BootBlock.co.uk

I’m not entirely sure how I found this site, but randomally hopping between sites while clicking on links that seemed mildly interesting seemed to be somewhat responsible. OCR is a site dedicated to providing high-quality remixes to existing video games.

Not much more to say than that, really. I’m particularlly fond of the Da Bomb Lemmings remix. The built-in Last.FM player doesn’t work for me, so click on the Download MP3 link underneath it if you’re also experiencing the same.

View: OverClocked Remix

I really hated the look of the old Software area of the site, so I went ahead and redesigned it. While I was at it, I did a ton of work which resulted in the listed below. This took longer to do as it required some major code changes within the application I use to actually maintain the listings data as well as of course the server side of things.

Here are the bigger changes …

• Completely redesigned. XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant.
• Product icon and PAD downloads, where available.
• Support section for each product - click the question mark symbol.
• Awards section - click the golden star symbol. See below.
• Changed products information during the last update.
• Lots of small changes.

Awards. I’m sure a lot of you have seen software sites that give awards to the programs they feature. These days, awards mean absolutely nothing. They just exist as a means for software archive sites to get more links back to them. They’re crap, and I hate them. So, why did I add support for them? Because I want to release the application and associated PHP files for the software section so others may use them, so it’s up to the individual user if they want to make use of this feature or not.

I mentioned a Support section in the above list; at the moment is just provides a means of contacting me about a particular software title. I want to expand this so it also provides frequently asked questions and general trouble-shooting information.

There is also a facility to purchase the full versions of any shareware, but that isn’t currently used as pretty much all of my stuff is free. Oh, yeah - the page is also fixed-width. This was accidental and will be fixed some time in the future.

Finally, I have integrated a part of this blog system with the Software section backend which results in the latest releases being displayed on the right-hand menu that you can see. Click on link to be taken to its relevant area of the Software section.

Edit: Erm, I think I may have made the link badges on the right a bit too glossy. Oops.

Flash games, hmm? They’re generally completely rubbish, but this one is a bit… weird.

In your role as Reiko, you must restore your position as top lady of the house by opening your right hand and slapping some bitches in the face. That’s the entire game, right there. You open-hand slap people in the face. Slaps can even crit for extra damage.

The first four fights were easy enough, but the five? Wow. I’m surprised my character didn’t instagib all over the screen. I was doing ‘er a good ‘un, and then got hit in the face with her sasuage fingers. Ouch. Edit: Yay, got her on the third go without being touched.

The game itself is all very well done, with anime-style graphics (I’m not a particular fan of the non-anti-alised lines, personally), proper music and sound effects. I particularly like the Street Fighter-style visual effect of out-slapping a wench. Maybe the sequel will feature big hairy geezers towel-flicking each other in the pods - watch out for that one.

Takes a little while to load, but here you go: Rose & Camellia.

The Software section of the site has been offline for a week or so and was resurrected only this morning.

The reason for this is that I have rewritten the back-end and entirely overhauled the application that generates the data. This took a while, but now I don’t want to rip my own eyes out when I update the catalogue.

What this means to you, fair reader, is… not much, really. There are thumbnails of screenshots available as opposed to the text links originally. In fact, I have added a lot more screenshots - especially for applications that didn’t have any at all. Three new apps have been added to the listing (including Timeline, my latest project).

If you were linking to any of the software in the Software section, you might want to update your links. The old method was extremely optimised in its PHP code, but the linking method (from other sites) was far too verbose for its own good. So I chucked the old code out and reworked things to how they should have originally been.

There’s other stuff in there like an integrated version checking service for my applications to make use of and other such stuff.

Last thing I need to do is completely redesign the appearance of it all as it looks a bit too simplistic for my liking. And a bit poo.

It’s okay, I’m still alive.

I’ve been caught up in doing some major reworking of the site. The smallest task involves getting the old TNK-BootBlock.co.uk domain redirecting people to whatever they were looking for but on this domain.

The biggest of the tasks requires the Software section getting an overhaul. I’m using an application I created a while back called Software Catalogue (temporary name!) to maintain the listings and associated data, which I’m currently in the process of reworking.  It’s getting there; I’m just about to re-do the screenshot support and give it a proper gallery instead of the textual links it was using before.

There’s still a lot more to do, but once I’ve finished with the program and updating the backend, I’ll be turning to adding services to the website which involve adding update checking to the Software area so all my apps will support version checking (without having to launch an external browser; it’ll all be built-in and incredibly lightweight) and all that stuff.

Okay, I’ve now pointed the TNK-BootBlock.co.uk domain so it points at this one in an effort to get this site established as my main.

Rather than using standard MetaRefresh redirects, I did it all using .htaccess located in the root of the domain. I’ve never used the RewriteEngine before, so it was all new to me - I robbed most of the directives from sites giving examples of how to use them. It seems it makes use of Regular Expressions, which is a pig at the best of times.

There are a couple more things that need sorting and then I can start dismantling the old site. Then I’ll need to take the biggy …

Email.

This is going to suck. I’ve got 68 email fowarders set up and routing mail to specified inboxes to help with working out which crappy company decided to sell a list of their customers email addresses off to spammers so I can easily block that respective forward. I can’t really utilise the mail forwarding method for various tedious reasons with this domain, so I’m going to have to get creative.

Once that’s done - it’s going to take a while, maybe even a few weeks - it’s time for me to update any of my apps that make use of services from the previous site - mainly update checking and the like. Speaking of which, I’m going to do a proper update checking service that doesn’t end up launching a browser from the app to perform a simple version check via PHP. I only really did that to send a little more traffic to the site, but either way it wasn’t very good. Only a few apps utilised a proper version checking mechanism, which I’m going to fully expand to all of my progs.

After that, I’d like to continue working on BlockBox (previously called WhiteBox) while also sorting its site out. I’ve got a domain for it (which is in fact the parent domain for this and all of my future sites) which is ready to roll with a fresh Joomla! installation.

Anyway, I’m hoping this is the last of the boring site updates and things’ll start getting more interesting around here. Possibly.

Here’s the new site, just like I said. I like being right as it makes a change.

So, what can you expect in this new place? Hopefully more posts. My posting frequency went to shit on the other site due to just not being arsed. Now I can post in a browser without having to be sat infront of the main PC anymore - that, I like. I could have just added browser posting support to Planarchy, but eh.

I originally went with Joomla! instead of Wordpress (which is what you’re looking at right now, but it really started to piss me off when I couldn’t make use of the new FTP layer feature and spouted a load of crap about file persmissions. So I moved over to Wordpress.

Joomla! was a true content management system, as opposed to Wordpress’ blogging… thing. It’s probably a good thing in the end as Wordpress uses a vastly smaller amount of resources to run.

To see how this site looked when I was running it with Joomla!, take a look at the current BlockBox test site. BlockBox being the new name of the WhiteBox HTPC software I’m working on. WhiteBox, as a name, was a bit too prolific for my taste. Shame as I really liked the name and it’s actually the name of my PC media player that sits under the telly.

But anyway, this site isn’t entirely complete, but I thought I’d unveil it at this point. There are numerous reasons why I went and trashed the old domain (it’s just a pointer to this one, now). Which I can’t be bothered going in to. One reason, at least, is to use a blogging system that isn’t tied to my desktop PC and I’d feel more comfortable making more regular posts with. I didn’t finish the editor in Planarchy and it had a weird sort of clinical feel to it that I didn’t much care for.

So, yeah. Expect more posts from me if I don’t get stupidly lazy again.