| This exists? |
[Jan. 28th, 2006|04:24 pm] |
Every time I look back into my past, I wonder how I ever was so lucid and content, and I wonder how I got to be where I am today. Half of these entries, I don't think I could ever write with the same enthusiasm and certainty I once did, especially compared to my latest entries (elsewhere). And I don't remember how I was ever so social and happy with myself in middle school. And I don't remember how I ever came up with, much less remembered, the extensive comic storylines I struggle to dig up today.
The more I analyze things, the less sense they ever seem to make. So maybe I'll try to do less of that from now on. |
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| I hate cameras. |
[Mar. 26th, 2005|10:07 pm] |
There was the most gorgeous moon out tonight. It was cloudy out, but the moon was completely visible, illuminating the surrounding clouds... which were layered so majestically around it.
I took 10 pictures with my digital camera. Each one came out as a shining white blob.
I took 2 pictures with a film camera, but I know that it couldn't focus on the moon, looking through the viewfinder.
I thus feel it's safe to say that I hate every camera in existence.
It's not the first time, either... there doesn't seem to be any camera which can capture a picture the same way the human eye can. Of course, this is just with experience with sub-$200 cameras, digital and film, but I'm not even sure that expensive cameras could accomplish that I'm thinking of.
I like lights... I like buildings. The city. Cars, streets, streetlights and streetlamps, highways and the perspective of streets merging and fading off into a distant area. I like grey, overcast skies, and, of course, the moon... and fog. Fog rocks. Unfortunately, these are the types of areas that cameras seem to fail most in capturing them the same way I perceive them.
Any thoughts? |
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| The <head> tag is special. |
[Feb. 24th, 2005|08:58 pm] |
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I think, despite using HTML for years, and seeing the benefits of XML, XML has only helped to lessen my understanding of how HTML works. |
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| Why I shouldn't sleep in for 12.5 hours. |
[Feb. 22nd, 2005|01:39 pm] |
Another game story idea.
The game is an RPG, the only thing which would suit the story. The setting is a sub-modern world, technologically advanced but technology is not as prevalent as it is now. Most of the world has been colonized, urbanized, and forgotten about, leaving slums through every corner of the Globe. Different races live all over the Globe, including dragons, frogs, cat creates, rats, etc. all as normal citizens, along with people.
Despite being a modern society, much of public belief is deeply rooted in witchcraft, homemade medicines and legends. Very little of is it effective, but so much of society is dependent on it, that modern science hasn't actually taken off yet. Several legends in particular are prophecies-- bound to no specific religion but rather society as a whole-- one being that there are types of people who can modify the Globe to their will. They can edit, create, and destroy new parts of the Game themselves.
You grew up in the slums, working nightly delivering drinks and 'modern medicine' for a tavern man you know, and daily searching for work. The city you live in is very shabby, but there are some areas of town still occupied by the middle class.
One nighttime delivery leads you to a back alleyway where a black markets trader has his shop. He's a dragon himself, very tall, nearly all black with two neon blue slits for eyes. His assistant is a clumsy frog, in assistant-like manner. The delivery doesn't go well, as the dragon takes to making fun of and threatening you, a small kid. Knowing that you're probably in danger, you get out of there as fast as possible.
Hoping it would be the last encounter with him, fate takes hold as you run into him the next day. He looks even more intimidating than the day before, and doesn't even bother to banter with you-- he shoves you off and threatens you about what he'd do to you the next time you run into him, walking off in a rush with his assistant.
One week later, he's on the news for a heist of the town treasury, looking even more frightening as photos show him stabbing the security guards. You run off to get help, knowing where he last was, but he took off without a trace-- in fact, there was nothing there to begin with.
Checking with the tavern man, you never left to go there. He never had a shop.
The whole game progresses are you continue to run into this shady dragon character and his assistant, as they become bigger and bigger criminals, and seemingly becoming more deviant and evil each time you see them.
That's when you find out that one of these prophecies are true-- certain people can change the game world. And you are one of them. For the past year, unknowingly, you've been intimidated by this character who wasn't as bad as he seemed to be-- and uncontrollably, you changed him into exactly what you feared he was. You made him into the world's most powerful criminal, all by accident.
And try as you might, keeping your abilities under control, he's now too powerful-- he's beyond your control, getting more powerful by the day, and you can't change him back.
