Archive for the ‘impworks’ Category

I’ve tweaked the display of the Vue links directory and the Google custom search of the site’s in the directory to hopefully make them easier to use.  I’ve also worked through all the python script and so they’re all displayed with a code highlighter.

I realised I’d not posted a progress report on any of my writing for ages. Its far too easy to update twitter and forget to mention stuff here.

I finished a completely rewritten draft of the Role Playing Game that’s been occupying a lot of my writing time for the last year. The plan was to make it leaner and more focused. This draft came in 7000 words longer and exactly the same number of pages so it isn’t leaner. However it is now more focussed with more detail where it was needed. So I need to circulate it and see what reaction it gets.

I took a look at the reworked opening to NitS that I wrote last year. I hate it so I need to go back to square one. The core story of NitS is written (although it will need a thorough edit at some point) but I’m struggling with the outer story as NitS takes the form of an investigation of the story. Still it’s not a lost cause.

I scribbled down the first few pages longhand of a short story on Thursday night that came to me thinking about some of the pictures in Exposed at Tate Modern. Discovering the book for the exhibition was a lot cheaper on Amazon than at the Tate I’ve ordered a copy as additional inspiration. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I’ve a couple of Dirk Dangerous short stories I must post up over on the Dirk Dangerous web site. I must try to find a pulp zine since Astonishing Adventures Magazine really seems to have gone (although I’m happy to be corrected on that). I’ve a good stand alone DD story that needs finishing and I’d like to continue the serial adventure I began by accident to see where it winds up.

I’ve been scribbling some notes on a very old idea for an RPG that has overtones of The Prisoner; The Invaders; and Health and Safety films. The system for it is very lightweight. The big idea is that the setting should be mostly detailed on a large map of the key location with lots of margin notes and scribblings.

I’ve been wondering about how often I do #followfriday on my twitter feed.   Partly because one follower DM’d me that I don’t do them often enough and another complained last time I did one because I flooded their stream.  So responding to the huge public interest on this burning issue of national interest I thought I’d take a leaf out of every red top newspapers book and run a poll…

 Loading ...

The small print: Please note that the management reserves the right to completely ignore the outcome of the poll unless it suits me.  Entrants must meet the eligibility requirements as specified in the interaction terms and conditions. Failure to meet the eligibility requirements may result in an entry being invalid and/or forfeiture of any prize.  You can complete the poll by filling out the form above.  Sending a message in a bottle via the ocean to arrive not later than the closing date of the poll is not a method of participating in the poll. That none binding resolutions are not binding.  That the sky is blue, grass is green.  That elves work in a chip shop.  Or is that Elvis?  I don’t know I’ve never been to that chip shop.

The original Knight Rider used to end with the refrain of Wilton Knight’s last words to Michael…

One man can make a difference

Tonight I thought I’d share how one page (and a tiny bit of PHP code for WordPress) made a difference to my site.  At least its made a difference for Google.  I’ll apologise for the over stretched Knight Rider references now.

I’d noticed in Google Webmaster tools that around five hundred of my site’s pages were no longer in the Google index that used to be.  I’m not sure if this was the result of Google’s Caffeine launch but the timing of the fall is quite close. I’d also seen a 5% drop in visits to the site but that could be just a random fluctuation in the numbers.

There are some pages I exclude deliberately using robot meta tags like tag index pages and category pages.  They don’t have any useful content so I didn’t want to risk a duplicate content penalty.  Even deducting those from the total number of missing pages and 300+ pages were no longer in the index.

A bit of investigation (the obligatory bit of any Knight Rider episode where Michael would wander round a warehouse filled with cardboard boxes with a torch) and deduction hinted that the missing pages were old blog posts.  The missing ones were buried deep in the blog.  They are in the XML sitemap but Google’s spider just wasn’t getting deep enough through links to think they should be in the index. I’d trusted the sitemap to keep real content in the index but it doesn”t seem to be doing that anymore.  The XML sitemap had become C.A.R.R. to my site’s K.I.T.T!

I can’t just drive into the back of the FLAG mobile unit and get Bonnie to fix the problem.  I had to come up with a solution for myself.  So I added a rather uninteresting Too Many Ideas Contents page that lists every page on my blog by title. It was pretty easy to set up in WordPress with a little bit of code in a plug-in…

Source code

function show_all_posts($atts) {
	$posts = get_posts('numberposts=-1&orderby=title&order=ASC');
 
	foreach($posts as $post)
	{
		$text.='<li><a href="'.$post->post_name.'">'.$post->post_title.'</a></li>';
	}
 
	return '<ul>'.$text.'</ul>';
}
 
add_shortcode('show_all_posts', 'show_all_posts');

I dropped the [show_all_posts] shortcode into a page and magically the list appeared.

