2009-07-20

My First CMS

Yes, it’s now the first time I’m using a CMS (content management system) for my home page. Not just some simple html/shtml/perl/php thing anymore. The previous mostly static way served well and were really fast to serve. But even though it was quite simple to add new posts by editing some static file, adding images and even hand-modifying my rss xml file (ugh!), all made it somewhat of a chore to make any updates. So I usually didn’t. Even better is the fact that now I have support for comments, and some small bonuses such as support for scheduling postings ahead of time to be published on certain time or day. I’m not sure if I’ll ever need that feature but it sounds nice. On a second thought: I just decided to test that feature right now, so that this post will be published early morning rather than late night. :-) In any case I am planning to post a bit more often.

Now that I moved to using WordPress, I opted to move basically everything from the old system as part of this new one, even including all news/blog posts there was in the archive. It was lot of manual work, but I think it was worth it. Got the chance to reflect on the past, fix lot of links and make some late-update-notifications as well. Funnily I even kept the age-old links-page, although I sifted through it after a long while and removed many broken ones. It’s funny how many sites just disappear when you wait a few years – even some sites you certainly wouldn’t expect to go away.

Organizing the stuff has always been somewhat hard. This time I realized that most of the static pages about my things are either related to games or visuals. Other thing is that now my sidebar doesn’t contain just links to the static pages, but also to blog postings by category.

Big overall change affecting many items is that I have added links to accompanying YouTube videos. Here’s a link to my videos in YouTube if you want to check the collection out or subscribe there as well. There’s also some new info as well, e.g. in the more games page.

PS. If you already RSS-subscribed again to the new system before reading this post, please do it yet again, one more time. I just switched to use feedburner, which apparently should give me some nice statistics as well.

2009-06-05

Turska 2.0

Turska is one of these things I have been tinkering with, but for some reason have neglected to mention here until now. It is a silly little UI/framework library meant to be small and easy to use, mainly aimed for games which have modest UI requirements anyway.

The very first version of the library was featured in Truck Dismount™ back in 2003, and the library was a simple component object/event based system back then. Later I got interested of the IMGUI concept and abandoned the old API to recreate it. Along the years it has always been open source – first hosted in SourceForge.net and nowadays in Google code.

Now I have finally upgraded the library version to 2.0.0 (this version is also known as Turs2). Check out the Turska home page if you want to know more.

2009-03-09

Secret Exit: Zen Bound, Stair Dismount Touch

StairDismountTouchButton
Our company Secret Exit just recently launched Zen Bound for iPhone and iPod touch.

In other recent news, right now we’re “completely denying” existence of Stair Dismount Touch project for the very same platform.

PS. I’ll be present at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) this month.

2008-09-12

Assembly 2008 – Seminar slides, 4 KB intro, Sauna Dismount

Fountain of Mart
This is a bit late, but here’s a few things I were part of making for Assembly’08. I held an Indie Startup for Dummies seminar presentation together with Jani Kahrama (download slides). Took part in 4 KB intro compo with XMunkki, sadly our intro (pictured right) didn’t qualify to be shown, for some strange reason (download Fountain of Mart / Youtube video). I actually made a small piece for the extreme music compo as well, an executable with size under 2 KB playing a tune. And finally, we created a little game called Kiuasturvat – Sauna Dismount which took 2nd place in the game development competition (Youtube video).