The actual dream has portions of bombing Iraq with the help of a mole rat equipped with a mechanical beaver tail. This part seemed more interesting for some reason. |
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| Stupid ideas in marketing |
[Jan. 8th, 2005|10:05 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | working | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "New Slang" ~ the Shins | ] |
The new Blockbuster ads are horrible. Everybody already knows that they're only getting rid of late fees in order to stay even somewhat competitive against the new crop of rent-as-long-as-you-like companies. There's no need to try and create an elaborate commercial about people demanding this, and being excited when it occured-- I barely heard a murmur about it myself-- nor is there need to try to get people to think this is a positive development, or that they did it in order to "serve" the customer. We already know they did it just to save their own butts.
However, this doesn't mean I'm not inclined to take advantage of this new development. *goes off to rent Dark Cloud 2 for the two years it'll take me to finish it*
Appendum (10:21): After just watching the last three commericals on TV, I can safely say that, in addition to Blockbuster's ads, all modern marketing is stupid. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jan. 5th, 2005|04:42 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  nervous | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "What's It All About" ~ Five O'Clock Shadow | ] |
For anyone who's not seen this site yet:
http://www.folklore.org/
If you're into these types of stories, then this site will amaze you. Or just be a good read for a while. This site easily solidified my decision to one day get a Mac instead of a PC. Instead of just wanting one for the supposedly-good-at-working-with-art reason, I also now appreciate the awesomeness behind its creation. Reading similar stories about the history of the IBM PC, Bill Gates, and Windows have not been as... interesting, to say the least.
Oh, but if only Macs weren't so expensive... but wait, what's this?
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0412expo2.html
Hah. Now if I only didn't spend all my money on Coca-Cola and badly-timed birthday presents... |
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| Troubles |
[Dec. 29th, 2004|12:01 pm] |
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Illustrator is much harder to use than I thought, and I can't find any tutorial that'll teach me where to start... |
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| A dream of surreal brilliance |
[Dec. 28th, 2004|11:11 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sleepy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Kissing the Lipless - the Shins | ] |
I had a dream last night, one I remembered, which is a nice change from the monotony of nothing I've been experiencing. While most of it made no sense (outside my head), I dreamt up this lovely little video game idea:
Farm House Animals Attack Or something. Actually it was supposed to be a male-only video game where you'd see pictures of beautiful women, but somewhere along the line they got replaced with sheep, baby chicks and eggs. As a character with a gun... thing (flamethrower?) you stand on this four-lane track in the middle of a level, which is located in some obscure jungle location (think Donkey Kong or Crash Bandicoot-- the place would probably change with each level). Then, sheep drop down to one side of you. Not just one sheep at a time, noooo... like, thirty, fourty at a time. And of differing sizes, too, some are HUGE. The same happens with chicks and occasionally eggs, they just drop down all around you, one at a time or in huge numbers, and you're supposed to blast them away and (or am I making this up?) make it to the end of the level. In which case, some Viking-dressed womenfolk with feather hats will discuss how angry they are at your progress.
Actually, maybe it wasn't such a good idea after all.
Other parts of the dream included:
- A huge casino-like areas that looked like a kid's restaurant, with areas for games and stuff-- a carnival, really. Several of my dreams are focused around these carnival-casinos for... some reason, but not all of them with the color scheme of red, white, and mac-n-cheese yellow.
- I think this might've been a continuation off of another dream, but anyway... there were three warriors, I think FF1 warriors, level '10', training out on a rock in the middle of a wide ocean. There was an island nearby which held a lot of warriors training, and these were the head honchos, they'd made it the farthest... before that I myself was at level 1, with some of my friends, and we were making a tour of the island, and for some reason I felt I needed to skip the middle man as I had already become level 10. There was more before that, but anyway. So, these level 10 guys were with a giant fish, who was just a more realistic Jabu-Jabu (from Ocarina of Time) with a HUGE set of ragged teeth. He was dishing out advice to the three warriors, who were showing off. (the fighter at this time asked him something, as he shot off a simple ice attack into the air and also sunk a far-off ship: "You once told me that sinking the ship would be more rewarding, but what does it gain me here?" as the ice attack was far more pretty than the sinking, smoking ship. Jabu-Jabu couldn't reply with much except "Things aren't always the way they seem...", which wasn't myseterious or anything, just stupid). So, while these guys were training on the rock (the art style was admittedly similar to DBZ) our little tour boat sailed out to a rock far away, at the base of the cliff where the island faced the three training warriors... (at this time Jabu-Jabu commented about his years in WWII, and the fighter cleverly remarked back "You even remember WWII? I thought that it never happened!" which revealed the fact that I was probably half-awake at this time) I thought it looked a lot like Jabu-Jabu, and a friend on the tour with me agreed. Then Jabu-Jabu came over, rather angry, and forced himself INTO the rock (ooh, movie sequence!) and... well, it seemed spectacular at the time. He made the rounds and then returned to the cliff.
