For ease of communication, I’ve now created a contact form (accessible from the homepage). Send me your comments, suggestions, and bug reports for anything I’ve created. I’ll try to respond to every email, so long as you provide a valid email address.

And in other news, I’ve created a new project, this time commercial. It’s a PHP image caching script. Simply supply a URL inside of a custom-formed <img> tag to have the file automatically managed by the script. If the file doesn’t exist yet on your server, it downloads it before displaying the image.

SEO time! So the blog had already gone under a facelift quite a long time ago to force pretty URLs, and now the main site has them too. Instead of index.php?page=software it’ll be /page/software. On top of looking better, supposedly this is good for SEO…

In other news, matt-soft will be expiring shortly so I’m redirecting all traffic to matt-shaffer.com. Over the next day or so I’ll try to shove everything from matt-soft onto this site.

A lot has been slowly changing in the background… I’ve decided to scrap matt-soft.com and move all content onto this site (as mentioned earlier), and I’ve begun the process. All of those shiny buttons now have links, all though many have no content. It’ll probably be another week or two before I get all of the content shoved up on the website,  so whatever. Once I get done offloading all content and uploading it to this site, I’ll do a permanent redirection to matt-shaffer.com until the end of the domain’s life, and then I will let it expire.

I’ve also created a new program, Isteg, which lets you embed files into other files, namely zip files into images. Your images will open just fine when double clicked or linked to on a webpage, but if you open it with a compatible zip program, you’ll see whatever secret contents you’ve hidden there.

I’ve also entered into the competition over at pascalgamedevelopment.com; the PGD annual. So probably most of the next posts on my blog will be about my work in progress, Sun Defender. I hope the random few viewers I get don’t mind .

I’m quite surprised actually. I’ve been receiving an enormous amount of phpbb spam, like everyone else over the past oh, few months or so.  Mostly, it was registrations with no posts and occasionally a profile link.

I came on my forum today to find a spam post – possibly posted by a human, but I’m sure the registrations are bots. Anyway, the post was filled with ~50 links to profiles on other phpbb forums. On my forum, I require registration before people can see others profiles, so the bot seems to know if that feature is on or off. Then in those profiles, are links to some very weird sites…

The basic timeline was:

Mass registration -> Occasional profile link adding -> Posting a massive list of profiles with links = $$$ for the bot owner.

Came close to completing my own phpbb3 captcha for the registration page, but it’s annoyingly complex..

I didn’t? How sad. When I first decided to delve into the world that is forum software, I had my mind set on just two options: phpBB or SMF. Well, in my opinion phpbb looked sleeker at the time so that was the sole reason I downloaded and installed it on one of my sites. What a mess.

Originally, I started off liking it. It is quite polished on the outside. It’s got everything a forum should have + easy management.

Onto the mess: The source code. Could it get any uglier? It’s like digging through 8 tons of garbage to find a lost diamond ring. When I wanted to change it’s captcha, I had one heck of a time wading through that mess. I also created my own template, and that took weeks.

On the other hand, I was starting out a new site and I wanted to try out SMF just so I could say that I had given it a chance. I was awestruck.

Firstly, SSI.php was essential to the site. I thought I would have to code my own bridge between forum + my own code (and I would have, if I had used phpBB).

Next was the smooth upgrade process. I give it some ftp details, it updates itself. Done. With phpbb, I had to manually update numerous times, or upload its auto updater (still slower than SMF) and that often failed at updating the darn thing.

Update 5/21: SMF released a security patch upgrading the forum from 1.1.8 to 1.1.9. I was able to upgrade the forum in less than 30 seconds, including whatever download it did.

Now for creating a theme, it was glorious. The CSS was commented. Loads. I actually knew what stuff did, and there was no pointless random CSS like phpbb has. I was able to create a theme using the default one as the starting point in a matter of hours, vs. a matter of weeks with phpbb.

