And then all hell will break loose.

Possibly.

Not.

:|

Anyways, I was working on ZagrebDox for the whole month of February and it kind of took all of my time and energy, but ended up being a really nice project because I’ve, once again, learned a lot of new things about WordPress.

I’ve also learned a few new things about MySQL and how to crash your hosting provider’s shared server.

What happened:

• the site has over 300 pages (each with at least 3 attachments)  and I’ve used a permalink structure which started with %category% – this combination produced waaay too many rewrite rules
• there was a 20MB database size limit
• for some reason, the wp_options->rewrite_rules field got duplicated ~10 times, and the database had grown to 50MB in no time
• combine that with the 20MB limit and what you get is a bunch of neverending transactions
• s0 the server went kabang! and the site was promptly moved to another one

To solve the problem, I’ve changed the permalink structure to begin with %year%, disabled creation of rewrite rules for attachments (thanks to Johan Eenfeldt – his code has made my number of queries per page drop from ~3900 to ~90), set the number of post revisions to 2, and then repaired and optimized the database which now stands happily still at 5.7MB.

I don’t know how rewrite_rules field got duplicated, I haven’t used any plugins that would mess with it, so I’m still in the dark about that. What I do know is: you can’t host over 700 sites on one single server and expect everything to go smoothly until the end of days. Not to mention that the only available transport protocol is fsockopen which made the admin area a bit slow until I’ve blocked all the others…

There’s been some other stuff I’ve worked on, but I’ll put that in another post.

It’s lunch time. And I miss Ma.gnolia…

Go fill it out and put these three as priorities at the bottom:

1. Improve custom fields
2. Post templates/post types
3. Do not auto-correct in HTML editor

Thank you! :D

But I will not steal from my own evening TV time to talk about that. Nuh-uh.

So, believe it or not, I’ve been officialy employed for a month and a half now. Netipični d.o.o. is where I now do what I used to do from home. Code websites, that is :)

In short: I’m satisfied, and (thank god!) the people who work there are quite (haha) normal and easy to get along with.

My backache is killing me, and I haven’t been able to sleep enough lately, but I’ll blame that on the godawful summer in the city too, not just on my impossible way of life and inability to adjust myself to the 9-5 routine. I’ll survive, don’t worry ;)

What else…

You know how Wordpress adds ‘category’ in urls when the page is an category archive? I’ve created a plugin that gets
rid of it. But you’ll also need another plugin to make it work. I’ve
been testing it for the past few weeks and haven’t noticed any hickups.
Read on.

I’ve also switched from TinyMCE to WYMeditor and I’m liking it so far. You can download it as a WordPress plugin from here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-wymeditor/. I’ve tweaked its CSS files to suit the WordPress 2.5 color scheme better:

If you like it, you can download the tweaked files from here:

wymeditor-wp25-css.zip

Just paste the two directories over in the ‘wymeditor’ folder (the one residing inside the ’simple-wymeditor’ folder, if you’re using it as a WordPress plugin) and overwrite the files.

I installed Habari and I like it – it’s fast and feels stable, but it’s also very young and needs more work. I’ll dig in when I find some time.

I’m working with Silverstripe, too, but I can’t say that I’m becoming fond of it. Dunno… Although it seems to be a great piece of software, it just doesn’t feel right for me.

I know I had more stuff in my head that I wanted to write about, but I can’t really remember anything else right now, I’m feeling a bit sleepish :)

I’ll be taking two weeks off starting next Tuesday, gotta start working on my final paper and get that diploma out of my way. Fingers crossed ;)

Music? Something new? Hmm. We’ll see.

Laters :D

It started as a simple harpsichord theme because I was going for something baroque-ish. I’m trying to compose a character theme for one game (the title of which I will not mention because I might not have anything to do with it in the end) and I constantly end up with something completely…off.

Maybe I need to read more about the character, dive into their persona. Or…something. Gaaaaa-argh! It’s frustrating :=

Cross your fingers and help me find the appropriate melody :)

Until then, enjoy the eastern winds.

"Rescue: The Beagles" is a side scrolling platformer that relies on procedurally generated content to deliver some great gameplay.

You can see a screenshot of the game in my site’s header. Yes, that’s you parachuting down, ready to kick some pharmaceutical ass and save the poor doggies. Have I already mentioned that you use owls to attack the enemies? Excellent.

It was made for TIG Source procedural generation game competition and, so far, people seem to like it.

For example, LaughingCrow reviews the game on Lithium Leaf and mentions that one of the more enjoyable moments of the game was the first appearance of the enemy known as Vivisector, because when he enters the screen, he says "Doggieeeess…" in a creepy voice. I’m particularly proud of that, for that is my voice. Ha.