- I was partially awake here, as I realized the dream quickly switched over from whatever I was dreaming beforehand. There was a young kid playing a really-awesome looking Zelda game in the middle of a grass field, walking towards a... castle or dungeon or something. I consciously realized that the theme was playing very slowly. Oh, but now I forget what that theme was, it wasn't the actual theme...
Into the mind of a dreaming automaton... |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 20th, 2004|09:47 pm] |
PHP doesn't return things when using eval().
Complications +10! |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 19th, 2004|09:13 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  eating cake | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Barely Breathing" ~ dunkan sheik | ] |
*yawn* The project of the week is Minimalist, my site engine. Been working on it for a while. I've decided I really need some way to organize everything in my site engine for my new comic project, and Minimalist was the long-term goal for that. But I've reached a wall in which the messy way I merged the code and the HTML is just too hard to work through, or at least enough to slow progress down. So I moved on to complete Minimalist.
The current progress is a (hackish) XML parser, and a (hackish) ECMAScript parser. The former is the real point of Minimalist, which is to allow custom tags to access special functions. Simply, you write out an HTML file, adding in the special tags. Minimalist takes any HTML files, runs them through the parser, and outputs them again. Every time it spots one of these special tags, it calls a function. It's supposed to really modularize the code, so that I'm not copying huge blocks of code between pages, making sure they're both updated and the same, or worrying about what variables are initialized or what PHP is included in the page. Minimalist will handle that itself. The XML parser deals with XML tags fine enough, but it's still pretty hackish because it doesn't deal with much else (there's about 19 types of XML items, according to the W3C, and regular tags are only one type).
The latter, the ECMAScript parser, is where the fun begins. This is in it's VERY beginning stages, so it's what I'll be spending a good portion of my time on. ECMAScript is, to put it simply, JavaScript. That is to say, the JavaScript syntax. ECMAScript is a standardized language, and while it's supposed to have a wide range of uses, JavaScript and ActionScript are the only ones I know of. Well, for a while I was thinking of making PHP the native language of Minimalist, until I read a slew of anti-PHP rants, which I thereafter agreed with. PHP is flawed, if you look at it closely enough. Crazy function naming, weird pointer support (references), and some major oddities like register_globals and magic_quotes, which if you don't know of, are basically security measures for the dumb and a boon to double-check, since they can be disabled, or simply enough, an annoying complication. Somewhere along the line I thought of making my own language which PHP could just parse, which led the way to MCL (Minimalist Coding Language, name subject to change maybe sorta not really but I'm just saying it just in case). MCL is an ECMAScript-based language which allows for easy integration with Minimalist, and provides easy access to SQL, HTTP variables, and more. The major cool factor in having a unique language is that I can port Minimalist to other languages than PHP, like Perl or Python, and any existing code would still work. Nyeah.
So, here's a Minimalist progress report, which is sure to not be accurate and will mislead you. As any good report should.
Minimalist Progress:
Framework: 10%
XML Parser: 25%
MCL Parser: 8%
Built-In Functions: 2%
Control Panel: 0%
(still working on a costume. i procrastinate far too much) |
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| Got me moving, whoah-ho-ho-ho! Slicing up eyeballs, whaoh-hao-hao-ho! |
[Oct. 6th, 2004|04:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  hot | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "Debaser (live)" - the Pixies | ] |
Some things I've noticed recently:
- I've been contradicting myself quite often lately. I think or say one thing about myself, make an exception, and realize I meant the complete opposite. Mostly I'm thinking of what I'd expect whatever it is to be. Wonder if that means anything.
- It was really cold yesterday, and some memories which you can barely think of in the back of your mind, but can't quite get your finger on, came back to me. *sigh* December can't get here soon enough.
- There are a lot more crickets around lately than I've noticed in previous years, walking home.
Still wondering on what to do about my costume. Going off to play FF7 now, hopefully to the point where Cait Sith is actually introduced. I've only heard of him by reputation, not experience. |
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| I Stay Away |
[Oct. 5th, 2004|06:09 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | cold | ] |
| [ | music |
| | "High and Dry" - Radiohead | ] |
Like I seem too be doing far too much recently (my new site is supposed to come out on the first of 2005), I've been working on another of my delayed projects. This one's the BingBangBOOM! website. I've had that "under construction" page for months now, and what was there before it wasn't too much better, either. Thus, I gave it and decided to make a nice site design, even if there's not a whole lot of content to put in it. If anything, it'll at least allow me to make the forums look pretty.
