I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.
I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.
If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?
Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.
It’s becoming a common query about how to make the content field in a TDO Mini Forms WYSIWYG (”What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get”). A WYSIWYG editor is where you see that your input is bold when you set it to bold, instead of seeing it plain with bold tags around the text. This tutorial will run you through quickly how to set this up.
Update #1: There is a bug with this tutorial. There is an incompatiblity between the AJAX code in TDOMF and using TinyMCE. Please disable AJAX before proceeding with this tutorial. If you have already done this, please disable AJAX. Then reset the form and then re-do the steps in this tutorial.
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Children cannot cease but find new ways to embarrass their parents. Alice, our 4-year-old, actually is not that bad but there was certainly, shall we say, a public incident, while on holidays. We were staying in this lovely old country house and we had got this great big inflatable pool out the back. The kids were hopping in and out all day long and we had allowed them to take up the habit of peeing on the grass behind a tree (rather than run across the hard stone floors inside while wet). Alice’s older cousin, who is a boy, stayed for a week and she started copying him, learning that she could pee standing up if she was wearing just her swimsuit.
Anyway, on the last day of the holidays we drove for 6 hours straight back to Paris. The kids were wrecked from being couped up all day in the car so I took Alice and Tristan, our 1 year old, out to the little park beside the apartment block. There was a small playground, too big for Tristan, too small for Alice but they still played there. As Alice was climbing up the ladder to the slide, she froze, clenching her legs together. “Daddy. I need to go to the toilet.” She looked like she was about to pee right there and then. Okay, okay, I thought. I lifted her down and said “we just have to go out of the park and up the lift. You can hold it that long can’t you?” She nodded her head while biting her lip. I picked up Tristan and started strapping him into the buggy when Alice called out “Daddy, I can pee her!”. She was pointing to a small patch of grass, outside the little playground, beside the very public pavement through the park.
“No Alice. We just have to walk over there and go up the lift.” So I went back to strapping Tristan in and then I looked again over at Alice. She had pulled her trousers and panties down to her feet and was about to try peeing standing up. Two mothers, who were sitting on a bench while their own children played, were in fits of laughter. Of course, I couldn’t pass it off with a witty comment because my pidgin French is awful. I had to finish with Tristan and then pull up Alice’s trousers and walk off with my bright red cheeks. Arg.
While on my holidays last month in France, I came across some humorous “Fringlish”. Check this out:
It’s a brand of sugar, in a pink colour, called “Daddy”. That’s right you can buy your Sugar Daddy in France in a pink container.
And then I came across the “Plate of Terror!” On one of my first trips to France, I was given a menu in a restaurant that had bad English translations on it and in the desert section they had for Chocolate Mouse: “Chocolate Moss”. This time, I was surprised to find the “Plat du Terroir”!
Plat Du Terroir on the Menu
Note: Terroir actually means Countryside (i.e. Countryside Dish) and it was gorgeous, hot French cheese and potate and lovely ham. Yum.
And the rain this morning really tops it off. I’ve spent the last two days going through all my emails, forum posts, web feeds and blog comments and I’m dozzed out with info overload. It really feels like I haven’t been away now at all, ack!
I didn’t do an inch of coding while on holidays and I’m all the better for it, loads of family time, sunny weather, no stress, no work and I even got to do some writing (for my “secret project” L___ H_____) and drawing (I’ll put up scans later). I’m hoping to keep the momentum up for writing, at least until work has worn me out a bit. I’m afraid this doesn’t mean more blogging but I’ll try and keep regular updates going.
I’ve been struggling with a roleplaying-gaming design issue. It’s probably just my own pet-hate. It’s something I call the “Big Pile of Skills” problem.
When creating a roleplaying character, there is nearly always a section on “Skills”. Most of the time you can choose any Skill you like and invest points into them. Some systems have some concept of grouping Skills like D&D’s Class system and Riddle of Steel’s Skill Packets. But most of the modern day systems I’ve played just let you pick any skills you like. I’m under the impression that most players considered this a good thing and limiting character choices to a select set of groups is considered Badtm.
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… because I’m going on holidays! 
Unfortunately I’ve heard that Wordpress 2.6 will be out very soon and I haven’t prepared for it. I’m aware of the changes but I haven’t setup a 2.6 test bed to do the work. So please be careful about upgrading, as soon as I get back it’ll be one of the first things I look at.
Also in my current work-queue:
- Form Hacker:
- Form Import/Export and TDOMF Fixes
- Support for hacking the Error and Validation and Stylesheet
- Excerpt Widget
- Admin Error and Warning messages on some dud Custom Field configurations (such as empty keys or titles, using the same keys across multiple custom fields, etc.)
- Display an Admin warning if Error messages are enabled (with the last release you can enable all PHP errors by a magic combination of options)
BTW If you want to show your appreciation of TDO Mini Forms by just clicking, you can pop over to Wordpress.org and give it a good rating!
… in the usual places.
For TDO Mini Forms, lots of small bug fixes (including one that was preventing some unregistered users from using a form) plus an Auto Respond Email widget and the ability to get moderation emails even if you’ve turned of moderation for a form.
For TDO Tag Fixes, just some bug fixes that have been hanging around for a bit on my private test server. I also plan to do some extra work on this in the next while, specifically around adding a “Tag Surfer” widget. We’ll see how much time I get.
And because I’ve moved to a new host, I can include 
and my Amazon wishlist for those who’d like to see TDO Mini Forms and TDO Tag Fixes keep on improving….
Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. Wordpress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.
It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.
For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run Wordpress (with some hacks), do Wordpress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.
Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…
Just a quick heads up. I’m going to be moving host over the next few days and my website will be unavaliable from tomorrow until whenever the nameserver changes propagate across the web. So I’ll be closing down the website tomorrow morning and moving the final snapshot of data across and updating the name servers. This affects the support forums as well.
This does not affect MOC, the Irish Gaming Wiki or my livejournal page.
See you all on the other side!
