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)

Custom 404

I just added a very easy thing, that I just haven't added before because of lazyness.

A custom 404 error message! Actually it was just a 100% blank site before today.

To have a custom 404 you only need to create a file named .htaccess in the root folder on the FTP server and then add

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

In fact I did that many weeks ago, but today I created that 404 file that gets displayed.

Try to go here: http://the-gamevault.com/thispagedoesnotexist.html! As you can see I have a button that simply takes you one step back in history....

< input type="button" name="back" value="Take me back" onclick="window.history.go(-1);" >

easy! =)

EDIT: I just discovered that you can actually use JS directly on the page:

EDIT: Try to click on this: Edit everything on this page! this enables you of editing the whole blog! try it out, you can click on any text on the page and then edit it.


Gives some possiblities!

Code box for the blog

I just added a small css change that draws a nice codebox when needed!

.code {
background-color:#3E3E3E;
background-image:url(http://the-gamevault.com/images/code.jpg);
border:1px solid #585959;
color:black;
margin-left:5px;
overflow: auto;
padding-left: 5px;
white-space:pre;
width: 99%;
}

Actually I made this box for a friend some months ago, but it's nice than I can use it too now :)

Quick start launched!

Today I finished the quick start mode!

You can access it from the main page in the sidebar on the right side.

I think it works pretty nice now, and I am rather happy with this "Go!" button drawn in inkscape!


Technically this works by adding up a list of all possible games in a list, and then it randomly chooses a game and checks weather the rating is above 3. When a game with a decent rating is found, you will get redirected with some Javascript :)

I also thought of adding a parameter where you could choose that you only want games with a better rating than 4, but as it is now, not many games are rated... So help me rate!

Adding Quick start

I'd like to have something on the Gamevault that gives the user a different opportunity for browsing games than using a list. Therefore I introduce the quick start button!

currently you can find the test page here: http://the-gamevault.com/quick.php
So, how does it work? It's pretty simple as it is now. The script takes every checked box and find a match in the file databases. Then it adds all the "good" games up in a string and takes a random game, which I'll redirect to with some Javascript.

But I have bigger plans! Currently the game database runs on a couple of simple text files, because my old host was without mySQL databases. When I get that database converted to SQL, I'll implent the quick start system as it really should be!

It should work like a clickable matrixsystem, where you can click everywhere in this square to get a game. Also, I plan to add a rating parameter which means you should could specify that you only want games with a rating better than 4 etc. This combined with the current system with game genres should provide a nice quick start where users quickly can get what they want.

Now I just need to convert to whole database to mySQL, and I don't really know the SQL language yet...

Setting the blog up

Hey there and welcome to this blog about the-gamevault.com!

The main purpose of this blog is to write about the development and progress of the site. Therefore the activity of this blog might depend on the coding activity on the main page. Lets hope it stays high :)!