Year: 2009

HTML is Your Markup Language Anyways
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I hate Wiki markup. I hate BBCode. I hate markdown. I hate the million other custom markup languages that have infested the web.

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Inbox Zero
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A few minutes ago, for the first time in around a decade, I emptied my email inbox. I’ve been steadily whittling it down (or at least holding the line) for the last few months: catching up on mailing lists, responding to outstanding emails, admitting there’s some things that are so old I’m not going to respond to them, and moving work items onto a proper to-do list. So I have an impressively boring screenshot:

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Survey of Conference Attendees
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If you have attended a conference this year where people have used Twitter, IRC, or similar tools to carry on conversations during the live event (a “backchannel”), I’d appreciate it if you would take this brief (5-15 minute) survey:

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Serenity Green
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Here’s a common question: Why doesn’t Joss Whedon’s Firefly have any Chinese people?

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Redirecting Users’ URLs
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I got an email in response to an old post on how I designed NearbyGamer‘s discussion URLs. It asked how to create readable URLs for a community site where users might edit those URLs. What happens after users have made lots and lots of edits?

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JavaScript: The Good Parts
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In JavaScript, there is a beautiful, elegant, highly expressive language that is buried under a steaming pile of good intentions and blunders. The best nature of JavaScript is so effectively hidden that for many years the prevailing opinion of JS was that it was an unsightly, incompetent toy.
p2

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Investigating Theme Spam
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If you’re interested in what spammers are up to these days, check out Snarky’s blog post Evil Eval() investigating the obfuscated spam code hidden in the new WordPress theme he downloaded.

I’d be really interested to see how many of the themes on various WordPress sites include function calls like eval, call_user_func, base64_decode, unpack, ord, chr, etc. as an indicator of hidden spam.

Athenge Ops Playtested
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Over the weekend Snarky dropped by for some ribs and playtesting. I think of early playtesting as scientific experimentation and had a specific question I wanted the session to answer: is the design of the core gameplay, op combat, any fun?

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Developer Day Notes
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I’m attending Developer Day DC and taking notes. They’re fairly rough and sort of only cover the things that catch my attention, but here they are in the hopes that other people find them useful:

more TK as the day progresses

I’m not taking notes at Happy Hour, so that’s all. A very friendly little one-day conference, lots of fun. Thanks to Viget for planning and hosting!

Client Logging to AWS
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Over on the BBGameZone forums helderic asked how to deal with exploits:

Lets say player A finds a exploit to duplicate a item and decides to exploit it. He continues to exploit it for a few weeks then player B finds the bug and reports it.
How would you catch player A? And what are some systems to watch/catch exploits/bugs/cheaters.

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