New dev blog
First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.
I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to a server, as opposed to Wordpress, which generates fresh HTML every time someone loads your page.
Advantages:
- Absolute control. You can customize the site theme without dealing with mountains of horrible PHP. And I can finally post HTML5 videos.
- You can host your website on Amazon S3, which is about 50 cents per month, 10x faster than a normal server, and pretty much guaranteed to never go down. Wordpress absolutely crawls in comparison.
- Perfect for coders, because you can write articles in raw HTML or Markdown in your favorite text editor, and you can track your site in a Git repository.
Disadvantages:
- No easy way to offer email subscriptions to readers. RSS is easy to set up though.
- Jekyll is written in Ruby and thus has a bunch of annoying dependencies to install. Still, the whole process is definitely easier than setting up a fresh Wordpress install.
Migrating the comments to Disqus was super easy. I use s3_website to deploy the site to S3. It only updates diff'd files, so it only takes a few seconds in most cases.
Overall I recommend it if you're a coder.
New app
I got hired this summer to do a mobile game as part of a franchise tie-in. The game is finally out today for free on Android.
Here's some (raw, uncut) gameplay footage:
grepr patch
grepr has garnered a modest but promising amount of attention. Most notably, iDubbbzTV had some great things to say about it. (warning: language)
I mostly agreed with his bigger complaints, so I made a few tweaks:
- The terminal menu is now more simple and straightforward to operate
- The enemy AWK drone is now larger and easier to spot
- The third level, where the enemy AWK first appears, is now greatly simplified
- Some glitchiness pertaining to the data node collision volume is now fixed
More importantly, the game now runs on Linux! It's 64-bit only at the moment, but everything seems to run just fine. If the game glitches on you, make sure you have libsdl2-2.0.0 installed.
New screens
Amidst all this craziness you might think I've abandoned Lemma. And you'd be wrong. Here are some fresh new screens:
I also fleshed out a whole ton of writing:
So yeah, lots of stuff happening. Stay tuned.
That's it for this week. Thanks for reading!
Mirrored on my blog