...in little over three hours of work, however, I've already needed to include about five CSS hacks, just for IE. This is strange, since the site design is much simpler than my other site in progress, which has only one (and a very hard one to find, too). Well, I'll see if I can sift some of the hacks out, or at least find non IE-specific ways to put them in.
The project I should be working on is Minimalist, which is an XML-based CMS. It's to replace my horrible PHP coding practices, and separate "content from structure" (just like I did "presentation from structure", and "behavior from structure". Ugh, this web standards stuff is killing me), but I'm sure more people can use it than just me. More on that later.
Halloween is coming up. I'm planning on masquerading as Cait Sith, to procure DELICIOUS TREAT x 123. Any ideas on how to make a costume out of that? |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 26th, 2004|04:06 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bouncy | ] |
| [ | music |
| | Autographs and Apologies - Motion City Soundtrack | ] |
In the process of making a single webpage for my new site, I managed to:
- Crash Internet Explorer using JavaScript.
- Crash Internet Explorer using CSS.
And in practically unrelated accounts. I don't know whether I should be proud of myself, or angry at the world.
Also, I seem to be awesome all of a sudden. How come I can select a music and mood now? |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 20th, 2004|05:56 pm] |
I apparently have a rival now.
My only opponent for running for President last year told me today he's going to try all year to beat me (in general, I'm guessing just at grades). What's odd is that he was rather friendly while saying it.
Also, a tad insane-looking.
The only thing I know about rivals is that they have an Eevee which evolves depending on your actions in the course of the game. |
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| Firefox 1.0PR |
[Sep. 14th, 2004|05:19 pm] |
I decided, on a whim, to pre-maturely upgrade Firefox to see what was in store.
I like it.
Firefox 1.0PR is the preview release of the first "real" Firefox release. Once it hits 1.0, it reaches release status. Normally I object to downloading nightly builds, non-supported builds or anything that has a suffix after the version number, just because I'm afraid software not rigorously tested, and software I regularly use at that, will mess something up. But 1.0PR seems to work fine, and I'm only more eager now to see Firefox 1.0 actually be released.
The changes are very minor, but good:
- The default skin has been upgraded to a) take up less space and b) look nicer. Now that the icons aren't so huge, the links bar below it looks pretty crowded, which wasn't an issue before. But that's not a bad thing, I hate links bars anyway.
- Added a "Page Style" option under the "View" menu. This is just a static menu version of the original style switcher. Instead of getting rid of the style switcher, which they thought about (along with the Javascript Console and View Source, thinking that extensions could do the same job. Good thing they got over that idea), they actually improved the thing. It also now includes an option to have "No Styles" which, while I have a similar option in the Web Developer's Toolbar (Disable Styles), No Styles apparently rips out presentational markup too, like the <font /> tag.
- The status bar has a little icon that pops up when a page <link />s to an RSS feed, and displays a menu for all the feeds. I didn't even know people did that! I'll have to add it to my own sites sometime... but in addition, it allows me to quickly see when a page has an RSS feed. Since I'm not "big" into RSS right now, maybe that'll help.
- The Tools menu can link to your default e-mail program, showing you when you have new mail or allowing you to quickly write a message. That should work well with Thunderbird.
Hopefully that's not all there is to it; in addition, there's still some well-known CSS bugs that were fixed in Mozilla that still last in Firefox, and I'm wodnering when they'll get around to that. Overall though, something nice to play around with.
Note: Apparently, some my my lesser-used extensions aren't Firefox 1.0 compatible. Oh well. Hopefully they'll have updated them by now, or else I may have to think twice before installing Firefox 1.0 on my computer, just yet... |
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| Checklist |
[Sep. 13th, 2004|04:37 pm] |
Things to get done today:
- Homework
- Watch Pirates of Sillicon Valley (again)
- Play the level "Hog Wild" in Crash Bandicoot 1
- Play that cool ruins level in Crash Bandicoot 2
- Play the level "Midnight Magic" in Crash Bandicoot 3
- Figure out why IE5 crashes when running my calendar script
Things I'll probably actually get done today:
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| Just peachy... |
[Sep. 12th, 2004|02:22 pm] |
Apparently, XHTML isn't the future. The WHAT-WG is developing a proposal for what will probably be called HTML 5.0.
