It's been too long...

Too long.

Again.

But on the other hand you are now reading this on a brand new designed site - mainly thanks to the money I earned last year, as a freelance PHP developer, spent on graphic design books.

Yes, I said graphic design books and not things to teach me how to use Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator because learning those teach you how to use those tools and not necessarily how to design properly. True, you can learn some design aspects from those how to create flavour of the month background/button/border type of tutorials but I feel that you still won't 100% understand the point about colour balance, unity, repetition and other elements of graphic design.

But I'm not writing this to rant, it's just a catchup post with what's going on with the site and other programming projects that take an age, thanks to life and procrastination!

Website:

It's getting there....slowly. There are still some pages missing, some that still have lorem ipsum example text, and some functionality not working, for example, on some pages the right sidebar menu is working. I did manage to start playing around with schema which is that extra gumph you get in Google nowadays, like when you search for a recipe and get star ratings, a picture of the recipe and maybe how long it takes (i.e. prep time and cooking) before you see the site description. The schema that has been added was the breadcrumbs, Google authorship (hence the "By James Dunn", if you came in via Google) and software schema.

The other changes are that some pages have been retired, like the Sega pages as I'm not in the mood to keep the AJAX up-to-date and my lack of interest in developing the page any further diminished years ago. Named and shamed has gone too, mainly for the same lack of interest/time reasons. However, confessions of a game programmer is still on the cards, although it isn't accessible in the menu (yet), I'm just waiting until I finish the E.T. remake before anything goes on it. Which leads me to....

Game programming project(s):

E.T. is still progressing and, I can finally and happily say, is actually nearing completion. This year I looked at articles to help motivate finishing a game and most said to make a to do list (of which you can find on the relevant game page) and just to do it (i.e. try not to let yourself think of "I'll do it in a minute" because you'll end up not doing it and before you know it, a week has gone by with nothing to show for it). After E.T. I'll probably start the scrolling shoot 'em up, Annihilator, where I'll start to look at having difficulty levels - which will be an interesting thing to code.

YouTube Channel:

Yes, I'm still doing that also. Again, slowly - I haven't updated it in about a couple of weeks/a month. I still have an LP of BattleTech to go up, so I'll try and get that done this week and I'm considering whether I should embed those YouTube uploads to this site or not.

hhhhmmmm.....