(Phaysis)

Haven’t been doing much with the site lately, as you may notice. Got several projects going on, mostly just development work. It’s all hobby, so take it for what it’s worth.

One thing I’m working on / was working on is a simple note tool called Raganotes. It was intended to be a tool to allow me to take quick notes, give them a title, and make them available. It’s a small experiment in pulling together some functional Perl building blocks: CGI::Application, Template Toolkit, Class::DBI, and Apache::Session. It’s a way to get my head wrapped around using these blocks in the assembly of a larger Content Management System for my site, a way of getting experience in doing so, finding methods that work, dipping my feet in the pool. It started from my overriding frustrations in building my CMS, a fast-and-loose attempt at coding something before I lost interest. What resulted was something that was kinda quick, I mean in the grand scale of things the month of building time was quicker than my past years of working on my site. I lost interest a few times, got stumped many, but I got it functional. Just not complete.

I think what I ended up with was something with way too much functionality to it. Instead of letting the user log in, make notes, add titles to them for quick browsing, publish them, search, edit, delete, undelete, copy, etcetera, what I got was a mashup of features that overall seem really cludgy. I had a vision, lost it during development, and then gained a vision that was hazily similar to the original, and now I’m stumped again. It’s mostly a user interface thing. So I’m letting it rest for a while.

My most recent project is my game, Chrontium. I started this back in 2004, some time before AJAX was an internet buzzword. It uses some advanced javascript, images, and realtime communication with a server to provide gameplay for users. At the time, it was fairly groundbreaking, yet I had only shown it to a handful of other people and promptly sat on it for months, years.

I’ve since gotten a new fire for Chrontium, and now, in the past 2 weeks, I’ve polished up the engine, redone the graphics, went from using GIFs to PNGs for true transparency (and much faster rendering in Firefox, et al). I’ve also done some cleaning up and changes elsewhere in the game code, I’ve rearranged the development file tree, and I’ve optimized the stylesheets and code to work in IE and Firefox (others forthcoming). Things are working rather nicely, but there’s rough edges. I also still need to build the server-side stuff, the database end, the user management, the scorekeeping, the game parameter controls, the message boards (which might come later), and all that. If it’s worth a damn, and gets popular after I post it here, I might relegate it to its own domain. We’ll see.

An associate of mine asked me why I didn’t simply use Flash instead of Javascript. My first answer was simple: I hate Flash. Really, I seriously do. My second answer: I want to prove to the internet community at large that Javascript, and the browsers they run in, are coming of age for realtime gaming applications. Anywhere you can use sprite graphics, you can use Javascript and images. I can’t wait until my first public release to see what issues, comments, or praises come my way. Will be interesting to stir a buzz.

But I’m not even finished enough to be concerned about these things. Really. Until then, I have my head down in the work.

Hello again. Time for your bi-monthly dose of new site news.

Things are moving slowly as far as stuff for the site. Nothing new there. I have the usual Big Ideas that I’ve had since the inception of Phaysis that haven’t been brought to fruition. But some of those ideas I’m getting new ideas about. Since I am now prone to imbibe a daily intake of coffee, ideas are popping and I’m making little touches to some code here, drawing some designs there.

I’ve set up a portable test server on my laptop and am experimenting with different content management systems, trying to find one that will fit my needs best. Some months ago I took a hard look at my history of glacial progress and decided that if I’m to have any luck with my site that I should stick to learning and using a prebuilt CMS instead of rolling my own. Well, I tried that track and found a few that fit what I needed…kinda. But the knowledge, code snippets, and concepts I’ve gained from examining them, hacking them to work on the limited setup I currently have Phaysis on, I’ve gotten new notions about writing my own CMS. We’ll see how it all fares.

On a negative note, I’ve been getting more spam than ever, and I have a feeling it’s from unsubscribing from a mailing list provided by a local radio station. Where I was once getting 12-ish messages a day I’m now getting 30+, and that was since unsubscribing. So the moral to be learned here today is that you can’t even trust the ones you can trust; they may be in a “business partnership” with other companies who aren’t bound by the first company’s privacy policy. Keep that in mind.

