Tag Archives: actual work

This thing on?

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Switched to P2 theme, hoping that maybe this frontend post editor will help me write more than one post a year.

To sum up the past 12 months:

  • Unity of Command, the game I’ve made sound effects and composed music for, is out! It’s a pretty awesome turn-based WWII strategy, and a demo is available if you’re interested. Check it out at http://unityofcommand.net/
  • File Gallery‘s download counter is almost at 100 000, and v1.7.5 could be out sooner than you think. I’ll try to answer some of the more urgent e-mails and forum posts next week.
  • I’ve become very intimate with Javascript and I kind of love it.
  • I’ve been reading a lot about game development, game physics, best practices, etc. in the past few months. It’s… complex. So much ground to cover, so many different approaches, so time-consuming. It’s frustrating, but I enjoy it (most days o.O).
  • Brlog related: we’ve won some awards, created our first iPhone app, helped create an exhibition and pushed a few new websites out.
  • nothing new on the music front, but I’ll post a Unity of Command preview mix soon

Gotta go to the store, brb.

And then…

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… the magical, floating, multi-color space-orb just disappeared and I was able to go on with my so-called life.

Anyways, I was working on ZagrebDox for the whole month of February and it kind of took all of my time and energy, but ended up being a really nice project because I’ve, once again, learned a lot of new things about WordPress.

I’ve also learned a few new things about MySQL and how to crash your hosting provider’s shared server.

What happened:

  • the site has over 300 pages (each with at least 3 attachments)  and I’ve used a permalink structure which started with %category% – this combination produced waaay too many rewrite rules
  • there was a 20MB database size limit
  • for some reason, the wp_options->rewrite_rules field got duplicated ~10 times, and the database had grown to 50MB in no time
  • combine that with the 20MB limit and what you get is a bunch of never-ending transactions
  • so the server went kabang! and the site was promptly moved to another one

To solve the problem, I’ve changed the permalink structure to begin with %year%, disabled creation of rewrite rules for attachments (thanks to Johan Eenfeldt – his code has made my number of queries per page drop from ~3900 to ~90), set the number of post revisions to 2, and then repaired and optimized the database which now stands happily still at 5.7MB.

I don’t know how rewrite_rules field got duplicated, I haven’t used any plugins that would mess with it, so I’m still in the dark about that. What I do know is: you can’t host over 700 sites on one single server and expect everything to go smoothly until the end of days. Not to mention that the only available transport protocol is fsockopen which made the admin area a bit slow until I’ve blocked all the others…

There’s been some other stuff I’ve worked on, but I’ll put that in another post.

It’s lunch time. And I miss Ma.gnolia…

Actual work: DAS and Studena

Posted on in News

I’ve been working on some interesting projects for the past few weeks.

The first one is the website for the Society of architects of Split (Društvo arhitekata Splita – DAS). My job was to code the layout and choose a CMS. I decided to go with WordPress because the site’s structure isn’t too complex and, except for two categories, it’s mostly just static pages.

I did encounter a few difficulties along the way, but nothing that wasn’t fixable. Most of the pain was caused by the ever popular “/category/” feature of WordPress, which inserts /category/ in the URL if the the page is a category index. While you can access those pages without the /category/ in URL if you’re using a custom permalink structure (such as “/%category%/%post_id%/%postname%/”, for example), the problem starts when your post count per page exceeds 10 (or whatever custom number of posts per page you choose) and you need to go to page 2 of that category – it returns a 404 error. I fixed this problem with a handy plugin called “Redirection“, which made it possible to rewrite “/category/category_name/page/number/” to “/category_name/page/number/”. I tried placing the rewrite rules directly in the .htaccess file, but, for some reason, that didn’t work.

Second problem was adding custom metadata to posts in a way that would make sense to a site editor. For that purpose, I used the rc:custom_field_gui plugin which was a breeze to use :)

Third one, that gave me two days worth of headaches, was how to display only posts with certain metadata on a category index page. First I used the officially recommended way, which consisted of using PHP’s continue statement to filter out the unwanted posts. That produced a empty page 1, and a populated page 2, because WordPress post count occurs before the continue statement. There’s also no way to do it with WP_Query, so I ended up writing a custom query. Again, problem with pages. I used the WP-PageNavi plugin, so I looked at its code and figured out what variables it needs to work properly and I gave them the values they needed.

