Month: February 2017

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 I’m not completely done with that yet (still planning to switch to a different theme and clean up some of the outdated pages).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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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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