IRAGINATION

IRAGINATION blog

www.iragination.com

February 22nd, 2010 IRA

The past week I switched over to iragination.com. As usual I’ve been so busy that once the move was done, instead of making some announcement I just focused my attention on to something else.

Ok, there was actually some other thing I felt it need to be solved before making any sort of announcement. To get the new domain properly indexed on search engines. You may consider this superfluous, but I really took care to make the switch in order to make it easy for search engines to detect the change, so I really want this to be working too.

So, after a week, and after doing the relevant site submission and stuff, here are the results so far.

Bing: Perfect

Yahoo: Winner

Google: Failure?

This one is funny because Google offered me at least three times the tools Bing and Yahoo have to report such domain changes and yet it is underperforming. Maybe Bing and Yahoo are not as big as Google so they have a better time reacting to these changes. Maybe they don’t care. I don’t know.

Usually I’ll let this pass and wait for it to solve itself someday. After all I can’t underestimate the weight of years of referrers and links to my old domain. But when Bing and Yahoo are doing a better job updating their indexes, I can’t help but keep bugging Google about it until it gets this sorted out.

Well, I’m making this post to help Google a bit. Maybe they’ll catch the hint.

Hey Google, look: www.iragination.com

Posted in IRAGINATION | 4 comments »

Fall of 21XX finally playable on Firefox

December 6th, 2009 IRA

Fall of 21XX is now fully playable on Firefox and friends. You no longer have to use Internet Explorer to play it.

Back in 2005 when I released Fall of 21XX r2, for some reason the map scrolling didn’t work on Firefox. It was sort of acceptable to say, “Guys, it works well on Internet Explorer, just use that”.

Years later, that statement was getting more and more embarrassing.

So, as I needed a break from Bass Abyss, I decided to take a look at the old Fall of 21XX codebase and fix that bug once and for all. Ok, the initial plan was more ambitious, I set to rewrite the engine, make the game widescreen, and as a whole use the process as a sandbox to try and implement concepts in a small scale to be ported back to Bass Abyss. Obviously such an endeavor would not be ready in an afternoon, but that fix was faster than I expected so,  I decided to publish it.

Have fun and sorry for taking so long in that.

Posted in Flash, Game Development, IRAGINATION | No comments »

Goodbye Geocities

October 27th, 2009 IRA

I was expecting to make this post yesterday but nothing happened.

Today I checked out briefly between breaks. It didn’t happen instantly. Some pages were accessible, others were not. I guess that’s how it was planned. Slowly, sections were taken down from time to time. The process was started, and it was a matter of time to witness the final result.

So today, somewhere between commuting and dinner, Fire Man Lives and the whole Geocities where shutdown for good.

Well, as simple as expect the content of your Gmail inbox be there forever, Geocities was one of those things that you could naively say would be there for good for no other reason than it’s been there for as long as you can remember.

When I read about its closure, I couldn’t help to ponder about it and make some retrospective. After all my first websites and the ones from many friends were hosted there. Good times.

With this, a link of the past is broken. For the Tweeter generation, probably this went unnoticed. For me, embarrassingly enough, I could not let go. So I backed it up.

For nostalgia sake, Fire Man Lives will be stored here for as long as I can. This is close to 10 years old content, so don’t be too harsh.

Um, update your links?

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Progress so far

September 16th, 2009 IRA

Although I’m very satisfied with the progress so far with Bass Abyss, I’m still unable to release a new version. I’m getting closer, but fixing the code has been too entertaining.  It’s an endless feedback cycle. The ideas I get in my job get applied in the game, and the ideas I get from the game just happen to solve some problem in my job.

The milestone version 1.0 should be something special, and not just another maintenance update. I’ve done some major revamps in many sections, stuff to be really proud of. But after a few days the hype is over and it just doesn’t look like it was such a big deal, even less worth an update. Probably it was, but I’m too used to not look back and be already very concerned with the new stuff I’m doing.

The only pressure I have when I stop to think of it is “well, maybe this is taking too long”.

September is almost over. I really want to have something for October, even if it is an unexciting maintenance update. To achieve that I guess I’ll have to come to terms with the high bars I’ve been setting.

Oh well. I just took a little break to write something. In the mean time, have a cute short hair Balandra sketch.

