Simplifying common section content in Textpattern

Posted on November 04, 2008 in Web Design and Textpattern. - No comments

It’s pretty common to have common content that is specific to each section. Often this takes the form of different side-bar content. This is easy to accomplish in Textpattern by creating a form for each section and then including the following code in your page template:

<div id="side"
<txp:if_section name="articles">
	<txp:output_form name="side_articles" />
</txp:if_section>

<txp:if_section name="features">
	<txp:output_form name="side_articles" />
</txp:if_section>

<txp:if_section name="default">
	<txp:output_form name="side_default" />
</txp:if_section>
</div>

This is obviously rather long winded, and as you add more and more sections to your site, it becomes increasingly clumsy. Textpattern 4.0.7 promises us the ability to include tags within tags which would provide a solution along the lines of:

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Discovering Zenith

Posted on November 03, 2008 in Gaming. - No comments

Back in the 80’s my good friend James Good introduced me to a game that was to occupy far too many of my teenage evenings. One reason I spent so much time playing it was that the game ran pretty slowly on the Commodore 64 the other was that it was one of those games that manages to create a strong atmosphere that draws your in to it’s alternative reality. Of course, the fact that it had 10,000 levels to work through also helped!

Sentinel was originally written by Geoff Crammond of REVS and Grand Prix fame and was totally different from everything else around at the time. Sentinel was one of the first “virtual reality” style games.

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Blazer tricks and tips

Posted on March 27, 2008 in Palm and Software. - No comments

Palm’s Blazer is far from everything you’d hope a web browser would be and it looks extremely unlikely that the situation is going to get any better any time soon. There are, however, a number of tricks and tips that can improve your user-experience.

This article contains information about using Optimised mode, Fast mode, disabling javascript, using Google’s mobile search, compressing webpages using transcoder websites, general Blazer maintenance, offline content and what to do when Blazer freezes while trying to access a website.

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Webcam astrophotography

Posted on March 24, 2008 in Astrophotography. - No comments

I’d long admired the impressive images that had been captured by amateurs using an inexpensive equipment in every more creative ways. Having had my appetite wetted by some fantastic images on the net I decided to have a go myself.

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Interactive fiction

Posted on March 20, 2008 in Commodore 64 and Interactive Fiction. - No comments

Back in my youth I used to spend many hours play “adventure games”. There was something about the text-only descriptions that inspired my imagination and created an atmosphere that you just didn’t get from the rudimentary graphics of the time.

My first encounter with text adventures or Interactive Fiction as they are now known, was with a VIC20 title. My dad persuaded my brother and I to buy VIC20 cartridge called Pirate Cove by Scott Adams. The interface was very simple with just “verb noun” commands and incredibly terse descriptions. I didn’t go down very well with my brother, who preferred traditional joystick twiddling, but for me there was something rather magical about the idea of creating an alternate reality within a computer’s memory – even if that computer only had 5k of memory!

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