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May 17, 2004

Clothes folding for Ninjas

Learn to fold your shirts like a ninja!

This video will teach you the Japanese method of folding t-shirts, which is of course 3 times as fast as the way I, being an American, have always done it. But now we know their secret!

Watch the video (links directly to a Windows Media Video file)

Or you can learn how to use a t-shirt to make your very own Ninja Mask.

Or you can learn more about the Ninja’s Real Ultimate Power.

May 11, 2004

Nintendo DS

Nintendo announced their latest handheld system today at the E3 entertainment expo, it’s called the Nintendo DS (for now), and it is looking mighty cool if I do say so myself.

The system has two screens, one of which is touch-sensitive and can be used to interact with your games via a stylus or your finger. An app called Pictochat will allow you to draw on the screen, and type messages to people around you with an on-screen keyboard, and the built-in Wi-Fi networking.

Because of the Wi-Fi, you will be able to play multiplayer games with others around you with no wires, and even over the internet if you are near an access point. If the developer chooses, you can even stream the game to other devices, so you could play multiplayer games with only a single game cartridge.

The system also has a built-in microphone that will allow games to take advantage of voice recognition of some kind.

The DS is fully compatible with all GBA games, GBC games, and original black-and-white gameboy games, giving it a library of thousands of games as soon as it launches.

A few of the games that are already in development for the system however are:

• a New Super Mario Bros. game
• WarioWare DS
• Mario Kart DS
• a new Metroid game
• Super Mario 64 remake
• Animal Crossing DS

And others. Those are just the Nintendo developed games.

All of the games make some sort of unique use of the two screens (and touch-sensitive screen). For instance in Mario Kart, one screen shows the race, and the other shows a map of the track, and a realtime ranking of who is in the lead.

Even with all the power and screens of this system, Nintendo says the battery will last 10 hours, just like the GBA. Which would be really nice. Both screens are backlit and the battery is rechargeable, so at least they have learned from their mistakes with the original GBA.

I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Nintendo can do with this system… Hopefully it won’t be too big to really be portable, and the battery life will be good. Both very important features of a handheld system.

Gamespot has a good write-up of some hands on experiences with the system while at E3.

May 05, 2004

iTMS Music Video Extractor

I haven’t mentioned the new version of iTunes (4.5) yet, but it has some cool new features, especially the new hi-res Quicktime music videos and movie trailers. But as it is now, you have to download them every time you want to watch them.

Not anymore!

iTunes Extractor allows you to save the quicktime movies to your hard drive with a single click, after the movie has finished downloading. It works like a charm!

I’m not sure if it’s against Apple’s terms of service to save those videos, so you might want to grab that app before it “disappears”.

Hope, Faith and Charity - Custom scenting, lotions, beauty products.

The site I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past month or so is just about finished (only needs a few more tweaks) so I’m going to go ahead and post it here.

Hope, Faith and Charity

The site is all in CSS/HTML, and to my knowledge looks good in all the new browsers. There are a few issues with IE5/5.5 I believe, but I’m willing to live with them as they are just minor cosmetic issues that don’t affect the function of the site.

Back-end

I used the ExpressionEngine for the back-end, which turned out to work extremely well. The pMachine guys have done a fantastic job with this product, and it’s worth every penny of the $200 price tag. It would be overkill for a personal blog site, but if you need a CMS of some kind, it’s fantastic. I haven’t found a better and more flexible system, as far as the template system goes, and ease of customization. The best feature in my opinion is the unlimited custom weblog entry fields, which allow you to set as many fields for an “entry” as you like. For instance on this site I have a price field, title, short description, long description, three different picture fields, a hidden keywords field, and a few others. I can then display these anywhere on the page simply by putting a variable in the template like this: {price}. Then for the Frequently Asked Questions section I have a completely different set of entry fields, post statuses, categories, and templates.

The URLs are search engine friendly, since they don’t have any crazy characters in them like ? or &. Like I said the template system is really great, and you can completely change the way data is displayed just by changing the URL that you link to.

I’ve tried programming similar functions in PHP myself before and I just couldn’t get it. I’m not a programmer, don’t like programming, and don’t want to learn programming. But with EE I can for the most part do anything I like, but without writing any PHP at all. (But if you did want to add PHP, you can add it anywhere in the page, and have it processed before or after the EE codes have been processed) The EE system has some simple “if” logic, which lets you do some things like:

{if title != “hide”}

…show some html…

{/if}

So that if the title of an entry is “hide” then it won’t show up in that entry listing. You couldn’t do advanced logic with the system, but it’s not designed to do that. The logic it does provide though is easy to understand and use, even for someone that doesn’t like programming like me.

EE only recently moved to its 1.0 release, so I found 3 bugs while working on the site. However, after posting them on the pMachine support forum, they were always fixed within 24 hours, and added to the next bug fix release the following day.

Search Engines

The site is already on Yahoo somehow, probably because of a link I posted a couple of weeks ago when I had a question about the site. I was still pretty shocked that it’s already coming up as #14 on the search term “Custom Scenting” on Yahoo, which is the product the client wants to push the most. Coding sites with CSS really does seem to make them extremely indexable, as well as having good titles, which this site has, in my opinion.