This is just absurd. We have a perfectly applicable standard, HTML 4.01. Then the W3C goes and develops XML, and then develops XHTML 1.0. That's fine and good, I like the idea of being able to easily develop my own portable XML-based language. I like how my code will be parsed much easier by a wider variety of applications. XHTML 1.0 came in three flavors, Transitional (a lot of presentational markup leftover), Strict (very little presentational markup, and what I use), and Frameset (frames. need I say more?). Then they decided to develop XHTML 1.1 which would be stepping stone between XHTML 1.0 (html-based) and XHTML 2.0 (the new version of HTML).
Then IE had to ruin the fun. It doesn't support the MIME type application/xml+html. MIME types are like extensions in windows, except more binding; actually they're more like Apple's file types, but MIME types can be bound to certain extensions... anyway. Whenever a server sends a file, the file has a MIME type. XML has to be sent with application/xml+html in order for most XML parsers to parse it properly (otherwise it may lead to some HTML-compatibility features, aka, XML-compatibility bugs). All XML parsers today can't accept text/html which is what HTML is normally served as.
In order to get XML to look the best, the most predicatable, send it with the right MIME type, which all current browsers accept... except IE. IE instead decides to force a download of the file, since it doesn't recognize it. That's not an effective way to view webpages, but since IE controls 90% of the marketshare... you don't have much choice.
Going back to XHTML 1.1, it says it HAS to be sent as application/xml+html. However, in an Appendix note, XHTML 1.0 (any flavor) can be sent as text/html if you want. A cheat, but necessary unless you want to do MIME-type switching and ugly server-side tricks to use XHTML 1.1, which I don't want to do. I was using XHTML 1.1 until I found all that out. I'm now stuck with XHTML 1.0 Strict, but I hope I'll never have to go back to HTML 4.0.
The future looks grim. The stepping stone, XHTML 1.1, is pretty much useless without IE's cooperation (coming in Blackcomb 2024!) unless you use the advanced XML tricks, which I think would be too much for me to handle. That being said, how am I supposed to migrate to XHTML 2.0 if I can't use my pages in strict XML parsing mode anyway?
XHTML 2.0 is supposed to be an updated version of HTML, it finally adds features after all these years, not just improves the existing ones. It also strips away some... and inevitably, it's not backwards-compatible. They say it's not supposed to be the successor to HTML, but it has the same name as XHTML, and it's close enough to HTML that it'll be a candidate for it. As long as browsers support it, I'm looking forward to it (the standard HAS to be updated at some point), yet many people are reluctant. And for good reason.
To get XHTML 2.0 working as a real application, it would need to be supported by... oh, let's say, 99% of all browsers, minimum, before it's considered as a basis for mainstream sites. "Why use XHTML 2.0 when XHTML 1.0 works fine, and on older browsers?" Some may argue XSLT (which can translate XML tags from one language to another) can be used to create HTML 4.0, XHTML 1.0 and XHTML 2.0 versions of the same page, but try juggling that many style sheets. Try checking to make sure every page works in all three languages. It's hard enough to check them in one. Since most browsers pick up new features quickly, and XHTML 2.0 is probably a pretty big feature, new versions of Opera, Mozilla and Konqueror are sure to crop up that support it. But then here's the kicker...
XHTML 2.0 is going to come out soon, but IE's going to come out soon as well. Unless XHTML 2.0 is released within an acceptable margin of time before Longhorn (not impossible, due to Microsoft's increasingly long delays, but I won't go into that), the new IE team probably won't bother to implement it. I'd think it lucky if application/xml+html was even updated, or the majority of CSS bugs. Implementing a completely new language might not be important to Microsoft staff...
And considering how long it'll take for Longhorn to come out, just think of how long it'll take before Blackcomb does. Since Microsoft's insistent on integrating the OS with the browser (it'd better be a really good implementation, or else it's just another way to get IE to be the only browser on the market) you'll have to wait for another OS release before another version of IE comes out.
...
Then today, I read they might, possibly, just make HTML 5.0. XHTML was great, it promises compatibility with XML processors, forces you to think more structurally, and is a pretty logical language. I've considered it the successor to HTML this entire time, and now they're think of making a new lanugage, completely confusing the issue. If there is an HTML 5.0, there'll be two distinctly different, yet almost entirely the same, versions of the same language-- with their own development cycles and updates, extensions (css/javascript) and quirks. They're both created to reach the same means, why not just have only one?
