by Chris on Meta

A Site Refresh & WordPress!

Another cycle of decay and renewal. My attentions elsewhere, on work and life and such and this site falls into decay.

The limitations of the NucleusCMS also contributed to the lack of enthusiasm for posting. Nucleus is fine software but the featurelist and plugins haven’t kept up with what I want to do with the site, including tagging and greater flexibility with categories.

So I’ve put in a brand new WordPress installation, imported my old posts and started mucking around with it. I chose a very nice yet minimalistic theme by Becca Wei until I can get around to hacking on my own theme. Old comments are in the system but somehow didn’t get attached to the posts, I’ll see if I can’t fix that. Links are broken, another thing to fix (I did that last year too, shame on me).
So lets hope this brings renewal, refreshment and more posts, pictures and better use of this medium we call the intarweb!

 
by Chris on General

AJAX

All kinds of JavaScript XML goodness!

  • prototype.js – the grandaddy of AJAX javascript libraries.
  • RICO – An open source Javascript library for creating rich internet applications. Rico originated as work done in Sabre Airline Solutions and extends on the excellent prototype.js effort from the Ruby on Rails folks.
  • MochiKit – More of an overall utility library, MochiKit has some AJAXish features.
  • qooxdoo – Another Javascript toolkit with some AJAX features.
  • AFLAX – Ajax meets Flash!
  • Cpaint – Presenting application like interfaces with AJAX
  • Complex Data Types with AJAX – sometimes it isn’t as simple as the demos make it look.

    • and … AJAX is the short name for all the technologies that make things like Google Maps so slick, like dragging the map around to find the stuff you’re interested in.

    [tags]AJAX[/tags]

 
by Chris on General

Overloaded Truck

<%image(20060112-loaded_truck.jpg|323|221|Overloaded Truck)%>

Check out the full size photo at photo.net

 
by Chris on General

More ways to play Monopoly

Ever wonder about all the extra rules people come up with for Monopoly? For us, it was always the Free Parking Bonus, either a $500 bill from the bank to sit on the center of the board, all the taxes and payments collected to go to the center or both. Whichever way you played it, Free Parking gave a few players a nice boost to cash, introduced an additional element of luck and usually sped up the game.

I just found a number of additional rules that players introduced to the game.

We always played with Immunity as a negotiating tactic but I’ve found players who were amazed I would offer such a thing.

Some of the other suggestions looked amazing though … Traveling Railroads? It makes perfect sense! Combining Railroads with Utilities? Another interesting idea, while getting all four Railroads always makes a nice boost in the early game it starts to pale once hotels start popping up. And both utilities only made a difference very early on.

Playing on a double board? It sounds insane! However, with a number of people wanting to play it would be very fun to have everyone in the same game.

I’m gonna have to try some of these out next time I get a chance to play Monopoly.

from boingboing

 
by Chris on General

Vanilla – Web Forums

Just came across Vanilla, a nice, clean web forum software. GPL, XHTML & CSS, extensible and more. Also Filebrowser, a thumbnailer / web file browser.