Posts Tagged with Michael Online

One year ago today Maikeru On launched. In honor of this anniversary—and because I felt like it—I’ve updated the design. Hope you like. It’s about… 2:30AM at the moment, and I”m dead tired. I’ll be updating this post sometime tomorrow after I wake up with all the information about this redesign. A lot of things have changed… so many, in fact, that I couldn’t finish everything even though I’ve spent the last nine hours working on nothing else.

One new feature I’ll mention now, before collapsing: I’ve opened comments up to non-registered users. This is a test run; if I start seeing a bunch of spam comments I’ll lock things up pretty fast. In the meantime, do comment. Registered users still have some perks… which I’ll go into tomorrow. *collapses*

Update: You’d think I would’ve slept until noon or something, but I woke up at eight and have been working on stuff ever since. Most everything is in place now, so here’s a rundown.

• Access Panel: Non-registered or logged out users should notice a new link at the very top of the site, “access”. This activates the access panel, which lets you login, retrieve a lost password or register. I haven’t worked all of the kinks out of this yet, but it’s still using the WordPress backend so nothing is completely broken; it just doesn’t quite work the way I’d like. I’ll be trying to clean this up at some point but it’s functional enough for the moment.
• Customization Panel: Once logged in, registered users will notice the “access” link replaced with the “welcome user” message. Clicking this will activate the customization panel. This one is a little trickier… none of the account settings work just yet, and my brain is too fried to try and get it working right now. Site themes work perfectly fine, however, so have fun playing with those. Logging out removes the cookie that saves your theme option at the moment; I might try to make it a more permanent setting in the future.
• Open Comments: As I mentioned last night, commenting is now open to the general public. You still have to provide a name and a valid e-mail address (which will never be shared), but I hope this will get more people—perhaps those that didn’t like the idea of registering—to comment.
• The FM Archives: Coming soon. The Wayback Machine actually caught nearly every post I ever made on my old site, Fractured Mentality. I’ll be working on getting these posted back to Michael Online in the near future.

There are still tweaks and minor modifications to be made here and there, but for the most part I’m extremely happy with things now. Let me know what you think.

From yours truly, that is. I use two seperate stat trackers for this site, the WordPress.com stat tracker and Google Analytics. Both show a recent increase in site traffic, which is almost certainly thanks to Liliy. Hopefully these new visitors are enjoy Fractured Mentality, as the blog here has been sorely neglected as of late.

Various things have kept me busy, including my summer job, my ongoing job hunt (if you have a job you’d like to offer me let me know, by the way), and a personal project which will be going live very soon. I’ll have to ask all of my visitors–new and old–to stay patient while I finish up this super secret project.

And no, it’s not the dedicated role-playing forum. As Liliy kindly pointed out, I don’t have anywhere near the userbase to actually support such a thing. It’s in development though. Honestly. If registration ever picks up I’ll put more of an effort into getting it to a usable state.

Also, about registration… I should mention that user accounts are purged on occasion. I don’t have any specific guidelines for this, but if I see someone that has registered and never posted a comment (the only reason to register at this point) then it’s pretty likely it’ll get deleted. Likewise, users that very rarely comment might also get purged. Everything on the site is available to non-registered users, so if you do register (and I hope you do ) I’d like it if you actually commented.

The comic made it today, if a little late. I’ve finally given up on TinyMCEComments as it refuses to work. In it’s place I’m trying Live Comment Preview, along with Smilies Themer + Smilies Themer Toolbar. Let me know what you think.

Futurama is on! The title of this post is the tag line for the episode. We all love Futurama right?

Seriously though, the reason I’m posting this is because I need to test some new site functionality. My original idea for the home page here was to display all the posts from the last day that had posts. So, if I made three posts on March 7 and hadn’t made any posts since that, you’d see those three posts. As soon as a post is made on a later date, only posts from that day show up, etc.

Unfortunately, WordPress isn’t quite that flexible. There don’t even seem to be any plugins that provide this sort of functionality. I wasn’t entirely sure how to do it so I settled for only showing the most recent post on the home page, which is great unless I feel like posting more than once a day.

Anyways, it finally struck me how to do it this morning: compare the date of the first post in the WordPress Loop with all the other posts, and if the date changes break the loop. It’s actually pretty simple… or should be, anyways. I’ll be making another post after this one—hopefully with more substantive content—to test things out.

Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends. You may notice a few small changes; fear not, for all will be explained in time. I do believe Maikeru On is getting closer to living up to its tagline, however. Be warned: this content may very well be explosively awesome.

Here’s the breakdown, for those of you still horribly confused: this is the home page, wherein you’ll find the info blurb, the most recent post, the most recent comic (yes, it’s here), my most recent work, a list of sites I highly recommend (visit them… later), and a few links that’ll help you show your undying support. The blog contains blog-like things, and the comic likewise contains comic-like things. The work section is my new online portfolio/freelance services section, and you can find out more about me or contact me with the aptly named about and contact pages.

Some of you may be wondering about certain promised features that are absent. Site themes, though a personal favorite of mine, have been axed for the forseeable future. My apologies to anyone that really loved them. The MORPG hasn’t been completely dropped, but it has taken a backseet to more pressing site matters, like finishing the site and getting it back up. WYSIWYG comments have made a huge comeback after their brief absence, however. Thanks to the WordPress 2.5 upgrade, Maikeru On now fully supports Gravatars. Go get yours now to use an avatar with comments.

