Vista gadget update

Finally my submission went through!

Apparrenly using internet explorer helped on the matter (surprisingly?)

Here is an official link if you want to try it: http://gallery.live.com/liveItemDetail.aspx?li=0f53d289-c9e7-4142-a97d-12ccf2229dad

Vista gadget

I just finished my work on a nice vista gadget with the gamevault. It looks like this:

I think it's pretty neat, but as I was about to upload it this MS site http://gallery.live.com things got worse. When I finally found the upload page, it wouldn't accept any of my files. I was told to add a jpg picture with dimensions between 60x60 and 100x100. After some initial failures, I sent in a jpg with 99x99. That wasn't "A correct format". Great. And when I had to send the gadget file itself, it even got worse! I have packaged a gadget file that works, but eventually the site did not accept this quickstart.gadget... So for now, I haven't succeeded uploading the gadget to the official vista gadget place, however you can download it here: http://the-gamevault.com/quickstart.gadget

Enjoy it, because it works really nice :]

The Gamevault on Facebook

I have been thinking about adding the site to Facebook as a kind of app, but it was a bit difficult to add the whole page, so I started out by doing this quick start app: apps.facebook.com/gamevault.

Quite nice huh :)?

I still think about adding the whole page, but it's not that easy because I have all the facebook stuff on the subdomain fb.the-gamevault.com, and I need to pull all the data from the-gamevault.com (creating a whole new database would be stupid!). I also need to redo the whole layout, so it's not something I can fix fast... But maybe in the future!

If you look a bit further down on this blog you can also see a FB widget... horray ;)

More from this category

Today I just added a small link under the frontpage game that takes you to category the game was from.

$link = explode("-", $data[4]);

$link[0] = strtolower($link[0]);
$link[1] = strtolower($link[1]);
< ?php echo "< p>< a href='index.php?type={$link[0]}&category={$link[1]}'>More from this category< /a>< /p>"; ?>

easy! =)

Quick start feedback

I just created a survey as you can see in the sidebar of the blog..

So what do you think of it :]?

(If you also want to comment on it, just comment to this post)

Special quick start site

I just added a special page from where you can use the quickstart button!

And the quick start now also features a possibility for defining the minimum rating.. quite cool eh :]?


The link is: http://the-gamevault.com/quickstart.html

And if anybody would help me stumble it then go to http://www.stumbleupon.com/s/#3G6vt4/the-gamevault.com/quickstart.html/, sign up and vote for it! (And also use stumbleupon, it's awesome :) )

The evolution of design

I just changed the "favicon" which is the small icon that appears in bookmarks and other places depending on the browser. While doing that I remembered that it was the last image that I had from the Gamevault version 2.

But how did the site looked in the start? I have been developing on and off on the site for more than a year, and I remember the first layout was really black and ugly. I can't find the page anywhere on my harddisk, but I found some of the image files!

This was the header:

After some months I finally realized that it was ugly... So I came up with version 2!

It looked roughly like this:

I kept this design for a long time, but in the end it was just grey and boring. I tried to put some colors on it, but nothing fitted that design. (the favicon was from here)

Then, some months ago, I finally came up with this in inkscape

And version 3 was born... :)

(No I don't plan on launching a version 4 at the moment)