kirabug’s idea files

Help You Play is a Game Interaction Design Pattern Library - handy for those of us who’d someday like to be designing fun things.

Great Hackers is probably the best article on programming (and to a lesser extent, problem solving in a technical setting) that I’ve ever read. It resonates.

A great article on coding — and something I need to keep in mind a little more often when campaigning for massive change in the more code-related areas of my life: Things You Should Never Do, Part I

I wrote my first plugin, or rather significantly modified someone else’s plugin, to offer better comic navigation for the comics. If you’re on the homepage, you still have to click the “navigation links” link under the current comic to get to the nav links, but once you do that, you can now navigate through the archive by category — so if you just want to read the Get Outta My Head comics, you can do that, or just the Sketchy Theater, or just the Idiocy on the Internet. And the Comics category stays there so you can navigate through all the comics as well. This makes me happy

Next three orders of business: fix the left nav up because one of my images keeps stepping on it (might be “fix the image” instead) and then add some big ole buttons to access the forum and the store to the top somewhere.

But not right now. This programmer’s going to go get some sleep.

So I’ve been pretty busy. Working hard at work, and resting hard at home. We spent the first half of the weekend with family, celebrating birthdays and fixing computers. We spent the second half of the weekend with appliances - dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, etc. Right now is computer time: I’m trying to fix some new problems in the forum, and Nighthawk is trying to learn all the patterns to beat Pac Man.

Yeah, I don’t even ask anymore.

Anyway, it looks like one of the bb plugins I’d added prevented everyones’ signatures from displaying on the bulletin boards. I’m still trying to hunt out why but suspect I’ll be doing a lot of code rewriting in the near future. Ah well, that’s how you learn, right?

It’s been, well, quiet lately. A lot of people seem to be off doing there own thing. The forums have been quiet, friends have been out of touch, even the comic community seems to be quieter than usual. Or maybe it’s just me - I’ve been so busy I haven’t been around to cause my usual level of trouble.

Oh, I did have some fun participating in some Fark Photoshop contests. They’re here and here and as long as you heed the “NSFW” warnings on some pics, they’re safe for work

I’m staying about a week ahead on comics and have more stuff to add shortly. I think. I’m still knitting and working on my Mother’s Day gift too.

That’s all that’s new here. How’re you all?

I finally wrote a phpbb theme that I thought was good enough to actually put into production in the forum, so it’s not only in place but marked as the default theme (’cause if I’m gonna work this hard there might as well be someone using it!). If you’re still seeing subSilver (the default template) consider switching to kirabug4 via your profile.

I also nuked two old theme attempts - the “kirabug” and “kirabug2″ themes - since they were incomplete/damaged and didn’t get along well with Internet Explorer for Windows, the admin pages, or most of the mods I had in place.

If folks ask nicely I can re-implement the “hide bbcode” command (the “anti-spoiler” code) but it’s a real bitch to install so I didn’t do so yet.

This is cross-posted to the forum itself as well.

So, it’s 2 AM and I’ve been monitoring the Online Comics Day spider (which checks the fidelity of links and linkbacks) for the Online Comics Day hub since about 9:00, taking over for Aric, who’d monitored it prior to that.

Midnight EDT resulted in a whole bunch of comics updating (ah, chron jobs) and it took a while for the spider to churn through, so that by the time everything updated and everyone was notified, it was time to run the spider again. Whee.

1 AM (when I originally planned to go to bed) resulted in almost as large an update, plus by then the comic checking code borked the status of 3 comics and I had to manually log into the database to fix ‘em. Oh yeah, that’s a lot of fun, by the way. I’m pretty good with mysql through phpMyAdmin, but I’d never used a pure command-line to update it before. Honestly, I think it was actually easier than phpMyAdmin for the small changes I was making. Then again, it’s 2 AM, I might just be delerious.

Anywho, by the time I got THAT straightened out it was almost 2, so I figured I’d run the spider one more time before I go to bed. Strangely, no updates. I guess nobody in Mountain time decided to run a midnight update.

The comic creators that I’ve spoken to via email have been friendly and helpful for the most part and really, despite the late hour and the crash-course in database-thwacking, this has been a lot of fun.

The chron job to check links that we’d hoped to have running for the spider doesn’t appear to be - we’re doing manual kickoffs and then verifying the results - so the site will be quiet until Aric hits it again in the morning. We’re up to around 40 active sites and a handful more that are choking the spider. (No, that’s not a euphamism.) Not bad for an event that almost wasn’t last year.