Not total darkness, mind you, but dark enough to notice. When you walk outside, it’s almost like it’s really late and the stores are closed, but they’re not, the lights (if any) are just dim. I finished dinner with some old colleagues when Earth Hour struck, and I decided to spend some quality time with my cat out in the lobby, thereby keeping my own place “off”. Hanachi-e surprised me by continuously trying to get back in the elevator (to go back home?), normally she’d just explore. I guess it’s not her exploring mood.
The past week, I decided to try and find out what the deal was with this Twitter thing. On the way, I managed to check out Plurk and Ping.fm. The concept of micro-blogging has never appealed to me before, which is actually rather odd given that I tend wish I could record my little bursts of thought somewhere. I haven’t explored Plurk’s features all that well yet, though I like the fact that you can add a link to your plurk, and the obvious timeline feature they have is a nice touch. It is rather annoying, though that cross-posting from plurk always has your profile URL at the end… and I can’t seem to disable this.
While checking what these micro-blogs had to offer, I wondered if I could integrate my blog tho those services and to Facebook as well. Given the support for WordPress, there were quite a bit of pre-made plugins that allowed me to do this, but none worked exactly the way I wanted it to with the Facebook related integration. It took me a while to get an ad-hoc solution working, but I wasn’t all that satisfied. So I started fiddling with the plugins to try and get them to work the way I wanted them to.
Things started to work the way I wanted, but the hacks weren’t satisfying me the way I thought they would. It did the job, but I had the nagging feeling that I should just make something from scratch. So I did.
For most of this Saturday morning, I made a WordPress plugin that would automatically update my Facebook status whenever I publish or edit a new post from the blog. Several firsts for me:
- used PHP for the 1st time
- made a WordPress plugin for the 1st time
- used the Facebook APIs for the 1st time
I had to create a test environment to prevent possible spamming and to speed things-up a tad, but after a few hours, I got the results I wanted. I made the plugin, I made a Facebook app, and, though the internals are still crude, I managed to get things to work the way I really wanted it to. Maybe you’re reading this via that?
The code deserved quite a bit of cleanup, but for now, I’m quite pleased.
Some other things regarding the rest of the day:
- I’m almost done reading The Final Empire (Mistborn, Book 1)
, and I can’t find the sequel
! Do I have to order it from overseas just to finish the trilogy?
- Privateer Press announced a date for their field test of the Warmachine rules update. The test documents will be available for download on April 6 at the field test site (which currently doesn’t seem to exist). I’m really interested on how they intend to change the rules to make warjacks relevant again (assuming that’s one of the things they plan on fixing).
- For this weekend’s Steam deal, they’re offering the Ubisoft Classic Pack, which includes Farcry, Dark Messiah, IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946, and Beyond Good and Evil, for only US$9.99!. Sweet deal, specially since I’ve heard quite a lot of good things about Beyond Good and Evil. Although the gog.com BG&E is DRM free, the current weekend sale is really good value. Unfortunately, Dark Messiah isn’t in the list of games when I checked the Steam site. Region blocked? I think it happened in the X-COM sale as well. And given that I’m having trouble getting the Flock demo on Steam to work, I’m exercising some constraint in getting more Steam games for now. If you like all of ‘em, however, getting all 3/4 games for US$10 really is a sweet deal.
Now, I wonder if I’ll be able to play SF4 tomorrow.
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