I’ve also created the sound effects and half the soundtrack. The credit for the other half goes to Rich Vreeland who composes awesome, very enjoyable (sometimes even addictive) C64- and ZX Spectrum-inspired music. Check for more on RichVreeland.com.

All the sound effects (except the enemy voices, naturally) and music were created using the incredible "Unknown 64" C64 synth by Odo Synths – do check it out, please – it’s pure fun :D

I’ve tried to do my best with limited time and I hope it sounds decent, at least :)

Now go download the game and enjoy ;)

The first one is the website for the Society of architects of Split (Društvo arhitekata Splita – DAS). My job was to code the layout and choose a CMS. I decided to go with WordPress because the site’s structure isn’t too complex and, except for two categories, it’s mostly just static pages.

I did encounter a few difficulties along the way, but nothing that wasn’t fixable. Most of the pain was caused by the ever popular “/category/” feature of WordPress, which inserts /category/ in the URL if the the page is a category index. While you can access those pages without the /category/ in URL if you’re using a custom permalink structure (such as “/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/”, for example), the problem starts when your post count per page exceeds 10 (or whatever custom number of posts per page you choose) and you need to go to page 2 of that category – it returns a 404 error. I fixed this problem with a handy plugin called “Redirection“, which made it possible to rewrite “/category/category_name/page/number/” to “/category_name/page/number/”. I tried placing the rewrite rules directly in the .htaccess file, but, for some reason, that didn’t work.

Second problem was adding custom metadata to posts in a way that would make sense to a site editor. For that purpose, I used the rc:custom_field_gui plugin which was a breeze to use :)

Third one, that gave me two days worth of headaches, was how to display only posts with certain metadata on a category index page. First I used the officially recommended way, which consisted of using PHP’s continue statement to filter out the unwanted posts. That produced a empty page 1, and a populated page 2, because WordPress post count occurs before the continue statement. There’s also no way to do it with WP_Query, so I ended up writing a custom query. Again, problem with pages. I used the WP-PageNavi plugin, so I looked at its code and figured out what variables it needs to work properly and I gave them the values they needed.

I can only say that I’ve learned a lot about how WordPress works :) And while it does have its quirks, if you know some PHP, anything is doable.

Second website is for a well known Croatian bottled water, Studena. Again, Blackduke was the one who produced the website and I was asked to compose some background music and a few sound effects. The first version of the music was initially accepted, but then it was agreed that something that currently plays on the site would work better. You can hear and download the first version from below :)

1.  Studena music – 01:42
   Download: MP3 (1,602 KB)

—

In other news: wish me luck because I’ve got three exams next week. And that’s it. If I pass all three, I get to start working on my master’s thesis.

Future awaits :)

Wow.

It’s not like I’m going to die, not like Dean from Supernatural is going to (he so is going to hell, I’m tellin’ ya), but still, it’s depressing. And also the opposite (name the word). It’s both at the same time. Now. I’ll tell you more about it in, well… about a year?

And Ablation X fits in here like a wild goose fits on a windshield, but that’s just the way things are around here. I’ve created the Ablation X page in the Games section and it doesn’t show in the RSS feed, so I’m giving you a heads up here – ABLATION X GAME PAGE. Moving on.

I’ve received some weird, but very awesome gifts this year (author’s note: for my birthday). Mostly money. Which I can’t have. But I can buy myself new clothes for the given amount of it. Because I look like a tramp, according to my mother. And she’s afraid that I’d use the money for something else than clothes if she gave it to me for reals. And she’s absolutely right. Do you have any idea how difficult it is for me to find these three things: pants, hoodie, sneakers? By the time I find those that I like, it’ll be Christmas. And it’s not that I don’t like shopping, I’m your regular 16 year old giggly (is that a word?) girl when it comes to it, but I really can’t make myself buy something I’m not in love with from the moment I laid (*giggle*) my eyes on it. Oh, I’m so emo sometimes.

And in category “Cool birthday presents which are not money”, we have three beautiful items:

“How to get your music in film & TV” by Richard Jay (thanks, hon!)
American McGee’s Alice and Cheshire Cat ACTION FIGURES (not dolls, as Nenad calls them)  (again, thanks, hon!)
American McGee’s Alice t-shirt – megaultrafabulous! (and again, thanks, hon!)

I can’t wait for Alice: the movie, but sadly, it seems it could take another decade for it to come to life. And although SMG->SMP is not getting any younger, I’d still like to see her play Alice. But I must say, Summer Glau sounds like a great idea for a replacement.

I have a preliminary exam at 8:30 AM tomorrow so I’ll call it a day now and go watch Star Trek Voyager.. Digital reproduction photography. Colors. On a freakin saturday morning. Bloody hell. I’m going to fail miserably, don’t worry.

Don’t forget to make a happy face when staring at yourself in the mirror in the morning, it really helps ;)