Soo... it's been awhile.

Been busy with a lot of things.

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First up I finished a website. It is for my guild in World of Warcraft.

http://www.shockwavegaming.net/

Everything was designed and coded by myself. Instead of just doing my thing, I thought it'd be good practice and worked with the members of the guild in making a site they all thought looked good and liked. I also skinned eqDKP and got some experience skinning VBulletin for the first time. I thought the vBulletin skin came out exceptionally well.

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JQuery.

Probably just a tad late to the scene but I've finally gotten around to poking around with it and learning some JavaScript. Was never a big fan but you can really do some cool things. I also need to do some more experimenting and make the plunge with AJAX.

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I consider myself very stupid for not having done this sooner. I finally got around to setting myself up a local test server. Had some fun installing Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Man the time I've wasted developing the way I used to. Every save: drag, drop, upload. Man I hated it so much but didn't want to edit straight on the server either so I always just stuck with it.

Being able to test everything locally is just simply amazing. (Damn my procrastination.)

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I have a lot of projects on the drawing board so-to-speak, but the one I'm currently working on is a sort of ItemStats replacement. It is no longer managed and every time I set up a new website or do some poking around it causes a mass amount of headaches trying to get it to work.

One major feature that I want to make sure to include that isn't in ItemStats is an easy to use skin / theme system.

A little preview:

Should be fun.

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Lastly, finally got around to watching Lost. It never really peaked my interest enough to go and watch it, but one day I decided to check it out.

So far I'm a few episodes into season 4 having watched seasons 1 through 3. Seasons 1 and 2, I must say, were amazing. One thing I really liked was the way the story was told. The flopping back and forth between flaskbacks and what was going on currently, I really enjoyed.

As I started watching season 3, and the beginning of season 4 the show seems to completely die. The story just went in some terrible directions, a lot of the characters I enjoyed got killed off, and the changes in how the story were told all just made it bordeline unwatchable for me.

You'd think there wouldn't be much difference between flashbacks and flaskforwards, but man did it just seem so much worse. I MUCH preferred seeing bits of the past and how they affected the present, rather than seeing the future and watching the present unravel.

The only major thing that has been consistent throughout the whole series so far that was a major annoyance to me, was the roller coaster the characters were on. They constantly change from me wanting to slap the hell out of them and really being entertained and liking them. One episode a character will just be perfect in a sense and the next they're just obnoxious and annoying. I wish there was more consistency in the characters attitudes and actions. I suppose this could just be a major annoyance because I'm sitting down and watching several episodes at a time, rather than just one a week as if it was airing.

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I hope to do a little face lift to the site soon and overhaul a good portion of the code, but for now that's it.

I'll try and not let this blog collect dust for 6 months again D: Can't believe it's been that long already.

Comments (0) - Tags: News, Programming, TV, Web Design

Sooo it's been a while D:

Did a bit of messing around with mod_rewrite to make 'clean' urls. Should help the site get indexed better on search engines.

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Was channel chucking last night and landed on Comedy Central. An old stand-up of Christopher Titus was on. Reminded me of his old show Titus that used to be on fox till they canceled it. Which was funny as hell just as his stand-up.

Another show that was incredible that got canceled was Firefly. Which is hands down one of the best Sci-Fi TV shows I've ever watched. The movie with the same cast and left off at the last episode of the TV show was incredible as well, Serenity.

Why is it they always cancel the awesome TV shows yet leave on all the terrible crap that is reality TV shows and stupid repetitive sitcoms copying their predecessors that did all the same things just years before. Not saying there aren't any good TV shows still on, just always sucks they end up canceling the few TV shows you enjoy watching. Such as Murphy's Law I guess.

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Speaking of good TV shows still airing. Monk just started up again. Which I love. When they first started advertising the premier for Burn Notice, it didn't seem all that great. With the new season starting and they had marathon on of the first season I watched it a bit and it's actually pretty good. Sure there's a few more I enjoy watching from time to time but can't think of them at the moment.

