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Category: Website

News related to the website.

Portfolio Updated

Oh hey there! It’s been a while, hasn’t it? 😂

Can’t believe it’s been a few years again since my last post on this site. Surely, one of those days I’ll figure out what to do with it (and actually not be too lazy to do it).

Today is not that day, though. Instead, I’ve recently decided to remake my Portfolio website. Most of you probably weren’t familiar with it in the first place, but you can check out the new design here. Keeping my Portfolio up-to-date is very important to me. Not only because having a history to look back to is fulfilling, but also because it’s a nice reassurance to have in case I ever need to quickly switch jobs out of unforseen reasons.

I was quite annoyed by the previous design, because not only was it a tad cumbersome to work with, it also never seemed to do quite what I wanted it to. I like that the new design looks slick and modern without being slow or overloaded. I also love having the projects I worked on presented as a timeline, which was really one of the main reasons for me to do the switch. The old design never quite managed to do that reliably.

Switching was quite a bit of work, but I think in the end, it was tortally worth it. What do you think?

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Future Website Plans

Hey there!

If you have read my previous news entry here, you should probably know what’s going on. The short story is that, due to technical problems, I was recently forced to overhaul and clean up my website a bit. I’m not completely done with that yet (still planning to switch to a different theme and clean up some of the outdated pages).

Anyways, all of this got me thinking. Isn’t it kind of a waste that, right now, all I’m really using this website for is the occasional news post every one or two years and a download archive for some of my old (partially obsolete) stuff? Yes, it is. So with that, how about I actually use this website more, now that I’ve gotten rid of multi-language content and made it easier to use?

With that, I got the idea to actually use this website more like a blog by posting news entries more regularly. Some of the topics I am thinking about:

  • Video games in general
  • Video game development (both from a hobby and a professional/job perspective)
  • Programming in general
  • Hobby projects
  • Real life stuff (only when considered interesting enough by me)
  • Probably more

For the near future, one of the things I’m planning is to actually write a lengthy and detailed blog post about my experiences with the development of Darksiders Warmastered Edition. Not only do I consider it a potentially interesting read for other people, but it’ll also be fun for myself to look back in a few years and remember everything that’s happened during the development of some of my past projects. In that sense, you could see these blog posts as some kind of historical preservation for myself.

So if any of this sounds interesting to you, be sure to check back here occasionally so you don’t miss anything.

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Hello Darkness, My Old Friend!

Well, here we are again, more than a year after that last post (time sure does fly) and, as you may have noticed, this website looks vastly different now.

So a lot has happened recently. My good old friend WYE (yep, that WYE), who has access to some of the webspace on this server (being one of the admins on smwhacking.de, which is also hosted on this server), is currently in the process of developing an entirely new website + forum for SMW Hacking. For ease of development, he decided to manage his soure code via GitHub, a smart move. A somewhat less smart move was to accidentally leak our mySQL database password on that same GitHub repository. Needless to say, the password had to be changed everywhere.

After doing that, I noticed that this website was suddenly broken and inaccessible. Naturally, my conclusion was that the password change had somehow broken the website. I looked for a solution for a good while until I finally decided to contact my server provider. They told me that the servers had recently been upgraded from PHP version 5.3 to version 5.6.

Being the dork I am, I still wasn’t able to put two and two together and kept looking for problems related to the password. Eventually I discovered the debug mode setting of WordPress, which displays usefull error information when something goes wrong. Now finally I started to realise that there wasn’t anything wrong with my password at all, but that the problem had to do with Wordpess all along. The natural assumption here is that the upgrade from PHP 5.3 to 5.6 somehow broke my website, but I didn’t notice it until the problem with the password occured, making me think that the password itself had been the source of the problem.

So after doing some digging, it turned out that the two major problem sources were two things I’ve wanted to get rid of, anyways: the qTranslate plugin and my custom website theme. As mentioned in my last post, maintaining a website in two languages is kinda annoying, so I’ve wanted to get rid of the German part for quite a while now. This problem gave me the perfect opportunity to do so (I hope I haven’t missed any bilangual pages). I also wanted to get a more modern and dynamic website theme, which I now have (although I don’t plan for this to stay the actual theme for a long time, I just went with it since I considered it the least likely to cause any additional trouble). So with this, the first step of my website overhaul is actually done now, and with German out of the way, nothing is standing in the way of posting here more regularly (except for, well, time and motivation).

Next, after finding a more suitable theme for my website, I’m planning to look through some of my old pages and clean them up (removing pages that are out-dated, adding pages that are missing etc.). Also need to update my Portfolio with my most recent project: Darksiders Warmastered Edition.

Stay tuned for more news on this.

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*Some Dust off the Surface Blow*

*One Eternity Later*

WOW, it really has been an eternity, hasn’t it? As you may have noticed, it’s been quite a while since my last activity on this website. This is due to a number of reasons. First of all, I rarely have time to work on private stuff nowadays, and when I do, I usually lack the motivation to do something with this website. Usually I’m lazy, but even when I’m not lazy, I prefer to invest my time into programming. Secondly, I’m not really happy with this website’s design anymore. Mostly with the fact that it’s so outdated and static. I’d prefer a more dynamic website, making full use of the potential of modern browsers. At the very least, the website should resize itself depending on monitor size. For this, I may have to use someone else’s WordPress theme as the tools I know lack the functionality to export themes with that capability (and I certainly lack the experience, time and motivation to design a theme from scratch myself). So basically, I want to redo this whole website, but don’t have the time and motivation to do so right now. Thirdly, maintaining website content in multiple languages is really time-consuming, especially when you want all your content to fulfil certain quality criterias. For this reason, I may very well drop multi-language support alltogether. After all, I expect every person visiting this website to have at least a basic understanding of the English language, which is everything needed to understand the content on this website. Multi-language plugins for WordPress are pretty nasty to work with, anyways.

To get an idea of what kind of website dynamics I’m going for, you can check out my Portfolio page here (or by clicking on “My Portfolio” in the navigation bar). That website is also more regularly updated, so you may get a rough idea of what I’ve been up to lately.

I’ll let you know when I make progress with this website.

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ZED Released

Yeah, it took forever and at this point you probably didn’t even expect it to happen anymore, but the past week I actually took the time to polish my first Games Academy project ZED and put it on my website.
Grab it here!

Now the only thing that still remains is Amazing Tetris. Let’s see when I will get to that…

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Website Updated

I’ve just updated this website. I cleaned and completed all of the pages and also added new ones. Enjoy!

In other news, I recently started programming in C++ since Pascal is outdated and it’s hard to find any useful libraries for it that are still maintained. Porting my project from Pascal to C++ could take quite a while, though.

EDIT:
Now with a new theme and updated software.

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New Website

As you can see I completely redesigned my website using WordPress and Artisteer. This makes it look a lot more professional. Also, it’s a lot easier to maintain this way. Right now a lot of content is still missing, which I’ll put up later. The downloads are already available, though.

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