Hopefully the friendly google bot will make it’s weekly visit to my site soon and head on over to the Hope, Faith and Charity site as well. ;)

Shopping Cart

The only drawback to using EE for an e-commerce site is that you are limited in the options you have for a shopping cart. Namely, you have to use an external shopping cart like PayPal or 1ShoppingCart, which open in a new window when you add something to the cart. This obviously has some usability issues, but for this particular site and budget, it was the way to go.

I decided to go with PayPal, mainly because it’s free until you sell something, and the shopping cart links are generated using a standard HTML form which makes it easy to pop-in the price and description of items from the EE back-end. With some other services like 1ShoppingCart, you have to first login to their site and create the product, then copy/paste the link into your site. This would have created a much unwanted extra step to adding every product.

However, PayPal definitely has drawbacks as well. Mainly that some people hate PayPal, and also because they don’t offer weight-based shipping. You have to either setup a flat rate for shipping each item, or charge shipping based on a range of prices in the order total. But again, because of the budget of this site, I had to make the call to live with those drawbacks in order to get the site done on budget.

According to pMachine, they will eventually add an e-commerce module to EE that will be available as a separate purchase. If it is anywhere near as well-put together as EE itself is, then it will be the killer shopping cart system in my opinion.

The reason I didn’t go with another shopping cart system like OSCommerce is because every flavor of OSC I‘ve ever tried has been a terrible pain in the butt to customize. You have to sort through pages and pages of PHP code just to change how a little box is drawn. Plus there are layers and layers of nested tables, which would have taken me ages to get rid of. Perhaps the Zen Cart will be a good option in the future, as it has a CSS based layout, but for now it seems to unstable to me, and doesn’t have all of the features and contribution add-ons that other OSC installs have. I figured the CSS layout and search engine friendliness of EE would be more important than having and internal shopping cart. Hopefully I made the right choice. I’ve never seen a OSC site come up on a search engine. I don’t think they get indexed very well at all. And I’d rather have someone find the site and be slightly confused for a second, rather than never find the site at all.

Final Thought

Overall the site was a really fun project. We did all of the photography, so there are some nice big pictures to look at, which will hopefully entice people to buy. I know I’m always reluctant to buy something I see online when the picture is so small I can’t even tell what it is. Hopefully it’ll be successful for the client, and far exceed their expectations. I think it is the best site I’ve done, and I’m pretty proud of it, so I hope they are too.

So if you need any lotions, sugar scrubs, milk baths, salt scrubs, Bella Notte linens, Burt’s Bees products, face masks, hair masks, essential oils, custom scented items, body washes, natural hand-made soaps, BedHead pajamas, etc. for your wife or girlfriend, be sure to checkout Hope, Faith and Charity. :)

May 04, 2004

GameSpot.com Video Reviews

Though they’ve had them years, I just have to give an enthusiastic two thumbs up to GameSpot’s video reviews of games. If you are a subscriber to their “complete” service as I am, then you have full access to a ton of video previews, gameplay footage, trailers, promos, etc. The ones I find the most useful though are the video reviews. As my previous post said, I’ve been pretty busy lately, and haven’t played a game for months. I’m still interested in the industry, but don’t have time to scour the gaming sites for the latest news and reviews. So instead of reading a 2 or 3 page article on a game, I can simply download a 200mb quicktime video and watch a 5 - 10 minute video review instead. The added bonus of this is not only do I not have to read anything, I can also watch actual gameplay footage and get a feel for the graphics and sound in the game while also having it described to me.

My interest in the reviews sometimes depends on the editor reviewing the game however. For instance, I find that Greg Kasavin, the executive editor, does the best video reviews. He sounds like he’s speaking freely and not reading from a script like some of the other editors. It makes it a lot easier to listen to than someone simply reading the printed review to you while they splice in some game footage.

Anyway, just thought I’d point out the feature, and if you are interested in the game industry at all, the $20 a year for GameSpot Complete is most likely worth it.

Not dead, just busy

If anyone still happens to read my site, I’m not dead, I’ve just been really really busy. I have a day job, as well as freelance web design on the side, which is the part that’s keeping me really busy, as well as a wife, dogs, and other interests and responsibilities,. I’ll show everyone what I’ve been working on for the past month in a day or two, after it’s finished.

In other news, Google just accepted my site for their AdSense program, out of the blue. I had applied several months ago, but was denied. Now they’ve reviewed it again and suddenly decided that my site fits the description, so expect to see ads here soon. I’ve already put in the code, but because my site was blocked before, it says it may take up to 48 hours for the ads to show up.

In more news, I was accepted to beta test Movable Type 3.0. I’ve installed it, and at first glance it doesn’t seem like that much of an improvement. I think others have written about the disappointments though. I guess the main confusion is that this isn’t MT Pro which is supposed to have all the new features. I was looking forward to the custom entry fields the most.

Thankfully, ExpressionEngine already provides this functionality, and it rocks. I’ve used it on the site I’ve been working on, and I am totally blown away. But I’ll write more details on that after I finish the site.