It's been a little while for blogging here, I've been keeping busy. GTA IV is just 11 days away and the updates have been occurring every day.
Inbetween that, work has been happening daily on AdaptCMS, from bug fixes to minor enhancements. As said on Insane Visions, v1.2 of AdaptCMS is like a "mini-major version". Numerous security enhancements, new features, heavily improved features and a LOT of minor improvements.
The beta for AdaptCMS Lite v1.2 should hopefully go up by this weekend. Of course AdaptCMS as a whole is basically the same, but there are several things that are greatly enhanced.
Another thing I've been working on has been the Packs; basically it's a bunch of content pre-loaded. I've been working on the PS3 pack (or the "next-gen" pack, unsure yet) so far and have it nearly done, I underestimated the amount of work. For the PS3, 138 games (from launch to GTA IV) with full info (publisher, developer, esrb rating, description, genre, release date and boxart), takes a lot of time!
Well that's about it for now, the next week is going to be very busy for me. If I can get the Beta out, then I'll have for other stuff, including the much-anticipated GTA IV. :D
The "Monthly Recap" is a monthly post that looks at my projects and
websites to see how they are doing. Statistics is a major part, however
other things such as new users, # of articles and other things are also
factors. Below is how March 2008 went:
A good month for IV. Stats according to google went down just slightly, in Awstats everything went up, who knows! Stats were up to a record high last month, so I'm happy.
A total of 7 articles were posted (1 tutorial, 3 blogs) and a nice 12 new member signups. Up
After putting it off, I finally got to work on GTA IV Universe and got quite a bit of stuff up and got some big traffic thanks to the likes of reddit and stumbleupon.
Stats were only up 4,500% :p. I think it could even be better in April, with the release of the game. WAY Up
I've had TIVO now for a while and love it, but especially during recent times, the selection of TV Shows has been pretty bad. A few shows have come back from the strike that I like, but it's been very few.
Las Vegas? Canned. 24? No idea when it's returning. NCIS/The Unit/Cane? Have no idea. You get the picture.
So I figured I should checkout shows that were around when I was younger. I'm a big Sci-Fi fan and when I have nothing to do on late Saturday nights, I will sometimes checkout Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis, they're pretty good shows. It is one of those shows where there are enemies, people, friends, events that you don't "have" to know, but certain episodes could have you confused.
So I got Season 1 and on, I've been watching every now and then since! It's a great watch by the way, if you are a Sci-Fi fan. I think of it as almost a more realistic, current-day version of Star Trek. I'm now on season 4. :)
I'm going to quote an article I wrote over @ Bengals Chatter about Chad Johnson. Check it out:
Last year a lot of people thought Chad Johnson was a big reason for the
Bengals losing season, he wasn't. There was an incident with the
Bengals playoff game in 2005, but I do believe Chad that he didn't
throw a punch. However Chad Johnson's basically has been asking for a
trade (without saying it) all off-season and I am tired of it.
It's been a crazy few days. After AdaptCMS Pro was released, Thursday and Friday were generally "bad" days, especially Thursday. Problems paying a bill and then my cat had to be taken to the vet (which I got to walk a mile while raining, taking him, fun :p). I haven't gotten the test results yet, but I am expecting him to be okay.
The Web
That said, I haven't done much web-wise. I did do an article about Creating your first website, I plan on doing more articles like that in the future. Other than that, I've already started just brainstorming for AdaptCMS Pro/Lite v1.2, definitely have some unique ideas already.
New PHP Project
I wish I could make a big announcement and reveal a new Project from Insane Visions, but I can't, yet. Frankly, I don't know what to do. AdaptCMS is really the CMS I have always wanted to make, blog software doesn't interest me either. There is a mostly-finished AdaptBB forum software and my idea of a Social-CMS, File Management script, shopping cart, so many ideas.
