TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

James 2.5 Explained

Welcome, to the all-new James! The partly-new James! The slightly-altered James! I’m calling it 2.5 – it’s the third redesign of my fifth personal site, but it’s not exactly a generational jump. I coded my first blog when I was fourteen, so I’m littering this post with embarrassing shots and links of the older incarnations. Sadly Archive.org only goes as far back as the first James, so the design marvels of, er, “Pentadact’s Site”, “Ugly Fruit”, “The Open Focus Network” and “Politics” are not on shown here.

Turns out I liked dark blue in 1999 too. And I took my tea black? Was I ever that young?

Very nearly changed the name this time – for a long time the prototype read ‘Pentadact’ at the top. There’s every reason to make that change, not least of which is that people might finally spot that it doesn’t have a ‘u’ in it. But no matter how long I left it like that it just looked wrong. This obviously isn’t Pentadact – that’s me. It would be like calling my house Tom Francis.

The smallest change is the new visual motif; that didn’t take long. In a weird way I hope making it narrower has made it look wider – when it greedily filled the whole screen, it had no shape or size of its own. Filling the screen used to be one of my design commandments – I loathe sites that cower in a column on the left-hand side of any reasonably-sized display. Now, I’m starting to see that there are readability reasons why ultra-wide isn’t always awesome, and I prefer sites with a sense of place to sites with a design philosophy.

Weird, news-style proto-meta-blog

The idea behind the stuff in the sidebars – which took all the time – is that as much as possible, it should be different each time you come. Almost everything is either automatically-updating, easy to update, or just randomised. Instead of a static set of dozens of nameless thumbnail shots of things, I wanted to actually explain what each thing is that I’m featuring. But for the number of things I want to feature, that takes a prohibitively large amount of space. So instead, the template randomly chooses two items and I attempt to explain what they are.

I also wanted to dredge up some older stuff occasionally – hence the At Random panel. Blogs are all about what’s new, my sites never were: I like to create a load of stuff and leave it all hanging there, like so much dirty laundry. I’ve read everything on this site at least twice, and I wrote all of it, but even I see things cropping up in that box that make me think “What the hell was that?” If you ever see it blank, by the way, click the Full post link and let me know where it takes you. Every post is supposed to have an excerpt, but I think one or two slipped through the cracks.

Apparently I actually had other people submit reviews and stuff to the first James. I invented Web 2.0?

It’s not supposed to hit you in the face or anything, but there is a logic to what goes in the left as opposed to right sidebar. Left is stuff by me or on this site, and right is elsewhereville, things by other people that I liked. The Favourites panel is a solution to the problem of distinguishing between the types of places I link. I don’t link anyone’s blog unless I read every post of it, but that doesn’t always mean it’s essential reading I want to push on everyone. I wanted a separate place for the stuff I truly couldn’t live without, and to give it a little love. It’s also the first thing I did, and trying to articulate why you like your favourite sites is not a bad way to start a blog redesign.

The channels at the top were supposed to be a bigger deal than they’ve ended up being. I thought that since virtually no-one is interested in everything I talk about, and since I personally stop reading a blog after one or two posts I wasn’t interested in, it’d be useful to be able to filter it by topic. Everything here does legitimately fit into one of those, and if you’re an RSS user you can subscribe to each of the ones you care about to get a sort of custom feed. Update: stats show people really like to click the word ‘Games’ up there. Knock yourselves out, chaps!

I was fond, perhaps too fond, of the left-centre-right alignment pattern.

The subscription stuff is technically not new, but I want to highlight it this time: RSS means new posts get sent to you rather than you having to check for them, which in turn makes me feel less guilty about erratic posting. Jason L’s already requested the ability to subscribe to the comments that get made here, so I’ve implemented that too. Google Reader makes the internet a single page that can be read by repeatedly pressing a single key: Space. So at last, we can start out-evolving these pointless limbs. I’m just trying to help that along.

And as you’ve probably seen, I’m embedding MP3s a lot now – I’ll also add a direct download link for them soon. I want to post more than just music, and I’m thinking of a new regular related to that. I have 1.5 terabytes of storage space now, and ten times that in bandwidth, so I might as well put it to use.

2003 – first recognisably bloggy incarnation. Hopelessly dark.

Oh yeah, the hosting: James was long overdue for its own domain, I got constant complains about the acronymic URL (good luck spelling this one, whiners!), and the real reason: my ISP now sucks so hard that I have to leave them as soon as I humanly can. A load of providers now owned by Tiscali are now getting horrible service as people are moved to cheap, shitty servers in a bid for the parent company to turn a profit for the first time ever. So that really filled me with the warm glow of consumerism.

I chose BlueHost because a hundred blog posts told me to choose AN Hosting. I don’t know if you know this, but there are no longer any objective reviews of this kind of thing – every major company offers a huge cash kickback to bloggers sending new customers their way. The most trustworthy you get are the minority who admit they’re being paid to recommend you.

Holy shit I used to write a lot.

