Flash game Roll updated - now with high scores

January 31, 2008 | Video Games

I have now updated my game Roll so that it makes use of the new highscores system from Mochiads.

The system is very easy to use and I’d recommend it for anyone who wants a quick and easy highscore system for their flash games (does anybody who reads my blog make flash games?)

I’m not convinced it’s perfect just yet, although any faults will be my end, and not with the Mochiads leaderboard service.

If anyone can score more than 12000 I will be mighty impressed

BM-Comment-Highlight Guide

January 28, 2008 | Web Design

In my excitement to get the BM-Comment-Highlight plugin out yesterday I forgot to tell you how to actually use the thing. Also since posting it yesterday I have though of another feature for the plugin so I have updated it accordingly.

How to use BM-Comment-Highlight

To use the plugin all you have to do is include a single php function call in your wordpress loop. This will return to you a string that you can use as a class in any way you see fit.

<?php foreach ( $comments as $comment ) {
$commentClass = bm_commentHighlight(); ?>
<li class=”<?php echo $commentClass; ?>”>
<?php comment_text(); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

When the function is called you will get a number of classes returned (most likely more than one). These let you style the comment appropriately.

The classes you get are:

• author - the commenter is the post author
• reader - the commenter is simply a reader of the blog
• user - the …
  

New WordPress Plugin - BM Comment Highlight

January 27, 2008 | Web Design

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned how to upload plugins to Wordpress.org - and now I give to you, my second Wordpress plugin - bm-comment-highlight.

Comment Highlight does exactly what it says on the tin. If you look around you will find that there are a lot of plugins that do what bm-comment-highlight does, namely add extra classes to comments so that you can make them look different, but none work in the way bm-comment-highlight does.

The problem I had was that I wanted to automate the process, I wanted it to work well when you have multiple authors, and I wanted to have more control over the styling. Since there was nothing that worked the way I wanted I wrote my own.

Most current plugins simply give you a single class to style your comments with. This means that all the comments …

Disney Interactive map on the DS

| Links, Video Games

I have just got back from Disneyland in Anaheim (I’ll write a post about my trip when I get the photos sorted out) - and one of the first things I found in my overflowing feedreader when I returned was this post on Wired about an interactive Disneyland map for the Nintendo DS that Disney are beta testing.

Thankfully I have a pretty good sense of direction so after a couple of hours in the park I knew where I was going for most things anyway but it’s still very cool, and I wish I’d been able to try it out - if only I’d known!

Where’s Wall-E - a brief history of Pixar in-jokes

January 15, 2008 | Links

I love me some Pixar and by all accounts Wall-E is going to be their best film yet. I am really looking forward to it. In celebration of the upcoming film I thought I should mention the following link - a brief history of Pixar in-jokes.

I’ve known about a lot of the jokes for some time. Some of them I even spotted myself (the pizza planet truck in a Bugs Life), and a lot are pointed out in commentaries and DVD extras, but this list goes even further. The thing is, I find it hard to believe this is conclusive too, and would put money on there being even more out there somewhere or other.

A 3 step guide to getting your WordPress plugin onto WordPress.org

January 14, 2008 | Web Design

I recently got my bm-custom-login plugin accepted onto the Wordress plugin repository. In order to get it online I had to use subversion - something I’ve never used before.

I found the “using svn page” on wordpress.org to be rather intimidating. For example the first section “getting started” jumps straight into telling you what commands to type without even mentioning the basic things such as what to download. This seems to go against the simple software the Wordpress team try to promote so I thought I’d work it out for myself and document the process. It was considerably simpler than expected.

Before we start

Since this is a tutorial for uploading Wordpress plugins I think I should point out that you will need a Wordpress.org account, and to have submitted an application for them to host your plugin. Once you get the confirmation email (which seems to take a couple of …