At this point I'm just thinking and gathering feedback, but at this point I have no idea. Hopefully soon. :)
Having the first blizzard in 12 years is such a weird thing. Since 1977 there has only been three blizzards in Cincinnati and the third one happened on Friday/Saturday. 12-14 inches by me and at the height of the storm, gusts of wind up to 40 MPH. It got so bad that my county had a Level 3 Snow Emergency, meaning any non-emergency vehicle was not allowed on roads and could be arrested. The worse part for most was the fact that practically no business were open Friday night-Saturday.
During this "down-time" I got to finish up on AdaptCMS Lite v1.1 and release it, you can get it here. Pro v1.1 has been released too. I'll talk more in a post real soon.
The "Monthly Recap" is a monthly post that looks at my projects and websites to see how they are doing. Statistics is a major part, however other things such as new users, # of articles and other things are also factors. Below is how February 2008 went:
Another great month for IV. Stats are the highest since the site became the main domain in the hosting account. (over 1 1/2 years ago) Last month stats were up by a lot already, analytics said 20% and were even up 8% if you compare Feb 1-29 to Jan 1-31st. The continuing success of AdaptCMS helped along with a lot of traffic to the tutorials. 5 articles were posted (1 tutorial, 1 blog) along with 8 new users. WAY Up
January was the best ever for AdaptCMS.com and February was much better. Awstats said uniques tripled January, analytics saying a 200% increase. There were several new articles posted and if listed at opensourcecms.com and v1.1 releases, March could stack up and possibly do even better. WAY up
Using PHP for now several years, every so often you are walking along the PHP trail when you smack into a steel wall. Not that I expected the Zip feature in PHP to be "really easy", but it couldn't be that difficult, right? Well aside from some small hiccups for a while, it wasn't tough.
Let me step aside first and explain. I was working on AdaptCMS, for v1.1 I was upgrading the gallery feature. A sort by feature, a few extra templates to control the look and then the zip feature. A person clicks on download and it generates a zip you download with all the images in the gallery, in it.
So getting back to it, I was using the built-in PHP ZIP function. So I got it working and built into the admin panel, before I take a break from coding I figured I would upload and take a gander. Right away I get an error, long story short the built in ZIP function is either only for PHP 5.2 and up, or a lot of parts of the ZIP function only work in 5.2 up. (built-in)
For anyone that follows the news decently, you know all about Russia and our relations with them going cold-war low. I wish it could be an exaggeration, but in several years Russia has gone from "kind of" a democracy to a country that is looking, scarily, so much like the Soviet Union.
I am glad the US media has done a decent job of reporting on Russia and being pretty fair about the country. I know I was absolutely shocked to learn that Russian media is now state-controlled, that's no joke. I visit numerous politics/current events forums and one, I was amazed to see that the Russian posters practically brush aside the fact there media is state-controlled, numerous ones have the belief that Russia tried "Democracy" and it failed, so it's worth moving on and that the US is an empire threatening Russia.
It really opens your eyes and the events that have transpired these past several years only look very, very bad. The main contention, has been and will be for a long time, is the US Missile Defense shield. The idea of the shield is pretty weak and I think would of totally been better to be a project somehow under wraps, that way if another country (like Russia) initiates development we already have the know-how and don't have to worry about being the one that is the instigator.
After a very surprising Kansas and Louisiana win, it looked like Huckabee had some momentum. After Super Tuesday, McCain is essentially "the" guy for the Republican party, if they want to keep the White House.
As a McCain supported I was worried. Not that Huckabee could come back, but that McCain could be somewhat embarrassed if Huckabee gets close losses and strong wins. Not that it has changed completely, but McCain today had a strong win.
McCain won DC (5,000 votes compared to over 150,000 in the democratic race?!), Virginia and Maryland. DC and Maryland were crushing wins, Virginia looked close for a while but turned out to be a 9-point win.
It wasn't anything compared to the sheer momentum and dominating performance Obama has had the past few weeks, but I think it kept McCain looking good as the republican nominee. Now the questions if Huckabee will "really" stay in the race if McCain does strongly on March 4th, Ohio and Texas are huge ones.