SMF’s source code is also a lot more organized. While it can still be just as bad as phpbb in some areas, it generally strays away from numerous absurdly large files. SMF’s coding style just makes sense to me. I can follow the code and understand what’s going on, where even with my PHP knowledge I struggle to figure out what the heck phpbb is doing. SMF also has a lot more comments (granted, newbies should stay away), and tells you at the beginning of the file a summary of what it does.

Only thing I find irritating is SMF’s user/mod management system. It just seems so quirky to me.. but it still does the job.

So for too long this site (matt-shaffer.com) has just been my blog. I don’t post a whole lot on here, and it’s probably not interesting to the majority of people, so I’m going to expand the horizons.

Basically, I had planned on keeping a site “matt-soft.com” dedicated to my creations. Turns out, I don’t want it anymore. I’ll be merging that site and all future creations into this one, because it also makes it perfectly clear who made the stuff (me!). Think of it as an obvious e-resume.

So, what else? The homepage is the central hub of organization. Eventually, I’ll add a footer (just for fun) and a navigation bar for easier navigation.

I also plan on creating my own wordpress theme for this blog (a nice bleak light gray, to go along with the main site), and a theme for the future oscommerce shop I’ll be setting up. What will be in the shop? Digital goods. Commercially licensed pictures & wallpaper, and games most likely. Quit your worrying. I need to get some quality free stuff out there first before I start charging, because really who would buy anything of mine without some sort of idea of how good it can be? .

Currently, I’ve uploaded what I’ve done so far – shiny buttons. They don’t lead anywhere yet, but they will.

We’ve all seen it (haven’t we?). Go check out wikipedia first if you don’t know what I’m talking about.

The internet. Yet another way for short or bullied kids to get on and attempt to gain power. Emotionally, physically, it doesn’t really  matter. Maybe they’re ignored by everyone else and strive for attention. Maybe their parents divorced, died, or ignore them. Whatever the cause, they are here, today, on the internet.

Their mission: Power and attention mostly. Often mini-modding or backseat-modding forums and messageboards, they want a sense of control. I find that these people will also often beg for moderator positions as well, and I dare not allow anyone like that to get the power on my own sites.

I personally believe that if you ignore these types of people for a long enough amount of time (which you should), they will turn into “griefers”. These are the types of people that go around games and websites puposely attempting to anger others and disrupt order. It’s all about them, after all. They strive for attention and power so much that they resort to such low methods of getting that attention, and in the end, just get banned from the website or game. Another common method is to steal others’ works. Many people are amazed at what that pathetic excuse of a human is capable of doing until someone else comes along and points out that it is not, in fact, their work.

Why the internet? It’s the easiest place to go. I don’t know any exact statistics (and would love one, if any readers happen to find one), for the number of kids who are growing up with 1 or more computers in their house and with some type of internet, DSL seems to be quite popular. Because they already have the tools they  need – internet, a computer with a keyboard, off they go searching for a place they first want to call home. How do they determine which site(s) they want to infest? I don’t know. How do we choose which sites to frequent?

They’re out there. Sensitive, and probably alone in the world. Ignore or comfort, your choice. I’ve never had any success with trying to confront, comfort, or befriend them. They’re unbearable and will spam IMs, e-mails, and PMs on forums/message boards when they finally begin the change to the aforementioned “griefer”. Then you will most likely be forced to leave them. Too unbearable, even for you! They’ll probably get worse, I suppose you and I may  never know. What I think they really need is a good school counselor and a loving home.

In this little tutorial I’ll take you step by step through creating a sticky note.

Finished product:

Let’s begin.

First of all, create a new image (Preferably a little larger than the size of your sticky note, just so you have a little working room). I’m creating mine at 128×128.

Then, if you don’t have the layers and paths window open, you will need to. Go to Windows->Layers,Channels,Paths… A new window will pop up.

