Oh my, it’s been a while, hasn’t it?

It’s been 2 years, 9 months, and 19 days since I last posted something on my blog. I’ve spent the past few days painstakingly recovering the contents of my old self-hosted WordPress website, omegastormproductions.com, that closed its doors in 2011 and transferring the contents of my last wordpress.com blog over to here. Sure, transferring the contents of the wordpress.com blog was easy; just export, then import. The old self-hosted WordPress website; however, was a bit more involved, as I only had an old database backup courtesy of a backup plugin I used that emailed me a backup on a regular basis.

WordPress can import a variety of formats from various platforms, and uses a XML file for itself, but I had a SQL database, which would have been fine for setting up another self-hosted website and restoring the old database, except now that we’re on wordpress.com, that’s out the window. To put it basically, I recreated each and every post and page from scratch by going through the database tables and picking out the published posts (ignoring past revisions). Everything I needed was there: Title, Content, Post Date, etc. It was just time consuming.

ImpactJS Demo

I have recently begun tinkering with the ImpactJS framework. As a learning experiment, I am currently working on a recreation of sorts of the platformer demo (dubbed Control Alt Shift, for no reason whatsoever) I did in Flash quite some time ago. This is to get myself familiar with the ImpactJS framework as well as get myself more familiar with javascript. Once I get the functionality available in the flash version fully working in this one, I’ll post it for your viewing pleasure. In the meantime, here’s a screenshot for you to enjoy!

ImpactJS Demo

Bright light! Bright light!

I’ve added a page containing a few things that I’ve done utilizing Flash and Actionscript in the past. You can find them over on the Flash page at http://brandonivey.wordpress.com/flash/. Due to the fact that WordPress.com does not allow Flash files to be embedded or even be uploaded for that matter, I had to find an alternative. A friend of mine allowed me to use his web hosting to store my files and I just link to simple HTML pages that have the Flash files embedded on them. Now you can still enjoy them! Always good to have a Plan B!

A portfolio of sorts

When I originally decided to revive my blog on wordpress.com, that’s all it was going to be… a blog about whatever that I felt like writing about. Now, I think I’m going to turn it back into what it was before, back when it was hosted on my own domain. To that end, I’ve already added my resume back and will be going through my archives to pull out some things I’ve done in the past to create a portfolio of sorts.

I know one of the things I want to show off is my experience with Adobe Flash and what little bit of experience I have with Actionscript. Another thing I want to show off is what I’ve done with HTML and CSS so far, especially given that web development is what I’m working towards. I haven’t created anything that implements Javascript yet, but I will get to that eventually.

Back in Action!

I have returned from a fun filled weekend (well, not really). I had to go out of town for a wedding. One of my wife’s cousins got married and she was a bridesmaid. It was a rare chance for me to actually wear a suit even though I didn’t have to do so.  And I hate wearing a suit…. far too hot and stuffy. I feel like a robot in one.

Oh well, it’s over and I’m back… and that means more fun and exciting articles for you to read! Stay tuned!

seanmumford.com

Sean Mumford is a a friend of mine that is already in the whole web development scene. His website had gotten a bit stale over time, so he decided to redesign it with new and exciting things. He launched the redesigned website yesterday. You can check it out over at seanmumford.com. I’m sure if you happen to have feedback for him, he wouldn’t mind hearing it.

It’s been awhile…

It’s been about a year and half ago now since I lost interest in maintaining my website (www.omegastormproductions.com). I just couldn’t bring myself to continue putting money towards its upkeep (was hosted with Bluehost at the time) given how often I was actually updating the blog portion of the site. I think my lack of updating the blog stemmed from the lack of interesting things to post, since my life is mostly the same, day in and day out. Either that or it was because I was narrowing myself into a corner with what I was actually posting. I always tried to keep the blog having a “professional” sort of atmosphere.

I think what I should do is change gears. Why try to post about a narrow topic when there many more things to talk about out there? From now on, I’m going to be blogging about anything that tickles my fancy. I’m going to be doing it from right here on WordPress.com, since I don’t have to pay to maintain this. You might like or you might not, but you are always free to leave a comment about what you think.

You’ll be hearing from me again very soon. Ciao!

Shoot ’em Up Tutorial – Part 1 is Ready!

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The first part of the tutorial is now ready for your viewing. This part of the tutorial covers setting up the basic structure of the game, adding the player, adding an enemy, and letting the player shoot the enemy. Very basic so far, but there’s more to come. Stay tuned for part 2 where we’ll begin adding a little flair to our game.

SHMUP Flixel Tutorial in the works

The next tutorial I am preparing is going to be a replacement for my older extension of Andreas Zecher’s tutorial. There are two very important reasons as to why this tutorial must be redone: One, the original was not optimized, not programmed with speed in mind if you will; and two, I need the tutorial to be compatible with Flixel 2.5 so that there’s actually one available, which was also a problem after Flixel 2 was released… which is when I started learning Flixel. I don’t want others not having something up to date to learn from like I did.

You can now Flattr me!

It took me a while to get them positioned in a way that looked somewhat decent, but assuming I didn’t royally screw something up, you should now be able to Flattr me using the buttons to the top-right of each page or post.