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Any who hopefully I'll have the Portfolio part of the site done soon so I can actually start making and hosting some stuff.

Comments (0) - Tags: News, Programming, TV

First thing done, I've got markdown implemented now. Works with comments as well so feel free to use it.

Also I now have an RSS feed running. Feel free to use that aswell. With that I've got the archives module done. Got to mess around with moo.fx to make the years collapse (click the greater than sign if you couldn't figure it out :p). Took a bit of fiddling around with but I think it's cool and will be more useful the older this blog gets.

Well next comes getting the portfolio section working. The main reason I wanted to make this site heh. Figures it gets shoved to last.

Guess that's it for now.

Comments (0) - Tags: News, Programming

So I completely redid the entire tagging system. Had quite a poor schema and the way I was retrieving tags was quite archaic. While digging around on the net found this pretty good read about different schemas to use for a tagging system.

I think this site is sexy as hell and for once I'm really happy with it :D

Discussing things to come I've got a few more modules I'm planning to add over on the right there. Some sort of archives / pagination is probably going to go over there. Need to work out some way of formatting, probably going to try Markdown. At some point I'll probably get an RSS feed working for the blog. After that I'll get the portfolio part of the site done. That's going to be a pretty big chunk. Guess the last thing will be tidying up the admin panel and just making things nice there.

Guess that's about all for now.

Oh... and if you want a link back on the friends module over there, get in Contact with me.

Yarrr.

Comments (0) - Tags: News

So I finally finished re-skinning the site. The sidebar is broken for the mean time. I'll get it working soon. After that I'll get the portfolio part of the site done and then probably just messing around with the admin panel.

I like the new look much MUCH better. If anyone has any comments or criticisms feel free to post a comment, I'd be glad to here them.

Comments (0) - Tags: News

Hola,

Update wise on the site, going to be changing it around in a bit. After messing around with it in PS adding that sidebar some things came up so I'm going to move things around a bit. Hopefully in the process I'll manage to fix the few lingering IE bugs.

Anywho now that that's said, on to another subject. I've been really into listening to and searching for new music. Mainly hip-hop. I've been wanting for awhile to make a big post on my musical tastes and the rollercoaster of changes I've gone threw over the years in music, so I'll probably get around to that soon.

Well with all this new music I got around to something I've been wanting to do for a while and that's messing around with Foobar 2000. I must say I'm in love. For ever I always just used winamp and it served me well, but man. Fb2k is so customizable it's insane. Just going threw and learning all the formating and digging threw all the 3rd party plug ins is a job in itself but I've really been impressed by what you can do with it. It really just makes listening to music that much more enjoyable :D

Here's a few ss's of a Fb2k skin I'm modding:

Still have some work to do on it but I really like how it's coming out. You can get the original made by cal45 here on DA.

I decided to make a Last.fm account as well. Here. I've been loving it so far. Found quite a few new groups that I've really been enjoying that I doubt I would have discovered otherwise. Feel free to add me if you want.

Guess that's it for now. Will update soon with the upcoming site change and that blog about my musical tastes.

Comments (0) - Tags: Music, News, Skins

Well, after quite sometime and going threw about 3 versions internally over the past year or 2, I finally got around to getting something resembling a working website done!

I am planning on making this site my personal portfolio / blog to post random blabberings and things I've made and such. I'm branching away from the whole community and web design thing as originally planned. I plan on adding a comments system which should be next. If a community of some sort spouts out of that I may throw some forums back up, but right now I just want to keep it simple.

Well what's next eh? Well the comment system is the next goal to cross off the list. Also, at some point I'm going to tweak the layout a bit to throw a side panel in there for some relevant info I want shown. Those 2 shouldn't take long at all.

After that, I am going to work towards getting the portfolio finished. It's about half done now. Then I'll get the current projects page working in proper order.

That's about all I have planned from now, but who knows.

Well glad I got something in working order.

...'bout time I'd say :D

Oh and IE and .Net can DIAF.

UPDATE: Comments system done.

Comments (0) - Tags: News