Cav's Place

The last post was the 500th on this blog and I think it’s time to write a little about the plans I have for this site’s future, especially since last night I think I just finished the actual code for a new section of it. I’m not sure if I’ll also manage to enter all data to my satisfaction by the end of the year, since I’m taking it so very slowly, but I think I will. As soon as that happens, you’ll start to notice changes around here.
Right now, if you go to www.cavsplace.com you automatically get redirected to blog.cavsplace.com, since this is the only fully functional section of the site. But that will stop as soon as there will be some other active section that you may want to get to, so from that moment on you’ll see a simple splash page if you visit www.cavsplace.com, from which you’ll be able to get to any of the active sections. And the sections themselves will need to link to each other, likely through some sort of navigation bar placed at the top, though I’m not fully certain of that yet so it may not get implemented at the same time as the splash page.

There are currently two other sections in the works. I was only thinking of one at first, but the other just sort of happened and in fact I started to work on it even before doing anything for the one I had planned. Still, once I did start working on the planned one I pretty much gave up on the other, so don’t expect to see it go live anytime soon, especially since there’s a whole lot of tedious work involved when it comes to adding content to it, not to mention a fair bit of coding left to do as well. However, unlike the planned one, this other section easily can and very likely will go live even with only a small part of the planned content, but until then I’m not even going to say what it’s about.
But let’s move on to the section that was on my mind since getting my own site, which is about all the games I ever played. It’s been quite some time since I started trying to remember them all and the full list currently exceeds 150, though I’m only absolutely sure of about 130. First I took to adding them to my list of games played on IGN, along with a rating and a brief note for each, and then, around the start of this year, started rating them on MobyGames as well. Thankfully I also saved my IGN list in a file, so I didn’t lose anything when they decided to destroy pretty much everything that was nice about the profiles you could make on that site to accomodate people whose attention spans can’t exceed half a second. So the new section of the site will basically just be a list of those games. For each game you’ll get a link to its entry on MobyGames, the ratings just as I entered them on MobyGames, for the categories displayed there when you try to rate the respective game, and a brief note, which is the one I entered on IGN if available or one written when adding the game to the list if I hadn’t added it to IGN before they destroyed the profiles. The script also calculates and displays an overall score for each game, which is a weighted average of the individual ratings entered. In case of the games I also wrote reviews for, you’ll also get links to those, both on the blog and on MobyGames. Some changes will obviously need to be made to some of the ratings, and possibly even some of the notes, once I’ll see them all side by side and be able to compare better, but that will come later.
Right now, both of these new sections are written pretty much entirely in JavaScript. The other section actually requires a little bit of JavaScript, but the games played one does not, so I may decide to eventually port them both, excepting that little piece of code, into Ruby on Rails, since my host supports it, to avoid issues caused by the way different browsers interpret JavaScript, but that’s not going to happen too soon. (Speaking of such issues, thanks go to Shiri for some testing in Chrome, which apparently has some serious quirks when it comes to dealing with JavaScript.)

I’ll also need to do something about the blog’s theme at some point, but probably not too soon. It’s very old and, though so far it worked, likely thanks to being so simple, who knows what problems may arise whenever a new WordPress version comes along. I still want it to look basically just as it does now, but I probably should get a newer simple theme, to make sure the code itself is better suited for new versions of WordPress, and then modify just what I have to in order to make it look as this one currently does.
What I do need to do is make all the sections of the site use the same style, which implies using the same style sheet for the whole site. The new sections already do, so just the blog is left. That’ll also mean adding the blog’s specific style code into that style sheet, which should in fact make it even easier to change the blog’s theme when I’ll finally get around to doing that as well. By the way, the font used has been Segoe Print ever since I first started the blog at the old address. If you see something else, such as Comic Sans MS, it means you don’t have that one installed. Due to some of the reactions it can generate, the new sections no longer try to use Comic Sans MS if Segoe Print is not available, but the blog still does at the moment. This will be taken care of when I’ll make it use the same style sheet as the rest of the site.