[ Home | Articles | Account | People | Projects | FAQ ] Name: Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton
Member since: 2005-01-11 23:48:31
Last Login: 2008-07-20 12:36:50
Homepage: http://lkcl.net
Notes: Hmm... my account information and Certs appear to have been truncated. waah!
Complete list of articles by lkcl
16 Jul 2008 (updated 16 Jul 2008 at 17:01 UTC) »
the simple criteria: PUT SOMETHING IN YOUR ACCOUNT! tell us something about you! don't just create an account which links to a web site, because ... well.... that's what spammers do!
8 Jul 2008 (updated 8 Jul 2008 at 16:09 UTC) »
video chat sites are boring. they're intimidating. i remember using one several years ago: it took me three weeks to get used to it.
what helped enormously was having a focus - something else to do. in the case of the video chat site i encountered, there was a "trivia chat bot" running. psychologically, the fact that the user can focus on "doing something" distracts them from feeling uncomfortable and at a loss.
consequently, i figured that in order to make my site successful, i would need some sort of gaming entertainment. so... i started today :)
not content with just doing a live video streaming site, i have to make a gaming environment as well.
fortunately, pyjs - pyjamas - makes this quite easy to do. all of the "game pieces" are Images which are done as Popups, because the PopupPanel class handles "absolute" referencing already... hmmm, might have to do something about that - but now now: i think i'd need to upgrade some of the pyjamas infrastructure from its original GWT 1.2 pedigree to GWT 1.5...
... but i'm happy with what i have, right now.
and right now, i have "board pieces" scattered across the screen - 108 of them - and the positions of the pieces, as they move, are recorded in the database on the server! yippeee :) now all i have to do is set up "notifications" to other users.
i have to say... this is just... i haven't actually _enjoyed_ programming for such a long time: doing this site is a real treat.
one final thing: the combination of video and audio _and_ gaming is important. why? because the users can communicate verbally and visually _without_ having to take their attention off the board.
7 Jul 2008 (updated 7 Jul 2008 at 14:26 UTC) »
complications, complications. adding facebook - although fun to do and likely to be necessary to the success of the site - was not necessarily a smart move right now!
making a facebook application is surprisingly straightforward. there's pyfacebook, with the example code being good enough to just work. fortunately, it uses django: i'd been playing with django so only needed 8 hours to "get started".
the complication is this: what, exactly, do i do with all the facebook users?? that might not be clear until you appreciate that the developer TOS requires that you NOT store any information on a user (except for optimisation purposes, and only then for 24 hours) except for their uid, primary network id and a few other pieces.
name? nope. sex? nope. list of friends? nope.
so... ermmm... we have all these "site" users, and we have all these "facebook" users... now.. whom do you allow to talk to whom?
and ... do you allow facebook users to obtain information about site-registered users, and vice-versa?
do you allow facebook users to send messages? what about messages in the chatrooms, do you allow the facebook users to see the IRC messages from site-registered users?
answers: no, no, no, no, no and.... no :)
like i said, it's suddenly got a bit hairy.
i was planning to add in "ignore" lists, and now i've had to put in the hooks to do that a bit earlier than intended.
bugzilla
i managed to get bugtracker installed: searches show that if you use perl 5.10 then you're screwed: you have to edit the setup scripts. bugtracker "testing" version hasn't filtered down yet... had to do it manually.
bugtrackers. amazingly useful. they keep you on track - keep you going when you would otherwise stop... you can't avoid the insistent list and the insistent pings of the email reminders... :)
one of them is that facebook pages are infrequently updated - or... more specifically, fbml profile pages are updated when your application calls in to the facebook server and hands it new content.
that causes quite a tricky way of handling things, for me, because, of course, facebook pages in profiles are supposed to be "static"....
soo... i'm going to have to think more carefully about how to do this. my site's a strange mixture, and it just got weirder through integration with facebook.
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