It was my first domain and the website that I loved. I kept checking now and again and finally finally my previous registrar dropped it.
Yep you heard my right six years since this domain has been mine and before that it was my domain for seven years. Now lets keep it going for many years to come. hopefully I will return to writing on the site. Poetry, technical articles, acidic laced rants against small minded idiots, short stories, or just the typical ill conceived drivel that is unfounded and uninformed... we'll see. First however I think a dash of paint is in order. Then a dynamic blogging setup because in my excitement to get something... anything on the site I am typing this directly into a file no backend what so ever. Time to strap in I'll be back tomorrow.