It’s been a long week, and a difficult time getting everything in order. Lucky for me there seems to be a WordPress plugin for just about anything, and so I have avoided diggint too deep. Going from no plugins to fifteen is quite a jump, but everything seems to work great and I’m happy with how things have turned out. Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Update: Liliy informed me that comments were broken; the problem seems to have been with the WYSIWYG comments plugin, so I’ve disabled it for now.

Just a heads up: you might starting noticing a lot of site downtime in the coming weeks. I’ve mostly finished the design for the next version of Maikeru On and I’m working on getting it set into a WordPress template, which requires me to take the site offline to test.

I’ll also need to develop at least a couple of WordPress plugins for some of the things I have planned, which… isn’t easy. *_*; Hopefully everything goes well and I can launch the new version by next month. In the meantime, please bear with me. ^_^;

My final project for ART 3560 (Web Design) has inspired me to do a complete Maikeru On overhaul. Nothing is happening in the immediate future, but in the next month or so I’ll be overhauling the entire site, including:

• New appearnce. The entire site look will be overhualed, including new themes for registered users to select from. Those users that have donated (or will donate in the future, before time is up) to the Help Mike Switch fund will have a new unique theme based on the new site appearance.
• Better integration. I use WordPress to manage as much as I can on Maikeru On, and I’ll be taking this even further in the overhaul. What this means for users is an overhauled registration, login, and customization panel that is fully integrated both with the site appearance (no more jumping to the funky WordPress login box to login) and WordPress itself. Theme information, for example, will be stored in the WordPress database and will no longer use cookies. This includes the MORPG (see below).
• More stuff. This includes the portfolio of my work (professional or otherwise) that is part of my ART 3560 project, a web comic (seriously: don’t ask when), the initial public launch of the MORPG, and maybe a few other things. The MORPG itself will be fully integrated into the site proper: anyone registered with Maikeru On will no lnoger have to seperately register for the game, and the game itself will be a section of the Maikeru On site and not a seperate entity.
• Various enhancements. I’ve installed the latest version of WordPress (2.5 Release Candidate 1), and it’s pretty great. A lot of the improvements are on the backend, but there are a few nice additions that users can enjoy too, such as native support for Gravatars.

The WordPress upgrade seems to have disabled my rich-text comment plugin; I apologize to anyone that really loved it, but I don’t know when—or if—rich commenting will return. If anyone out there has ideas for making the site better, please leave a comment.

Work continues on the MORPG. I’ve slowed quite a bit, largely because the burst is over, and partly because I want to make sure what I’ve done so far is good enough that it won’t cause trouble later on when I start getting into the really complex stuff (heh). This is good, because it’s already shown me a few things I could have done better, and I’ve gone back and improved them.

One thing that had me stuck for a bit was the character creation page: users get to select their characters class (Fighter, Caster, or Balanced) and an elemental affinity, using big ‘ol buttons that are kinda’ cool and light up when you hover over them and stay lit up when you click one to select it. It’s clean and simple and works really well; it’s very elegant. At least, that was the idea. Getting the stupid buttons to stay lit when a user clicks is a bigger pain than it should be: it requires javascript wizardry, and mine–while adequate enough to accomplish this simple trick–isn’t good enough for my own standards. Sure, I can get it to work, but the code is ugly and cludgy. Javascript tends to look that way to me anyways, but I’m not a huge fan of most of its uses (’cept AJAX, AJAX is spiffy). Here’s the code I used to highlight our buttons:

function $(element) {
 return document.getElementById(element);
}
function strip(element) {
 $(element).className = '';
}
unction activate(group,object){
 if(group == 'class'){
  strip('fighter');
  strip('caster');
  strip('balanced');
  $(object).className = 'active';
 }
 if(group == 'affinity'){
  strip('holy');
  strip('earth');
  strip('air');
  strip('neutral');
  strip('fire');
  strip('water');
  strip('shadow');
  $(object).className = 'active';
 }
}

Notice that those first two functions, $() and strip(), were created only to clean up the code in the third function, activate(). If I hadn’t done that, the code above would be an even more jumbled mess. So we have an ugly script that keeps our button lit up when a user clicks it. Is there a better way? Perhaps one that doesn’t even require the general ugliness of javascript?

There is. So bleeding-edge, in fact, that I both didn’t know it existed and was not surprised at all to find out that it doesn’t work in any version of Internet Explorer. Here’s how we do it:

input:checked+label {/* style rules */}

…that’s it. What took three functions in javascript takes one simple selector in CSS3

This method does have it’s own problems. No version of Internet Explorer supports it. Firefox 3 Beta 3, Opera 9.25, and Safar 3 Beta do, but I doubt earlier versions of those browsers do (well, maybe Opera). It’s so much simpler, though, that I’m hard pressed to really care.

Update: The character creation page is finished (for now). I ended up wiping all registered users while testing it, though. If you registered before, you’ll need to register again… or just wait until the thing is finished. ^_^

I’ve changed RSS feed from full text to summary, so as to force those of you that subscribe to it to actually visit the site in order to read entire posts. Nothing sinister; I’m hoping that if more people are forced to visit the site to read longer posts they’ll actually, you know, comment. Assuming there are readers out there to comment…

And I’m still looking for feedback on the MORPG forum. I’m going to include this notice in all of my posts (regardless of subject) until somebody starts giving feedback.

Just to remind my (few) readers: I’m still looking for input on the MORPG board. Registration is open now, so even the extremely lazy ones have no excuse to not comment.