matt hackmann - web developer - artist - nerd

It is the eve of the beginning of my PHP/MySQL class. Of course, we should all know by now that CMS programming is child's play for me. However, seeing as my final project for this class is a CMS with front end, I'm taking this opportunity to redesign stuff, and by stuff I mean everthing (even beyond the site itself). Some things to expect from the next iteration:

• Twitter integration on blog page
• A proper portfolio
• Accross the board branding
• Page navigation
• Probably more as I think of it

If my rebrand goes as well as I hope, I shouldn't be updating the design for some time. Geez, we haven't heard that before, have we?

Once again people have thought it fun to spam my blog. To this I say: Burn in hell, you dirty bastards! But, oh well. I've added some interesting features to the comment system that should keep them at bay... unless they actually write a bot to target my site specifically. But, in the meantime, the comments are back up and running. No crazy password, approval e-mail, or word verification necessary. That's how proud I am of my coding. That and the fact that I can't seem to programtically send e-mails on my server. It sucks. Hardcore.

Also, you'll notice that the RSS feed is back so subscribe and never miss out on my awesome news again. Peace out!

This is the name of the new site backend I've been working on. Now, for anybody who's been paying attention I haven't written a web engine since Tetra 2. The last time I worked on it was sometime back in '05 I believe. Back then I was extremely proud of my little creation but I look back on it and think to myself "that is one bloated piece of crap". It really was. Over 2500 lines of code. In comparison my new engine is only one or two hundred lines of code and almost as powerful (or it will be).

From a design standpoint Purple Fusion is way different from Tetra. Tetra was built around an object-oriented core. From an interface standpoint this was very clean. However, it did lend to some slowdown and made adding new modules cumbersome at best. It also limited what you could do with a module (to a degree). The new engine completely throws objects out the window (almost, the main class is PurpleFusion and that's the only one) and goes for a scriptable approach. Each page is it's own seperate page script that makes calls for getting data, displaying templates, etc. This makes creating new pages incredible quick and eliminates redundant code. Here's the script for the front page:

<code>

&lt;page title="Home"&gt;

&lt;template:page_head&gt;

&lt;db:entries limit="15" sort="entry_date" order="desc"&gt;

&lt;loop:entries&gt;

&lt;dblink:category_name table="categories" link="category_id"&gt;

&lt;field:entry_date type="date" format="m-d-Y"&gt;

&lt;field:entry_body type="standard"&gt;

&lt;process:data&gt;

&lt;template:entry&gt;

&lt;end:loop&gt;

&lt;template:page_foot&gt;

&lt;end:page&gt;

</code>

As you can see it borrows from SGML's tag structure. Because of the tag structure it's very human readable and makes for quick prototyping. I'm incredibly pleased with the way it's going right now and hopefully I'll have it running this site in a couple of weeks. Now that I think about it I could even speed things up by generating a cached version of the source code and just include that instead of parsing the page all the time. Yeah, this rocks.

And I isn't ejucaded either :-P. Not much new going on over here. I'm still doing the Clear Creek site (sparked an idea for an ASP.NET wiki :-D). Also, did a bunch of work for the Schindler's again. Made a profitable $50 off of it which I've promptly used to buy myself a 120GB hard drive. Oh, and I got a free $20 Amazon.com gift certificate for taking a [http://www.gametap.com]GameTap[/link] survey. I'll probably buy Episode III with that (totally free :-D).

Jeff bought Jedi Academy last week. Awesome, awesome game that one is. Never thought I could get into an FPS, but I did. It's $10 software so if you see it I recommend picking it up.

That seems to be all. I know, short entry for such a long reprieve. Until next time :-P

Well, after a hellish last week we are all moved into our new house (when I say "all moved in" that means we live here, that doesn't necessarily mean we're all unpacked :-P). It's wonderful. Our room is almost double the size of what we had and the backyard is superb (we've been out at least twice everyday since we moved last Wednesday). Of course, there's been a few problems but all have now been worked out.

Last night I e-mail Phil Vischer, creator of the popular kids show VeggieTales, inquiring about how he rigged the veggies. To my surprise, waiting in my inbox this afternoon was a personal reply:

Hey Matt,

When we produced the shows in Softimage, it was all lattice deformation. Each eye was in a lattice, and then the entire character was in a lattice. We just animated lattices. The mouths were simple texture maps created by a separate animation and applied in rendering, and then reapplied slightly blurred as a bump map. Very simple stuff. (All developed in 1991 when I built Larry for the first time.)

Virtually nothing changed until we moved to Maya in 2000. By then I was no longer animating, so I'm not sure what they changed. Now everything is done in Canada, and I'm clueless.

Hope that helps.

Phil

Talk about cool :-D. With that knowledge I can now finish my models for MeatStories (R) ;-).

Also this afternoon I became the webmaster for a bunch of monks. Tomorrow I'm going to call their "outside guy" to get a list of everything I need to do. I poked around their server a bit and it looks like I'm going to have to do some ASP[.NET] work (which I'd actually been tinkering with shortly before we moved), so that'll be fun (and bring back some memories).

Well, that's enough for tonight. Now that my computer is setup again (with internet) I'll be making my usual every other day entry.