New year, new numbers, time to redesign the css again. It's like a ritual now. I got an early jump on the 2023 css in december. Changed it about 5-6 times before I settled on the current one. Tried to take inspiration from fashion websites but half of them stopped updating in 2019-20. I can't imagine how websites that are so popular just stop updating because they are not getting a billion views - people in the comments be like where at?
So what did I do last year 2022? Wrote 3 articles. One of which was about an update I did to a game I wrote. I think I spent 6 months on that C code - on and off - but it was fun. I fixed some bugs in the news website; some feeds are checked twice if the xml lib fails on the first try, also fixed some issues with the cronjob which runs every 6 hours now but it still errors out 50% for some odd reason. I took a lot of photos last year which is probably why my writing suffered but it's been all street photography all day. Out of 365 days I took pictures for 239 days. On the website I posted 176 items with 779 photos and only got 13 comments. On IG I have 2,305 posts and 274 followers. IG is such a waste of time, the only caveat is that I can just throw up images on there with much consideration.I think I am posting far too many pictures so I am going to curate more this year meaning less posts but more quality. This might mean more time molling over which pictures to choose but I will see how it works out.
All the best for the new year.
Patches
On a permanent link page the masthead is hidden to save space at top.
On Page 2 or greater the sidebar is moved to the bottom to make pictures larger and the masthead is hidden.
This is most likely the plainest theme I have ever created for the website. I did alot of things last year that I cannot even recall at the moment. I will have to update this post as I gather the records. I think I started designing this CSS since last December and up until today I am still uninspired. The modern web today is full of long mobile brochure websites that are different only in fonts and background colours.
Some things I did last year (that I can remember);
Released a whole new Wii game based around a synthwave theme called NewoZero. Some say its may best work so far.
Wasted a bunch of time trying to increase my instagram followers.
I spent alot of last year taking pictures an untold amount of gigs of mostly bad pictures but I am getting better while doing street photography.
I have to rebuild the JMGov search index which was last built in Oct 2019. Since so many things have happened I need to complicate it a bit by allowing users query multiple indexes. I will most likely have an advanced search link or something like that. No history, no future.
I need to change the file formate of my index into something that is more stream-able. Because the current file is getting too big to load into server memory as whole.
I am pretty much done with the upgrades/optimizations to NewoZero version 1.1, will have to push that update out to players at some point in the summer. The game has only been out 2 months and has already garnered a whole bunch of fans.
I have several blog posts that I need to write - I am getting really lazy on the blogging front - maybe its old age but I have a few bit of tech that I have bought recently and CDs to review that have been sitting on my desk for months. They are not going to write themselves.
I am at the lazy area in Hyper Metroid, and Xenoblade Chronicles. Hyper Metroid is fun, it just has a few unexplained tricks that you might not realize that you are being taught during game play such as "hyper ball".
Things Done
Changed both front shock mounts and bump stops on my car. Probably going to have to change the break pads next or spray the fading bonnet.
Conclusion
Despite the chaotic cluster that was last month's server move I think things turned out pretty well. I am still on a never ending bug hunt but these are the struggles you face when you have a 20 year old custom blog.
Welcome back. New host, Domain transfered (took 6 days). Updated some code from PHP 5.6 to 7.4 over the past 2 months. Switched from mysql to mysqli. Gonna spend the rest of the month fixing all the sub projects to ensure that they still work on the new server.
Stuff I did
The website design is mostly the same. Too much other work to do.
I have changed most of the page navigation links to count in reverse order. This is a bold move as I have never seen it on a blog before but I will explain the thinking behind it at some point. basic idea is that pages never change after they are created. This change to the navigation is not without sideffects. At some point the main page will have 1 single post item until another post is added. Originally this would happen at the tail but now it is visible all the time. You have to give to get.
Published a new game called NewoZero and wrote a postmortem before the site crash.
My mysqli layer has a cache bug that revealed itself in the wii leaderboards and the blog itself has a cache bug. cache bugs all the way down.
The search project broke. The new server has more RAM available for stuff like this and my new 64bit home computer should be able to do a better crawl this time around. I need to change it to a sequential file read instead of loading the whole file into memory at one time.
Another issue I had with the new webserver is that it kept trying to upgrade all my http traffic to https for some strange reason. I have a web traffic that comes from older devices like the nintendo wii so I had to dig into the server configuration to turn that stuff off.
I have updated the softnews project adding a little icon beside youtube links so that you can see right away which links are video and which are text blogs. There is a growing flood of video content and it's becoming annoying. There is always a delay in posting stories; because every feed is not checked everyday but when I check a feed late and I miss something that was posted the day before I now bold the item so that when you are scrolling down the page it is more noticable. I probably forgot a few changes.
NGLB
On the leader board I have added a New vs Old player chart to show the ratio between players that have set scores for the first time versus those that have set scores in a prior time. I have also reduced the historical charts to the last 15 Months instead of 18 so that the labels have a better fit.
Blog
Got a new camera after 6 years of owning my old point and shoot. And with a new camera comes a whole new photo category called "Street Photography". This new category should prove to be an interesting look into street life in Jamaica. Most of the pictures will be candid and probably in black and white. The main goal of the project will be to find interest in mondaine everyday places. Most times we end up traveling to find interests outside of where they live. This new photo category is extreme staycation. Once I start uploading you will see what I am talking about. I already have 3 weeks of photos to upload. The new camera is fast and the quality has increased 4x.
