A few people have expressed interest in how Wavatars are made. Here is the long boring explanation for those overly curious souls. Again, if you want the WordPress plugin, go for it. If you want to adapt it for non-Wordpress use, help yourself.
All of the following is done in PHP: Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Wavatars Process”
A while back I saw the bad buzz surrounding the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and decided to give it a pass. High system requirements, crashes, rampant bugs, sluggish performance and that sort of griping led me to stay clear of the thing until it hit the bargain bin.
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I guess it just did. I don’t know that I’ve seen a game go that low from the lofty heights of A-List pricetag. Usually they bottom out at $9.99, and in rare cases, $4.99. But less than four dollars? That’s yard sale prices, right there. I know in some places the game is still retailing for about $30. I don’t know if the $3.74 was a mistake perpetrated by my local Target, or if they really wanted rid of the thing, but it’s just too cheap to pass up at this price.
I know a lot of the problems with the game have been ironed out in a series of patches, so it will be interesting to see how it all turned out in the end.
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Wavatars is a plugin that will generate and assign icons to the visitors leaving comments at your site. The icons are based on email, so a given visitor will get the same icon each time they comment. It livens up comment threads and gives people memorable “faces” to aid in following conversation threads. It’s also fun.
T w e n t y S i d e d
/plugins folder. Then enable the plugin. That’s it. Wavatars will instantly appear for all posts (even old ones) on your blog. If you don’t like how the image looks within your theme, read on…
The administration panel is under Options » Wavatars. You can adjust the size of the Wavatars, and assign HTML to come before and after each image to help nudge it into place. Each image is also set with the CSS “wavatars” class. On this site, I don’t have any HTML prefix or suffix, and instead just added these lines to my CSS:
.wavatar {
float: left;
padding: 3px;
background: #fff;
margin-top: -25px;
margin-left: -25px;
margin-right: 5px;
}
If that still doesn’t give you enough control over wavatar placement and you don’t mind editing your theme, just turn off automatic placement and add the line wavatar_show($comment_author_email); to your comment loop wherever you want the image to appear.
Your mileagle may vary. It all depends on your installed theme.
Note that the plugin requires that your install of PHP support the GD library. If it doesn’t, the Wavatars won’t show up and you’ll get a warning in the Wavatar admin panel. You can still use this plugin to display Gravatars, even if the GD library isn’t available.
This is the first release. You could even go so far as to call it “beta” if you want to be formal about it. It’s only been tested on one server (this one) so far. Please leave bug reports and questions in the comments below.
After I showed off my new Wavatars WordPress plugin on Saturday, a lot of people posted just to see what their wavatar looked like. I feel bad, but I’m afraid that initial system had to go and as a result, everyone’s Wavatar has been changed. This was for a good cause. I’ve moved away from PHP generated random numbers to random values derived directly from the hash of the email. To translate out of programmer babble: The plugin will now generate the same wavatar for you no matter where the plugin is running. Different websites running the same plugin will give you the same, predictable results.
I also added a bunch of new parts for greater variety, so the plugin can now generate 956,384 different shapes in 57,600 different color combinations for a total of 55,087,718,400 unique Wavatars. That should be enough combinations for now.
I’ll be releasing the plugin later this week. If you have a WordPress blog then you’ll be able to have wavatars on your own site. I’ve ironed out the installation problems, so that you should be able to simply upload the thing and turn it on. (In theory.)
Also, I can’t take credit for the idea, which I first saw at implemented as MonsterID. (Hat Tip: MetaBLOG.)
I’m doing a large update to the site right now. If something breaks, that’s why.
8:45am Step 1: I’m deleting a bunch of old plugins, removing orphaned files, removing a bunch of themes I’m not using, and a bunch of other fussy stuff.
9:00am Step 2: Some changes to the theme. The monthly list of archives is replaced with a much-shorter yearly list. The category icons are a little nicer. Some other minor tweaks to spacing & placement. Gravatars are gone for the moment, but I’ll put them back later.
9:15am Step 3: Wow. I managed to get this far without breaking anything. Check out the sidebar on the right, and you should see the new theme switcher, wich will allow you to change between white and black layouts.
9:45am Step 4: What a pain. I made a plugin to generate little smiley face avatars (for people who dont have Gravatars) and it worked great locally, but failed in a dozen different ways once I made it live here on the server. Between different versions of PHP and file write permission problems, I had to make all sorts of goofy changes. Boo.