Right now, if I were to go to HTML 5.0, that would be going backwards to HTML 4.0 and then moving on. To be honest, I'm pretty good at figuring out how programming languages for when they're similar to each other, like PERL and C, BlooP and Basic, HTML and XHTML. But I can't keep the idiosyncracies of XHTML and HTML in my head, now that they're different. There'll be tags that work in one, but not the other, CSS tricks that work in one, but not the other. If in the minimal chance they really decide to continue developing XHTML and HTML separately, the differences will just become to great that I'll have to stick with one.
And somehow, I feel that XHTML would actually be the losing side.
to those of you who actually read through all that... here's a medal. *ding!* |
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| How do you like dem apples!? |
[Sep. 10th, 2004|01:37 pm] |
Our school was reorganizing classrooms over the summer. As a result of this, they threw out a ton of computer equiptment... that I never really knew we had.
One of these pieces was an Apple IIc, which is the last version of the Apple II made (roughly 10+ years after the original Apple II). I thought the school had thrown out all Apple II's years ago, but this one made it through. Conveniently, at the time I was passively reading www.apple2history.org, and was considering that if I ever got one, it'd probably have to be a IIc (everything built in; no need for external cards). Since they were throwing it out anyway, they let me have it, along with an archaic B&W 10" or so monitor. Pretty good.
But even better is that they were throwing out some actual Macs, specifically the LCIII. It's from 1993, but runs System 7.1, and I still can't get my head around how Apple made three major OS releases in eleven years, while before that they made seven in just eight years. In any case... they were throwing it out, asked if I wanted it, and since I never owned an actual Macintosh (despite being a fan of Apple) I accepted. Came with the monitor, keyboard and mouse. Right now I'm trying to upgrade it to OS 7.5.5, the best it will run with only 8megs of memory. It still seems never than our 486 in the basement, despite being a few years older and only half as fast (a blazing 25mhz). Experimenting with it should be fun...
Now I can finally call myself a Mac-owner, even if it doesn't mean I use it... for all intents and purposes, Macs are just too expensive. However, PearPC would allow me to run OSX on my PC, which I'm going to take a stab at when I manage to find $50 for MacOS 10.3... |
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| It's all coming together. |
[Aug. 28th, 2004|12:05 am] |
I've noticed recently that comments on my posts have become steadily lesser in number...
And in addition, my posts have become progressively longer.
Thus, I was keep this post as short as possible.
...
...
is it working? |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 16th, 2004|02:36 pm] |
Minimalist is progressing slowly... Minimalist being my comic management script. I'm beginning to reconsider how it works, it might be too complicated for the average user. Looking at Kamikaze update script, a comic manager I've heard little of, it's been updated to v2.0 and finally has screenshots I can look at. It looks to be exactly like phpComic, in fact, so I'm not worried about making it better than that. I should probably try out a newer version of phpComic since some progress has been made, and even changed its name to Cusp. Finally, I need to experiment with my KeenSpace account to see what theirs is like.
Minimalist is more like KeenSpace's comic manager than the other ones. Basically, via a control panel you can upload a comic, upload a news item, and the content is loaded into your webpages via tags like ***recent_news*** or something. Minimalist works on the same principle, you use webpages which have tags like <m:news list="10" style="table" start="newest" /> which would insert a table of ten news posts starting form the newest. The table can be formatted via the control panel.
Web pages act differently. You don't actually need to FTP any files yourself, it's easier to do it in the built-in file manager. You can create comic templates, and upload them to a virtual, protected folder. Then Minimalist generates the actual pages based on the virtual templates. Since HTML is faster than PHP, this works well, so you have actual files like /news/2004/01/12/index.html instead of /news.php?id=20040112. Using folders instead of query strings helps if you ever change from PHP, the file names can remain exactly the same. With the news templates, for instance, some data would be saved on HOW the pages are generated, which in this case would convert the /2001/01/12/ to an actual query string.
Right now, however, I'm far off from my goals... in fact, not even remotely close. The comic manager I'm making is hard-coded into the site, so that you'd have to edit the page in order to edit how the site works. But I'm betting it's a simple conversion between the hard-coded version and the dynamic version. I just need to write up how everything'll work, and then develop it.
I'm hoping to release Minimalist under the GPL or some free license, if it ever is actually developed, since I'm sure other people would like it as well. The only reason I care to look at other comic management scripts is because I want to make sure Minimalist would have enough flexibility as so that everyone could use it. One can only hope...
Oh, and Final Fantasy Legend is one of the best games ever. And not just because you get to kill god, though that is a plus. |
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agenteqze's journal