For shame, KROX-FM/101X. For shame.

As you can obviously tell, Phaysis has gotten another facelift. This time, the design is markedly different. Previous designs were simply variations on a theme; different colors, different header logo, same layout. This time, completely different layout, colors, and everything. And I’m completely happy with the design.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reading some journals of web designers and those in the information and usability biz and overall they’re starting to say some of the same things. Screen resolution of 800×600 is dead or dying. Netscape4 is dead. Internet Explorer4 is dead. So now it’s OK to design using current web standards. Now it’s OK to design using advanced techniques without fear of incompatible pageview failure. It’s OK to design using larger text. Now it’s OK to use large images in your design. Most of your audience can see it all. And if you design it right then anyone at any resolution can see it all and not suffer.

Gone are the days of 9-point text sizes — that design technique is so 2002. Gone are the days of 8-bit displays — the need for the “web safe” palette is not there anymore. It’s now just a convenience to techie designers with little eye for color. It’s now safe to use any color the designer wants, as it always has, without standing out as designing with no consideration for the lesser of us.

Browser capabilities are statistically catching up, just as actual browser brands are exponentially multiplying with each new mobile device. So you design with all this in mind; you use stylesheets to add style and layout to the html markup, and browsers can then choose to support those styles or ignore them based on their particular implementation. As long as the text gets across, you’ve won. So in the past years I’ve been designing Phaysis with that goal, trying to publish it clearly and concisely for any browser.

As a test, I looked at the site this morning on my friend’s new cellphone. The text was there, the menu was there, the journal entries were there, and everything worked. It was beautiful.

On this design, I’ve decided that placing my personal journal at the top fold of the page was the best option. I saw one designer’s page which, as a design, placed the latest entry smack-dab at the top of the page. No bones about what the page was about; it was a journal page, and here is the journal! I took that to heart and considered that even though this was a personal site with not much inside, some thinking about why people come to my site would prove beneficial to getting repeat readers. So to the top, underneath the full-size header, it went.

I placed the menu at a completely unexpected place: at the bottom right. It’s a small trend among some people, and I kinda like it. Navigation becomes a minimal part of the site, and doing so makes the reader use more attention in finding and using the navigation, slowing them down to actually look at things instead of the thoughtless clicky-clicky-clicky game. I left a vestigial link to the menu at the top for those who may be on text readers or portable devices where scrolling through pages of text might be a daunting task.

So, large header, main personal journal at the top underneath the header, the fortune cookie, redesigned and slimlined, joining the top half to the bottom half, and then the site news journal and the new “about Phaysis” box to the left, menu to the right, and a slimlined copyright footer at the bottom.

About the images in the design: I was browsing my image directories and came across some of the photos I’d taken over the early part of this spring. The set of pictures that stood out to me were a set of three that I took of a decaying wading pool at Pease Park. The fact that it was there, empty, and overgrown completely appealed to some dark corner in me, so I took the pictures. And now here they are, as hot, dusty, and oversaturated as they are, in this summertime design. I’m not sure what they say, but they’re saying it beautifully. Enjoy!

Phaysis has undergone a domain transfer. If you’re able to read this after April 14th, then things went according to plan. For several years running, I’ve been stuck with register.com as the registrar for my domain; it seemed that any time i tried to transfer out, my domain ended up expiring before the tranfer completed. This year, I managed to remember to transfer early enough, but just barely.

The new registrar for Phaysis.com is GoDaddy; much more economical than register.com. So instead of paying $35/yr (those’re old school rates left over from when register.com was the only domain registrar) I’m now paying less than $9. And now both of my domains (including glassdoor.net) are at the same registrar. How much better could it be? Heh.

Ok, so enjoy the site, read the sparse journals, look at the old art, and send me an email through the message gateway. Remind me why I should go through this trouble to have a website.

New site design. Take it or leave it. Not as cheerful, bright, or fanciful as the last. Not what I had planned for a future design, either. Sometimes, I just shouldn’t listen to people on IRC.

Enjoy the site. Remind me why I keep on with it.