10:00am Step 5: Okay, the fallback icons (I’m calling them “wavatars”) are working again. So, if you have a Gravatar it should use it. If you DON’T, you should get a unique avatar generated by your email adress.
10:30am All Done: The “wavatars” was going to be a plugin for public release. I thought it was ready for distrubution, but the problems I encountered just installing it on my own server indicate that I need to add some version checking. I REALLY wanted it to be seamless and useable for non-technical users, but I see there is no way to avoid it: The user has to be at least savvy enough to set directory permissions to 777 for the thing to work. PHP can create the directory, but not set it to 777. Dang.
I still do plan on releasing wavatars, although I need to test it a bit better to make sure it can fail gracefully instead of puking PHP errors all over the comments when something goes wrong.
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They should have titled this “The Cutscene Chapter”. Deprived of the ability to communicate, there isn’t much for Gordon to do in this part of the game except push the button and listen to people talk. The rocket launch goes off flawlessly, the portal energy is negated, and Earth is saved. Yay for the good guys!
And yet, this is the darkest chapter in the entire story thus far. Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Half-Life 2 Episode 2: T Minus One”
Here is a post I wrote about my previous mobile phone, two years ago. It turned out to be more phone than I needed. I don’t commute, and I spend most of the day in front of a decent computer with broadband, so I have no use for all the web / messaging features it had. About the only feature that might have been useful to me (aside from, you know, making phone calls) was the camera. I tried it once, discovered that it sucked, and never bothered with it again.
There were many little features on the phone that I never used. I investigated them once, and found that almost everything web-related was broken, cost money to use, or both. This didn’t bother me, since all I wanted was a phone, but it did make me wonder why they bother.
Yesterday I got a new phone:
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It’s nice, although I’m not an expert on the things and I’m probably not the best person to ask. This is the phone Sprint was giving away for free, which means it’s probably crap. It’s a… “Fusic”. No, I’m not making that up. Somebody really named a phone Fusic. It sounds like a blend of “F*** you” & “music”, which is actually pretty appropriate given the marketing focus they have. The big feature they’re trying to draw attention to is the built-in music store, where you can buy DRM-saddled music which only plays on the phone. For $2.50. Their offer is so outrageous and inept it actually made me giggle when I saw it. It’s like seeing a guy in the street selling betamax tapes of terrible movies for $100. You wonder, does he know what a complete tool he’s being?
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The size of the phone – my big complaint with my previous phone two years ago – is much better. It’s more width and less depth, which means it fits in my hand when I hold it, fits on my face when I use it, and doesn’t leave a big lump when I put it in my pocket. Progress!
It has a thousand features I’ll never use, most of which I have turned off to save money. I can’t comprehend their pricing system, which would give even the most eager rules lawyer the heebie-jeebies. From what I can tell most features take a flat monthly fee to enable, and then they nickel-and-dime you when to make use of them. Again, I laugh at a company that will send me a new phone via overnight express shipping for free, and then try to haggle a nickel out of me over a text message. It’s amazing that after all this technological progress what the phone companies really want is to bring back the concept of the pay phone: Their vision is to give everyone their very own pay phone where the phone company can hit them up for loose change while the thing is in use. No matter how many gadgets they pack into the phone, aparently the part they miss the most is the one where the user inserts their coins.
Here is how I'd conquer the game-publishing business. (Hint: NOT by copying EA, 2K, Activision, Take-Two, or Ubisoft.)
Grand Theft Auto is a lousy, cheating jerk of a game.
A programming project where I set out to make a gigantic and complex world from simple data.
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
The product of fandom run unchecked, this novel began as a short story and grew into something of a cult hit.
Let's ruin everyone's fun by listing all the ways in which zombies can't work, couldn't happen, and don't make sense.
What makes the gameplay of Borderlands so addictive for some, and what does that have to do with slot machines?
A long-form analysis on one of the greatest horror games ever made.
Deus Ex Mankind Divided was a clumsy, tone-deaf allegory that thought it was clever, and it managed to annoy people of all political stripes.
No, game prices don't "need" to go up. That's not how supply and demand works. Instead, the publishers need to be smarter about where they spend their money.