While our standard structure of posting weekly has fallen faster than a tree in a logging area I felt it important to update everyone about something that has slipped past me in these last few months. We use a great plugin called WPBook to feed posts that we make here on the blog directly to our Facebook page. Unbeknownst to me, there was a change in the way in which WPBook handles posts to our page’s wall in a recent update. While it still posted they were not in the correct format and many of you were redirect to the app’s back-end feed. I have remedied the problem and everything to be back to the way I originally designed it. For those of you who are our fan on Facebook our title links will not directly take you the blog. For those of you who are not our fans, why not?
Author Archives: Derek
More WordPress Hacking, Now with Tastier Facebook Posts
It has been quite awhile since my last post and that can only mean one thing, tons of boring server side work that no one but myself cares or understands. Thankfully I have something to share with the masses!
Holy Redesign Batman
Gaslamp Games just a bit better looking. Hold on there young guns… she’s not quite legal yet. We are experimenting with a new layout method that does have some benefits as far a loads times but it comes with the price of mis-rendering at lower width resolutions. Fear not, this mistakes shall soon be fixed and the beauty of a liquid design paired with lightning fast load times shall be had again. In the meantime why don’t you check out our Forums. As an added benefit of registration is that you will share the same logins between both the forum and the blog so you can leave comments easier.
Enjoy!
Lurking
So this week has a been big for the website back-end, and my beautiful console. Wordpress 3.0 came out and has been promptly installed. I’m pretty excited about a couple of the features; the most notable of which is the ability to generate the navigation menu in the admin panel. This will help me from having to make hard edits, something I LOVE!
News From the Console
It’s been over a year since Gaslamp Games moved from the seedy underbelly if shared hosting into the semi-professional world of a virtual private server.
How did I celebrate this great day you may ask? I broke the server…twice.
Ignore the Man Behind the Console
Another short post from me this week. Beta, beta, beta! Why does beta always get all the attention when my hair, er… problems are just as pretty exciting. While we burn away at finding all those pesky last minute bugs my face has been owned by a console. What does this mean for you? Fuck-all. I’m improving, securing, and updating so much stuff you’d need at least three sticks to have enough shaking power.
Edit: Maybe its the huge amounts of caffeine or that face that I just conquered a problem that has been bugging me the past two days but you need to see this. The Oatmeal has done it again, it sure does suck to be a male angler fish. http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler
Services Everywhere!
Well it has been a busy week for all of us. The programmers and artists are busy putting the finishing touches on our exciting beta and I spent the large portion of last week redoing the CSS for the entire site to streamline your browsing experience. When I go back a look at all of the little services and tweaks that I have done I figure I should give credit to my many resources.
First of all I’ve been using the Debian style of package management off and on since the early 2000’s when I used a distribution called Libranet. This was a great distribution for a time when running Linux on the desktop was a challenge to say the least. One thing that rang true with me was the east installation of packages AND all their dependencies with a very simple command..
apt-get install <package>
No crappy .rpm’s no having to install from source just easy to use and even easier to customize.
Enter Ubuntu which has gone to great strides bringing Linux to the masses. Not only does Canonical have a well thought out and designed product, there is a great community behind it. For a self taught computer user I found it immensely helpful. One of my favorite little bits of information is the server guide that is made for ever release. This guide provides a quick setup for many of the common services that are run in a server (read: command line) interface. You can find the latest version for 10.04 here.
For all those self taught users out there like myself you will learn more from following this guide then you’d like to admit. I challenge anyone to setup a mail server for multiple domains in less than six hours without at least referencing a guide once or twice.
Housekeeping… May I Fluff Your Pillow?
Short post from me this week. With the impending release of our first beta of Dungeons of Dredmor slated for May 15th everyone has kicked things into high gear and I am no exception. While Dan is knee deep in game databases, David doing that creative art stuff, and Nicholas doing… well I don’t know but I’m going to assume its more of the same it is up to me to tidy up the website and push out the slew of changes to the website.
What will this mean for you as the user? Well the graphics should be a little less narrow and use a bit more of your screen as well as some graphics tweaks that probably only bother me. In the back-end of things I’m preparing our pre-order tool as well as setting up some scripts to hopefully handle an increased load from our adoring public. In addition to my usual duties of checking security I’m exited for the prospect of providing you our customers with a streamlined process and overall easy browsing experience.
If you ever get a message that you don’t think belongs please feel free to contact me at webmaster (at) gaslampgames.com