Posted in Game Development, IRAGINATION, Ilustración | 4 comments »

Now sporting a table-less design

July 5th, 2009 IRA

If for some reason the site looks weird, please clear your browser cache. I did a heavy rewrite of the layout and now I’m using a table-less, css, div-based (or whatever is the buzzword) design.

After clearing the cache and if I did everything right, you should see no major difference. That means everything went well.

I’m tinkering some applications in my work and they require a similar process, so as usual I try to apply the experience gained and use it here. This should make easier for spiders and similar machines to index my site, by being presented a more semantic layout.

I took the time to support as back as Internet Explorer 6. Considering the magnitude of the markup change, I kind of take pride that the site looks good even on it. Hack free. As soon as I’m done with other tasks, I might look at Internet Explorer 5 and older, if feasible, but don’t expect it soon. Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all look nice on Windows. Yeah, it’s a pleasure to work with those browsers but I just can’t neglet the majority of visitors that browse with IE. Hopefully they’ll migrate to IE8 and I won’t have to look back at IE6 again. I have no access to a Mac system anymore so I’ll have to think positive and trust it looks ok on it.

And if you use Chrome, Safari or Firefox 3.5 you can enjoy nice drop-shadows.

I’m still not done with this process, probably 95% of the site that uses the main layout has been reviewed and cleaned up. There are some tables I won’t be able to get rid off on a reasonable amount of time as the ones in the Illustrations section. That markup is  generated by the gallery software it is based on, Coppermine. On a side note, it’s a turn off that that project seems kind of stale but I’ll keep using it for now hoping they release some big update that lures me to use it more often. WordPress, the software I use for the news front page and this blog, has seen many major upgrades in the same time period, and that kind of motivated me to do some research on its tool-set and related technologies available.

On the horizon there are the mobile browsers, the console browsers. There are so many customizations I’d have to make to support them, but rest assure they’re in my road-map/wish-list.

Now evaluating forum software.

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Cleaning up the links

June 11th, 2009 IRA

I did some clean up on the links section removing sites that met this criteria:

• Sites not found (404 error).
• Sites that present the host’s default error page, usually sites hosted on Tripod or Geocities.
• Sites that redirect to other sites. If possible I’ve added links to the new site if the content is still related.
• Sites that admittedly report to have closed and left no content.
• Sites that have no accessible content unless logged in.
• Sites that are abandoned and broken or unusable.
• Revamped sites that have content no longer related with my site.
• Sites that are only forums (at least be kind enough to link back to me).
• Myspace sites or similar crap.

This time I didn’t mind if the site has been abandoned. As long as it is there and has some content with some sort of uniqueness, I can keep links to it, for historic purposes at least.

To my surprise many sites of some favorite artist of mine are gone.

As for the many Mega Man sites gone, well, considering the current state of the web, the old format of  mega man site that everybody seemed to copy years ago is no longer appealing. Even back then I couldn’t help to wonder what’s the point of this or that site? On the other side, I’ve been surprised to see many old sites still working and maintained with new content and activities. Kudos!

I even looked for sites that I knew they still were there but had old links pointing to them.

It only took me around ten years to sit down and do this clean up, so don’t expect me to do it again any time sooner.

If you think your site has been unfairly removed, just let me know. Probably I couldn’t find it.

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Yet another host

April 6th, 2008 IRA

I moved again.

Jeez, I’d with I can forget these hosting problems and focus to work on actual content.

Give me some time. I’ve made arrangements to get a bit of free time to return to my artwork and games, but I really need to settle these hosting problems first.

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About the recent downtime

March 9th, 2008 IRA

On March 4 my previous host executed a “temporary” block of my site because it was using too much CPU. It happens they wanted me to switch to a dedicated hosting plan, which was absurd considering my traffic.

So, after 3 days of ticket exchange hell, I decided to break up my relation with new and sign up with a new host. Yeah, I know, you may be wondering why it took me so long? Well, as usual I was busy with my work. And, hey, they said temporary block, like, we will enable you again, maybe? I was wrong, that was my mistake.

I hope this new host can handle better the sudden surges of traffic. I know they happen because of my flash games, but honestly, I have had them before, way larger, and my previous host never complained. I guess like all good host, they eventually oversell and the quality of the service vanishes.

Sorry for the inconvenience. I would like to have a better post but for the moment this is everything.

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