A website’s homepage is one of the most important parts. If someone lands there and doesn’t find anything interesting, they’ll go elsewhere more often than not. Here are some examples of good home pages. Here they are, in no particular order. Study them and learn. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, your boss/parent/etc tells you to “stop playing that stupid computer game”. You need a quick excuse, right? Well, I can tell you one thing, you don’t want any of these excuses…

• “I have to finish this level. The game won’t let me quit if I don’t.”
• “Uh, what computer game?”
• “Take that, PKer! (turns from computer) Huh, did you say something?”
• “This isn’t a game, it’s a virtual world.”
• “Oh, do you want to play?”
• “Ten more minutes!”
• “I’m in the middle of a quest! I can’t stop now!”
• “Move, you’re blocking the light.”
• “You’re a noob. Come back when I’m not busy.”
• “Oh, I was just checking to see how much gold I have. I was only going to be on for a couple minutes.”
• “I’ve only been playing for…hmmm…ummm….well, only a few hours.”
• “Let me do one more thing before I get off.”

Arrrg! I’ve reached the least fun part of beta testing–having your progress halted by a bug. After making a bit of progress in Pirates of the Caribbean Online, I hit a bug with the game. Mr. Gibbs is refusing to recognize me. After doing two quest-things for him, he’s just sitting there saying “What do you want?”. I’m probably going to have to start over again if I want to continue with the storyline.

I guess I’ll just do more freeform gameplay until the game is released, then start over. Even after hours of playing, I’ve barely dented the main storyline. Disney’s VR Studio sure knows how to make a game that lasts…

Great, now my younger brothers are going to continue with the game and do all the cool stuff before me.

It’s time for the Weekly What The Heck!

Google Buys Doubleclick for $3.1 Billion: They claim they want to make ads more useful and less annoying. Will it be the death of the popup ad, or the introduction of “useful” ads that follow you from site to site?

Sony’s New Copy-Protected DVDs Don’t Play In Their Own Players:Â Soon they will announce their new BetamaxHD disc format that won’t play in any of the BluRay players either…

MySpace Digg-Clone…Not a Success: Uh, what’s the point if you can’t submit things yourself? What the heck are the “trusted sources” that it gets it’s content from?

YES! I was searching through GameSpot.com for more info on Pirates of the Caribbean Online (which I’m beta testing). Guess what? I won’t have to pay for it! Muahahaha! I was afraid that I’d have to stop playing once the beta ended, but disney plans to have both a free ad-supported version and a premium version with more features and no ads. That’s good, since I can’t afford to pay a subscription.

Beta-ing the game is a lot of fun, though there are plenty of problems. Lots of crashes, unsolid decks on ships, and the like. I may have to start the game all over again after the latest problem. I went and did a quest thingy and came back to Mr. Gibbs, but he seems to think I didn’t do the quest. Arrg! Sometimes the game brings down my whole system when it closes as well. THe game will be a lot of fun once all these annyoing problems are ironed out.

Enough already! Firefox is way better than any of the competition. Yeah it takes a while to load, and it does have a few memory leaks. But compared to Internet Explorer….

Anyway, things improve with every update. The next major release of Firefox is due by the fourth quarter of the year, I believe. I imagine plenty of these problems will be fixed by then. The only problem I have is the slow loading time.

People complain that there are memory leaks that bring down their systems if they leave firefox open for a few days. A few days? Hello, just close it andreboot your computer once in awhile. You don’t need your machine up 24/7 unless your running a server on it — and should you really be running a browser on the same machine as a server? No. You shouldn’t be running anything on a server other than Apache, PHP, etc.

Yeah! I got in on the beta for the Pirates of the Caribbean Online game. It looks like it’s shaping up pretty good, though it shows the fact that it’s a beta very visibly. There’s a ton of bugs, glitches, and random crashes. It’s fun when it’s not crashing (or hanging, or lagging, or not letting you do stuff because of a random glitch).

The graphic quality is amazing, and the voice acting is great. The sound effects are spectacular. The game currently lags frequentlty, but I expect improvements soon. This is going to be one fun game (it will be released on May 25th, I believe).

In case you were wondering, I’m the guy behind the NPC holding the bag of money.

Haven’t had time to look at it yet, but Digg has just released a Digg API. Also available is a Flash Toolkit. I wonder what you can do with the API. I’ll have to take a look later.

Why pay someone to make business cards for you when you can do it yourself? All you need is Adobe Photoshop, a printer, and some cardstock (available at Staples or similar stores). This tutorial will teach you how to make a basic business card. This is by no means the only way, and you can alter the design any way you want. Just do whatever you think will look best. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

About time! Finally you can play Windows Media files in Firefox! Microsoft just released a new Windows Media Player plugin that’s compatible with Firefox. You can get it here. Odd… what’s in it for Microsoft? Why are they doing something like this all of a sudden?