Then all I had left to do was wait and see if it worked…

The impact was like Michael hitting Turbo Boost – the day after I published the page Google indexed 500+ pages on my site rather than the 200 it was doing in June and July.  Its done that every day for a week now and the number of pages has actually risen slightly to a high of 617 pages.

The 300 missing pages are now back in Google’s index so I think I can safely say…

One Page Can Make a Difference

Thanks to everyone who voted on my Nicer Python Display poll. I’ll start looking at updating all of the python script pages on my site to use the new, improved formatting.

 Loading ...

I’ve wanted to improve the display of the code for my Vue python scripts here for quite awhile but I was never entirely happy with the code highlighters I’d tried. I’ve installed and fiddled with a new one tonight and I think I like it but since its really for you (well at least if your here to look at my Vue python scripts) I thought I’d run a little poll to see what you think.

The new style can be seen on Terrain Matcher while the old style can be seen on EcoRotate.

 Loading ...

The poll will run for a week and at the end of the week if the vote is in favour of the new style I’ll update the other python script pages to match.

I didn’t intend to make site changes today. An unexpected interaction between a plug-in and an update of WordPress set me off trying to find a fix. I also spotted another tiny problem with one of my own plug-ins so I fixed that and then checking in IE noticed that MS Word html had crept into a post and was breaking the site in IE.

Then I’d been thinking about making some modifications to the navigation: moving the blogrolls to a page to free up some space (analytics showed they were not sending a lot of traffic to anyone anyway). Then I tweaked the feeds block to add twitter and switched to some new icons. I also added a plug-in for related blog posts (I’m not sure if the configuration is perfect yet I’ll have to tweak it as time goes by) and fiddled with the styling of posts a bit. That led me to switching my font stack to one that hopefully covers even more visitors available fonts. That had a knock on effect on some of the layout sizing so I tweaked that and a few of the colours too while I was there. So what was supposed to be a little fix and a tweak has eaten nearly three hours but I’m happy with the changes and hopefully visitors will like them too.

I’ve been exchanging emails with Paul, a Vue user, who was having difficulty visualising how big objects should be in Vue. He uses real world measurements but his pictures didn’t look right because he was struggling to get the objects to be the right size and making the distances between them realistic. That was messing up the quality of the lighting and making things look a bit weird. He mentioned the Father Ted episode with the Cows…

“Now concentrate this time, Dougal. These (Father Ted points to some plastic cows on the table) are very small; those (he points at some cows out of the window) are far away…”

I’d suggested he use a cube and make it about the right size for a real world object and then size the model to match. Similarly using a cube sized to a distance to help lay out things. He wasn’t really comfortable with that. It was helping but it was slowing him down.

Then I realised he was a football fan so to help him get a sense of scale in his scenes I made him a quick football pitch model. Nothing fancy just two squashed cubes. He knows how big a football pitch should look and can size and space objects using it as a guide. Once he’s happy he can delete it and render the scene.

Since it worked for him I’ve expanded the set to include thirty-four sports grounds and pitches and posted them here tonight for anyone to download. I’ve made a page for them Vue Scaling Objects.

If there is interest I’ll do some more packs: vehicles, people, plants, buildings, planets and animals all strike me as possibly being useful. Leave a comment if you’d like any of those or something else saying which one(s) you’d find helpful…

After a (small) flood of unacceptable comments that didn’t get past my blog’s spam and flood control I’m posting living room rules.

Just a quick note: I support freedom of speach.  You have the freedom to say whatever you want on your website.  Quoting the 1st Amendment to me is a bit daft as I’m in the UK not the US.

Since I needed to get a simple explanation up in a hurry I’ve borrowed this from the excellent explanation posted by John August.

I’ve made a few minor CSS tweaks here.  A little one should give the breadcrumb trail at the top of the page a bit more space when it gets long so it doesn’t do weird things.

The bigger tweak is adding some conditional CSS that should (hopefully) imporve the display of the site for Internet Explorer users using IE 6 or IE 7.  The left hand navigation boxes should now look neater with less space to the left of the links.  If your using IE 6 or IE 7 I’d like to know what you think of the change and anything else you think I could do to make the site look nicer for you.