Now select the paths tool. Here’s the icon:

What we must do next is to create points so we can make a nice, smooth, outline for the stickynote. Dealing with the paths tool can be pretty confusing, especially if you don’t know what you’re doing. Considering many of you readers may be new to GIMP, or just the paths tool, I will go into a bit of detail on how to handle it.

Placing points
Click in one of the corners of your image with the paths tool created. A circle will appear. Click the mouse again somewhere else, and other circle will appear and so on and so forth.

Deleting points
Made a mistake? Well, click the point and press the backspace button to delete it. Oddly enough, the delete key doesn’t work.

Moving points
Of course you’re going to mess up or at least want to tweak the position of the points you place. To move a point, first select the paths tool then move the mouse to a middle of a point (the circle). Then click and drag it. You’ll know it’s ready to move the point when you see the standard arrowed cross in the top right corner of your mouse. ** Don’t forget: If you move points before finishing the design, you may want to change which point is selected. After all, when you left click again it creates a point stemming from the currently selected point.

Curving
This is pretty hard to do unless you create a new point for the sole purpose of being curved. To create a point with an associated curve, click and drag the mouse instead of just clicking. It takes a bit of moving to get the desired curve. Look at the diagram below. The box labeled 1 is what controls the curve. Move that box or the point to alter the curve.

The box labeled 2 will not affect the curve.

Finishing (Connecting beginning and ending points)
Make sure you have the last point selected (the one you want to connect to the other end). Then hover your mouse over the other end point, hold control, and click. Tada!

Now we need to turn that into a selection, because we can’t do much with it as a path. In the Layers, Channels, and Paths window which we may or may not have opened at the beginning of this post, click on the 3rd tab.

Then click on the path that you want to make a selection (Unnamed, usually. May be Unnamed#1, etc, if you had trouble with the thing). Then right click it, and click “Path to selection”.

Alright now if you’ve used any image editing software before, you know how to deal with selections.  Now you can put a gradient/solid color etc inside the selection. I decided to go with a 2 color gradient. The colors are:  ffde6d and ffe58c.

With the selection still active, click the first tab in the Layers,Chan,Paths window to go back to the layers. Then create a new layer. This step is optional, to add some shading. Icon:

Now, change the foreground color to something a bit darker, like efc944. Next, scroll down on your tools window at the bottom to reveal more options. Change the pressure to something low, I used 4.0. Next select a the size 9 fuzzy brush.  Then, with the new layer selected, shade around the edges or wherever you feel like shading. If it’s too dark, simply change the opacity of the layer. Mine came out dark so I changed the opacity to 45 and it looked nice.

Yay! We’re done! Viner hand size 12 font is a good font to use.

First off, to avoid confusion I’m talking about the candy malted milk balls. Not burgers. So anyway, if you’ve had probably 2-3 boxes of whoppers in your life, you’ll realize that some of the whoppers in a box (3 or less usually), are bad/disgusting/icky. SOoooo I had 2 bad whoppers in this last box I had, and after the first one I set off on a way to avoid eating the bad ones. Now really, it’s quite easy to tell which whoppers you shouldn’t eat!

Here’s a picture of a bad whopper:

Not pleasant! So, what are the signs?

1. A not-so-round shape. Loppy, bulgy, whatever.
2. It looks like a squirrel attacked it. It’s got little scratch-like marks all over it
3. Cut it in half and what do you see? Looks like the inside of some alien egg.

So as a small number of you will notice, I wiped out the old site. The main reason being that I have just begun moving most random software related content to a fresh, new site about my software: matt-soft.com. The site is just being fleshed out, so most of the content from this site won’t be on there for a few days. This means that a lot of google visitors (who mostly want GameMaker examples) will just have to wait a bit. Considering that a good majority will get 404s, I’m going to bustle about and get up a 404 page by tomorrow which links to matt-soft.com.

So. What exactly will be in this blog? I have no idea yet. Maybe it’ll have some code snippets/examples, bits about my life, and random things I find interesting. We’ll find out.