Categories
bitching facebook

Fight the Guardian’s and The Independent’s spam

On Facebook.com front page:

“Dave Stone and Mike Merren recently read articles.”

…so I click on one of them. Lo and behold, instead of getting an article, I get The Independent app trying to force me to install it.

Force. Yes, force – there is no option to “view the article”, the only option is “install this app or cancel”.

Lots of people complaining about this recently, but there’s really only two things to do:

  1. Shame the newspaper by tweeting them
  2. Report them to Facebook for abuse

Tweet them to let them know what you think

@Guardian and @TheIndyNews

Report to Facebook

Yes, I know Facebook is behind this in the first place, but if you don’t bug them about it, they’re less likely to care:

…and you might as well let the developers know how pissed you are – directly – since Facebook gives you this option:

Categories
Web 0.1

Linkedin now blocking iPhones

If you follow links in linkedin emails today, from an iPhone, you get kicked off the linkedin.com site, and every page redirects to:

Https://touch.www.linkedin.com

Even if you type in the front page URL directly, you are *not allowed* to visit the website.

Classy.

Categories
android computer games dev-process games design programming

Prototyping: Chess Quest v0.4

(I’m prototyping a new game (working title: “ChessQuest”) – original post here)

Major changes:

  1. Enemies have health, and can be killed by touching them
  2. Performance is another 30% faster (should be running OK on most phones now?)
  3. Enemies have a direction indicator (not necessary right now, but it’ll become important in a later version…)

Download link

Chess Quest-0.4.0

Categories
agile games design programming

16 KB Game Competition (winter 2011) – Java

http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/lwjgl16k/25093/view.html

“the LWJGL16k competition starts right here, right now.” – Cas

The rules

First deadline: 25th November 2011
First task: get a black screen running using LWJGL

“you’ve got 7 days. All I’m looking for at this stage from you is a blank window opening up and maybe a rotating square or whatever. Of course complete games are even more welcome but the idea is to get something shipped.”

Well, what are you waiting for?

If you’ve got Eclipse installed, all you need do is download the LWJGL library, copy/paste the 50-line minimal project from the Wiki, and submit your entry!

(I believe Cas is onto a good thing here … force people to realise how easy it is to make a game if you focus on small-but-visible steps done *quickly* – No more procrastination!)

Categories
amusing Web 0.1

Eventbrite: please un-break your login page

And repeat after me:

“novice web developers should NOT override the Enter key on the keyboard”

(autocomplete fails – when you hit enter to accept browser-autocomplete, the idiotic untested, badly-written javascript kicks in and deletes the form data)

Categories
computer games funny

Kongregate: Level = 47

That’s one higher than Jim Greer.

Finally.

Categories
fixing your desktop PHP programming

Fixing Suffusion: List posts from a single WordPress category

UPDATE: So … it seems Suffusion has (buried deep inside the config) a way of displaying category pages with a higher-level workaround to the WP “missing feature”. Although so far I can’t find a way to set the settings on individual pages (which is what you generally need). So, I’ll leave this post up – it’s a good starting point for customizing Suffusion’s page-of-pages (which is also, it seems, how you would customize its Category pages.

Just to be clear, this is not a bug in Suffision, although it’s an oversight and I hope it’ll be included in a future version. The core problem is in WordPress: people have been requesting/expecting this feature for the past 5+ years, it’s pretty basic, but for now the WP folks haven’t added it.

Problem: List all the posts in a single category

This is VERY frequently requested by WP users: you want to have a Page on your site which lists the posts that are in a single Category.

WP has a very low-level way of doing this – which is very error-prone, hard to maintain (it’s hard-coded to database ID’s!), and requires you to break every single theme you own. Every time the theme is updated, you have to manually re-implement the fix!

Fortunately, there’s a minimal workaround (which is documented in the WP docs now (scroll to bottom)) which still (!) requires some theme editing.

Fortunately, Suffusion already has most of this workaround implemented, so we can make the fix without screwing around with the theme so much. The source code in Suffusion is almost identical to the sample provided by WP – but unfortunately it’s missing a key part. In Suffusion, you CAN list posts on a Page, but you CANNOT filter those posts by category.

Solution: Combine WP’s source with Suffusion, with a bit of safety improvement

So, edit the file “posts.php”, titled (in Suffusion): “Page of Posts”.

Where it has these lines:

$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);

…instead copy/paste the following:

$category_exclusive = get_post_meta($posts[0]->ID, 'category', true );

if( $category_exclusive )
{
$cat = get_cat_ID($category_exclusive);
$args = array(
	'category__in' => array( $cat ),
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}
else
{
$args = array(
	'orderby' => 'date',
	'order' => 'DESC',
	'paged' => $paged,
);
}

Usage

As per WP’s official suggestion … if you want a page to filter by category:

  1. Edit the page
  2. Select the “Page of Posts” template (this is Suffusion specific; in other themes, it might not exist)
  3. Add a “custom field” (scroll down on the edit screen), called “category”, with a value of the NAME of the category you want to be included

Explanation

One major thing here: We are being SAFE and non-destructive to the Suffusion theme.

Critically important is that we ONLY do a “filter by category” if the Page itself requests it. WP’s sample code does NOT have this protection (which is why the code above is slightly different).

This means that the rest of Suffusion (which doesn’t know about our new feature) is unaffected, and works as normal