I almost went with AN Hosting anyway, but I happened to have their page up when I closed my browser for the day. It stopped me with a flashing alert claiming that a customer service representative for AN Hosting was trying to talk to me, and even lamely generated her (of course her) introductory lines. I almost spat. When I tried to close it, it generated another alert trying to panic me about that.

If these guys invent a cure for cancer, and I actually have cancer, they will still never see a penny of my money as long as I live, in cancery pain. BlueHost feel nice. Their CEO blogs. Their website lets you try out a dummy account. In fact, I like them so much I’m not going to link them, just so you know this isn’t a pay-per-post.

That would actually violate the prime directive of James, by the way, which is never to make money or sense.

PC Gamer Podcast: March

Tim calls this episode 11, because it’s the 12th, and I call it March, because it’s out in February. I’ve numbered the file 185, after the issue of PC Gamer that’s coming out this week.

In it, I do an impression of the bartender from the Witcher, we discuss the worst games of the year, gasmasks, some new information on the Team Fortress 2 changes, pleasing pirates in Sins of a Solar Empire, and our crack legal team’s advice on how to say things we’re not allowed to say.

Editor Ross Atherton is the smooth-talking host, Deputy Editor Tim is the one with the emphatic voice, I’m the low drone, and News Editor Craig is the Scot.

Chris Livingston Considering A TF2 Comic

Creator of the brilliant ‘Concerned’ blogging about ‘1Fort’, a possible new project. Let’s all get our hopes up so he can’t bear to let us down by aborting it.

Come In

So this is the new layout I’ve been tinkering with. There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s very time-consuming tinkering about fancy niceties for which I have long since lost my enthusiasm. The only major thing missing is a box with links to friends’ blogs, but the way I wanted it to work relied on some highly unstable technology that I’m not going to be able to code robustly anytime soon. It involves tachyons.

I was going to talk you through why I’ve done some of the new bits, why I scrapped some of the old bits, and why it’s slimmer. But it’s kind of late, and I’m kind of burnt-out on thinking about it now. I’ll edit that stuff in later – for now, let me know what you think, and have a listen to this while you look around:

EVE’s Assassins And The Kill That Shocked A Galaxy

“The simultaneous ambush and galaxy-wide hangar theft inflicted financial damage upwards of 30 billion ISK – $16,500 US dollars at IGE.com’s prices. The value of the stolen assets utterly dwarfed the original fee for the job. And yet the only item the Guiding Hand’s anonymous client requested for himself was the cold, dead body of the target. It’s safe to say this was personal.” Continued

My Galactic Civilizations 2 War Diary

Galactic Civilizations 2 is a strategy game about colonising space. The cool thing about it is the AI: the alien races you meet have very different personalities, and it’s fun to bargain with them and play them off against each other.

Long ago, I tried playing the biggest possible match of it, with the most possible alien races, and wrote up how it went in bite-sized entries.

Update!

CVG, the site I wrote this diary on, is gone forever. But the diary is now back up on PC Gamer’s site! It starts here.

Powered Down For Redesign

Because testing this stuff offline is an enormous hassle, and WordPress has masses of functions that are only valid when used in this: the main index file; James will be down, malfunctioning, hideous or utterly screwed up for many many hours tonight. If it’s not fixed by the time I get bored of fixing it, I’ll revert to this design and give up. Either way, it’ll be a working website again on Sunday.

New TF2 Maps And Medic Change In Two Months

I’ve been lobbying Robin Walker with increasingly bizarre suggestions for sprucing up the Medic, and he’s had some annoyingly good reasons why they wouldn’t work. Can’t wait to see what will.

http://www.shacknews.com/onearticle.x/50709

Team Fortress 2 Update Reactions

This just went live, and makes me happy in several ways.

• Added an option in the Options->Multiplayer dialog to filter custom game files being downloaded from servers

Ahhhh.

• Fixed cases where ragdolls were falling through the world

Ahhhh!

• Graphics optimizations for mid and low end hardware

Ooh.

• Fixed players blocking doors in Well

Heh.

• Fixed engineer building in exploit areas on final caps in Well

Oh?

• Increased starting round timer to 10 minutes in Well

Hmm.

But my favourite Steam Update News – and I apologise if you’d hoped I might do something like a ‘Films of the Year’ post instead of this – was actually a little while ago.

• Added effects to players when they earn an achievement, visible to other players nearby

Cool. But isn’t there an achievement for tricking an enemy Medic into healing you while you’re disguised? Would this not give the game away somewhat?

A few days later:

• Fixed cloaked/disguised/disguising spy reporting his achievements to everyone else

Reason Valve should hire me #26: totally saw that one coming.

Things Round Here Have Changed

But I’m tinkering with a redesign for this site that will likely go live in the next week. I like what I’ve got so far, but every time I look at it I half-glimpse something much, much better, and I’m trying to work out what to change to make it into that. In the meantime, and in the spirit of preparing for a New Year’s reboot, I’m posting things I’ve been meaning to post for ages. From the TV show Carpoolers:

I’m actually not wild about it as a sitcom, but there’s something brilliantly infectious about the radio singalong scenes. See also the ad.