…when I decide to post an update to my website, which I have shamefully neglected for the past twelve months. Despite promising regular updates every time I do this, I never actually do it. Oh well…

However, there’s actually something to report. I added a linkroll for my Delicious bookmarks to the Links page, replacing the text that stated that I would, at some undetermined point in the future, add some actual links to the page. Tadaa! The linkroll will always display the most recent bookmarks I save to Delicious, and I might even play around with the CSS to style them properly. Might. Might not.

In other news, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. As with other fancy Web 2.0 stuff, I’m one of the first to know about it, and one of the last to adopt it. So, if you feel like following my more or less regular tweets, go to my Twitter page.

So long!

Today I spent at least five hours working on my WordPress theme. I haven’t really done much programming in XHTML/CSS in the past year, so it took quite some time to get into the code again. The stylesheet for the layout was a complete mess, and while I updated the WordPress software to 2.8.2 last saturday, some of the PHP files in my theme were “leftovers” from the old version. You get the picture.

After what I did today, the stylesheet looks much better, and major parts of the XHTML are way cleaner than before. As a result, the code validates again properly via the W3C Markup Validation Service. Now, let’s have a look at what changed for someone who visits the site.

I did a complete overhaul of the metadata for each entry (time and date of the posting, categories, tags and the link to the comment area), so the distinction between the actual post and the metadata appears clearer. The same was done for the metadata in the comment area, aka the single post page. This went along with some cleaning up of font sizes, colors, hyperlink behaviour and of course lots of wrestling with the infamous paddings and margins.

The second, big change concerns the comment area. I’ve tweaked all the forms (the input fields for name, e-mail and website, as well as the input area for the comment text), and brought the formatting of the actual comments in line with the rest of the site layout. Last but not least, I implemented support for Gravatar icons in the comments. Since WordPress supports this since version 2.5, it was only a matter of adding some PHP to the comments template. Visitors who already signed up with Gravatar and uploaded an image will now see it appear next to their comments.

After today’s programmathon, there’s not all that much more to do. I might tweak some small things here and there, but don’t expect any revolutionary changes in the near future… unless I decide to rebuilt the layout from scratch on a whim.

Recently, I stumbled upon a set of posts on PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun called Gaming Made Me. These stories, written by the authors of RPS and quite a few guest authors connected to the games business, brought back many memories about my own history in gaming and a huge sense of nostalgia. Thinking about which games made me the gamer I am today, I decided to follow suit and write my own story. This is the first part of this story, and I’m going to touch on one of the earliest games I played, roundabout 20 years ago.

My father owned an IBM personal computer back then. It came equipped with an 8088 processor and a monochrome Hercules Graphics Card, running MS-DOS from a 10 MB harddrive. I distincly remember having to tweak DOS bootdisks in order to be able to run some of the games I played, but that’s a completely different story. Aside from the obvious (Pacman, anyone?), there’s one game in particular that I want to mention here.

Today, one of my favourite game genres is RPGs, Role-Playing-Games. (You should read this article over on Gamasutra if you’re interested in the development of the RPG genre in general.) I owe this fascination to no small degree to one game which I played on my father’s old machine: Wizardry VI: Bane of the Cosmic Forge.

Where could this staircase lead to?

In Bane, the player controls a party of up to six characters in first-person perspective during their voyage through a three-dimensional world. The party embarks on a quest to retrieve the Cosmic Forge, a quill which can be used by its wielder to control time and space, from an abandoned castle full of monsters, traps and treasure. The whole game world is based on square tiles, and the party moves around in the four cardinal directions, one tile at a time. Some tiles are guarded by monsters, and upon stepping on such a tile, turn-based combat ensues. Other tiles hold, among other things, treasure chests, doors that have to be unlocked or deadly traps that need to be disarmed.

From today’s perspective, the game will seem awfully crude to most (younger) gamers. Pixelated graphics, whacky animations, and beeping sounds. For me, it was a revelation. I would play the game for hours, thrilled by the possibilities of exploring this mysterious world, fantasizing about the secrets I might uncover. The game didn’t feature an automap, so I would draw elaborate maps on graph paper, annotating every nook and cranny I came across. With a smile I remember my surprise upon meeting a creature that would not actually attack me on first sight but rather try to engage in conversation and offer to sell some strange items which would help me on my quest. Looking back, it was mostly the suspense about what I might find in the game’s huge world, and not so much the things I actually did encounter, that made up the immense fascination: there was enough room for my own fantasies. The graphics weren’t such a big deal either. This was long before “real” 3D engines and high resolution artwork. Nowadays the game might look bad in comparison: but when I played it I simply couldn’t imagine anything better.

Back then, I didn’t really understand the plot of the game, not to speak of the many smaller stories and sometimes rather difficult puzzles the game had to offer, and I never finished it. Nevertheless, Wizardry VI, the game that introduced me to computer RPGs, made a deep impression on me at the time and I still remember it fondly today.

Since I’ve never really done much here since I built the original site, the WordPress version I was using was pretty old already. Today I finally got ’round to taking care of that, and it seems I was successful: the “news” page is now running the latest WordPress version, 2.8.2, and thanks to the new update routine, upgrading should be much easier in the future.

On the administrative side, there’s the new WordPress content management system/dashboard which makes quite a few tasks more convenient to handle for me. On the visitor’s side, there’s not much new at the first glance. However, you might notice the overhauled sidebar, which is now widget-enabled for more compatibility if I decide to add new sidebar items in the future.

There we go again. It’s been another year of zero contributions by me to my own website. *sigh*

Now, I never wrote this here, but I’ve been playing the infamous MMORPG World of Warcraft almost since the game was released in Europe. There, it’s done, I said it. Admittedly, the excitement wore off after a while, and now I rarely log on to the game anymore if there isn’t a big new content patch or something similar going on. I do, however, still enjoy designing and re-designing my user interface for the game. Blizzard has been very open to the question of UI customisation, and nowadays there is a wide range of AddOns developed by enthusiastic players all over the world. While I lack the skill to write AddOns myself (which requires in-depth knowledge of LUA coding), I use many of them to build my own UI, and sometimes I even modify the .lua files to change some small things in them.

So, while I don’t have anything really exciting to post here, I’ll show off a screenshot of my current WoW UI… here it is:

This is what my UI looks like while fighting.

See you next year!