It is the eve of the beginning of my PHP/MySQL class. Of course, we should all know by now that CMS programming is child's play for me. However, seeing as my final project for this class is a CMS with front end, I'm taking this opportunity to redesign stuff, and by stuff I mean everthing (even beyond the site itself). Some things to expect from the next iteration:
They say all good things must come to an end. Such is true for my one week of summer vacation. It was brief, yet enjoyable. Got to celebrate my birthday with my family, eat grilled food and lots of potato salad, and also take the usual trip to Tulsa. It's a pity that it was so short, but I'm complaining too much. The school is giving me a bachelor's degree in less than two years, so this time next year I'll be out of school. But that's a story for another day.
As you may recall, last month began my two month long journey through the wonders of Flash. Last month focused primarily on Flash as it pertains to design, teaching us the interface, motion tweens, and just a hint of ActionScript. This month, however, is dedicated to nothing but ActionScript. To demonstrate these "newly acquired skills" our final project consists of making a game.
Now, I put "newly acquired" in quotes for a reason. For anybody who's frequented this blog long enough you should know by now that I am, or at least used to be, heavy into coding. Because of this I have an unfair advantage over the rest of the class in this regard and as such I am taking my project to ridiculous extents (far above the scope of the course). The nice thing, though, is that the instructor actually acknowledges the fact that I am as proficient as I am, so much so that I took the place of the lab instructor for one day (whilst the real one was waiting in line for his iPhone 3G). Being able to talk to the instructor about geeky stuff as equals is a nice departure. But, enough ego stroking, about the actual project itself.
I chose to challenge myself and create essentially a dumbed down clone of Street Fighter, but be completely extensible through external configuration files. The first thing I avoided was the use of graphics inside Flash itself opting instead to load sprite sheets from external sources. Everything is configured through XML sheets that define how a character should react, define where animations are within a sprite sheet, stages, etc. Amazingly, I've achieved most of this and all very, very quickly. The biggest problem I foresee is the addition of enemy AI, but I've got ideas on how to achieve this as well. Overall, though, I'm loving being back at the helm of the coding ship. I'd forgotten how much of a thrill can be derived from hours of typing if statements and nested for loops. Damn, it's good to be back.
Once again people have thought it fun to spam my blog. To this I say: Burn in hell, you dirty bastards! But, oh well. I've added some interesting features to the comment system that should keep them at bay... unless they actually write a bot to target my site specifically. But, in the meantime, the comments are back up and running. No crazy password, approval e-mail, or word verification necessary. That's how proud I am of my coding. That and the fact that I can't seem to programtically send e-mails on my server. It sucks. Hardcore.
Also, you'll notice that the RSS feed is back so subscribe and never miss out on my awesome news again. Peace out!
This is the name of the new site backend I've been working on. Now, for anybody who's been paying attention I haven't written a web engine since Tetra 2. The last time I worked on it was sometime back in '05 I believe. Back then I was extremely proud of my little creation but I look back on it and think to myself "that is one bloated piece of crap". It really was. Over 2500 lines of code. In comparison my new engine is only one or two hundred lines of code and almost as powerful (or it will be).
From a design standpoint Purple Fusion is way different from Tetra. Tetra was built around an object-oriented core. From an interface standpoint this was very clean. However, it did lend to some slowdown and made adding new modules cumbersome at best. It also limited what you could do with a module (to a degree). The new engine completely throws objects out the window (almost, the main class is PurpleFusion and that's the only one) and goes for a scriptable approach. Each page is it's own seperate page script that makes calls for getting data, displaying templates, etc. This makes creating new pages incredible quick and eliminates redundant code. Here's the script for the front page:
<page title="Home">
<template:page_head>
<db:entries limit="15" sort="entry_date" order="desc">
<loop:entries>
<dblink:category_name table="categories" link="category_id">
<field:entry_date type="date" format="m-d-Y">
<field:entry_body type="standard">
<process:data>
<template:entry>
<end:loop>
<template:page_foot>
<end:page>
As you can see it borrows from SGML's tag structure. Because of the tag structure it's very human readable and makes for quick prototyping. I'm incredibly pleased with the way it's going right now and hopefully I'll have it running this site in a couple of weeks. Now that I think about it I could even speed things up by generating a cached version of the source code and just include that instead of parsing the page all the time. Yeah, this rocks.
Eh? Whatever :-P
Today, at roughly 4pm CDT, I return to my old job of cashiering. Am I excited? Am I looking forward to it? I'll just tell you one thing: I've saved out my hawaiian SpongeBob shirt just for the occasian (i.e. hell, yes). I just hope I remember how to work the stupid register :-P
In other news, I got the graphics tablet I ordered up on Wednesday and I must say, it is a thing of beauty (and hance a joy forever). Today's comic was colored and highlighted using it and I have to say it's probably one of the best things I've done so far. About the comic itself it seems that the style is finally coming together (i.e. I'm satisfied with it at the moment). I've already got Monday's comic finished and have ideas for a couple weeks to come. I'm so sucked into this at the moment I barely had time to finish coding the comic viewer. From now on all my updates will be done over there so if you want to keep up on the comics add that to your favorites (I'll add in an RSS feed sometime within a week).
Also, for those who may not have gotten the hint, I am now legally licensed to drive in the state of Oklahoma. The test was brief, but nerve racking and I was only coached on a couple of minor points. So to date I've driven twice on my own: once to take my homies to the library, and last night to take my homies to go bowling (my "homies" being Jeff and Chris). And despite the fact that money keeps slipping through my fingers I've got enough of it stored up to make a nice down payment on a car, so that'll be coming own the road fairly soon (if you'll pardon the pun).
Well, I've been up for way too long now and I need to get some rest if I'm going to be in decent shape for work this afternoon.