So I find I have been playing quite a few web based games of late. And just about all of them has brought to the fore of my mind the glaring fact that there is nothing they have done that I can’t do. Seriously. More over, I think I can do it better in just about every way.

One of the games I find myself playing is a space game which, to be fair, isn’t very good — in fact it’s bad. It’s just not a very good game, yet for some reason I find myself continuing to play it — as does a lot of other folks. It’s strangely popular. While playing at just about every turn I see things that could not only be done a little better, but done WAY better. Not just game play wise, but technically as well. Their HTML is bad, they clearly don’t understand CSS and their PHP is poorly written (from what I can tell.) So, this of course always lead me to the line of thinking that, why shouldn’t I try to make my own?

Read More

Well as some of you know I have been working on a joint Wordpress MU and Invision Power Board theme based on the joomla theme Chromatophore.. I thought I would give an update — It’s going well all things considered, but its taking me a little longer than I had for seen to get the color chooser logic working correctly.

You can see my progress here:

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

Read More

Code obfuscators will strip out the unnecessary characters like white space, tabs, newlines and comments. The modern flock of javascript obfuscators will also go through and replace every command and variable in the file with some random key that points to an array which then gets eval’d back out at run time. Generally speaking the code you see in an obfuscated javascript file looks like completely gobbledygook which is sorta the point.

My stance on it is simple; Don’t do it — If you ever catch me encoding or obfuscating my javascript, come kick me square in the jimmy.. I simply cannot abide by people who think they need be secretive with javascript.. And lets be completely honest here, that’s what it’s about. Read More

My new project requires a common theme across both Wordpress (and thus Wordpress MU) and Invision Power Board. No small order.

To that end I have decided to convert (or redesign) the Chromatophore Joomla theme into a combined wordpress / invision power board theme. I decided to go with this look because I very much appreciate what the folks over at RocketTheme did with the Chromatophore theme. To be honest if I were using Joomla I’d buy it, but since I’m not I must create my own.

Instead of just cutting and pasting their html, js, css, and images into an already created wordpress template I have decided to recreate the theme from what I see alone. Without looking at their source — at all.  (So far I’ve only peaked a couple times)

Read More

I was asked today what my professional opinion was with regards to which graphical format to use in web design. I pondered it a bit and it occurred to me that this was a very misleading question, and showed an error in thinking. Of the three commonly used formats none of them are “correct” and all three of them have their place in web design. This is very much a “use the correct format, for the correct job.”

Of the three image types commonly used on the web today (GIF, PNG and JPEG) usually the argument comes in the form of people agreeing that JPEG has one use; and either GIF or PNG has the other use. The religious war begins when folks try to argue the merits of GIF versus PNG. And usually it comes in the form of arguing PNG’s new hotness and it’s lack of support by Microsoft against GIF as the old standard that may not have as many features but at least its supported.

Read More

So I got the Wordpress MU blog system up and running YESTERDAY. And today I wake up to some spam in the form of a bot that created a “wow gold farmer” blog. It was completely random crap and went a pretty long way towards detailing my need of some form of bot protection.

I’m stunned that I got botted so soon after putting it up, more over on domains that didn’t exist until yesterday.  BUT likely due to my post of yesterday which told the bots where to go — woops.  A solution was required and fast! Read More