I can only say that I’ve learned a lot about how WordPress works :) And while it does have its quirks, if you know some PHP, anything is doable.

Second website is for a well known Croatian bottled water, Studena. Again, Blackduke was the one who produced the website and I was asked to compose some background music and a few sound effects. The first version of the music was initially accepted, but then it was agreed that something that currently plays on the site would work better. You can hear and download the first version from below :)

  1. No flash Studena music – 01:42
    Download: MP3 (1,602 KB)

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In other news: wish me luck because I’ve got three exams next week. And that’s it. If I pass all three, I get to start working on my master’s thesis.

Future awaits :)

Actual work: Polaris+, W&GA, T-Com

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Better Nate than lever, here are three projects that I’ve worked on in the past 3 years, but somehow forgot to mention. Khm. I’ll create a "Work" section soon and put them together with my other actual works. Enjoy!

Polaris+ (January 2008)

Music and sound effects for website intro

Link: Polaris+

W&GA (November 2006)

Music and sound effects for website intro

Link: Wine and gastro academy Zagreb

T-com (March 2005)

Music and sound effects for a T-com promo CD

Link: T-com cd @ Blackduke.com

Ultra big thanks goes to Blackduke for giving me the opportunity to work on these projects :)

Lately

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I’ve watched the first 5 episodes of “Battlestar Galactica” season 3 and, so far — I like it. It’s still very “on the edge” and very intriguing (as opposed to, I don’t know, “Lost”?). But the fifth episode (“Collaborators”) kind of annoyed me. Of course, it all had to happen, it’s a plausible consequence of war, yadda3, but it just seemed a bit…weird. I can’t put a finger on what exactly bugged me, but I know that I don’t usually shout “Oh, come on!” every 5 minutes when watching my favorite TV show.

After reading about “Heroes” on Blogography, I just had to see the show (not because Mr. Simmer didn’t like the first two episodes, but simply because it’s SF — I felt obligated, you know?). So I sat down and watched the first two episodes. And then, a couple days later, I watched the next four in a row. I guess the conclusion is obvious: I like it a lot. And yes, it’s not exactly a fast-paced show, but I feel it’s got just the right tempo. It kept me occupied for 3 hours without even thinking about the time and I’m really looking forward to the next episodes. Hopefully, the creators won’t blow this one.

What else… Oh — it seems that I’m not the only one with a poor purple monkey. Here’s a post on B3TA boards that clearly shows another case of the, ahem, eye disorder.

Industri has entered a beta phase and I’m looking forward to testing it out. Tig has ported it to Doom3 engine and I just hope he’ll find time to finish it one day.

I’ve coded the HTML for Up&Underground magazine’s website. It runs on WordPress 2.0.4 with some minor tweaks. The site is in Croatian. It was designed by my friend Lina Kovacevic.

I’ve ported my own site to WP (locally), but I have yet to find the time and the will to upload it and replace the current version. I didn’t touch the design due to lack of time (I’m back in ‘school‘ once again) and ideas. That also means that I’ve skipped the November CSS Reboot, but it seems I’m not the only one. I guess the event has lost its charm, and it probably takes a B. Adam Howell (where’s he hiding lately?) charisma to pull it off properly.

James Brown performs in Zagreb today. I didn’t want to go. I just don’t like him. He is the funktastic break-the-beat-and-hit-me daddy-o, but I’m not really a fan. I know who he is, and I’m thankful for the beats and inspiration, but that’s it. Also, I must say that I was quite disappointed by Public Enemy’s performance last month. They were so bad that I had to get dead drunk and bow down to the porcelain god the next morning. Their comic sucked too.

Regarding my previous post:
In my own humble words of conclusion, Microsoft’s Expression Web designer (why not stick with Frontpage, eh?) is a solid copy of Dreamweaver, but with standard Office look. It’s a good tool (as far as I can tell, from my brief encounter), but it’ll have to be half the price of Dreamweaver when it comes out, if it’s to succeed. Time will tell.

And my time tells me it’s time to watch TV now ;)