Blog of Ortz

I’ve been collecting XNA videos on Youtube into a playlist for a while now. Check it out. I’ve got about 40 videos as of this posting.

If you have a video you would like me to add, feel free to contact me or leave a comment.

I also idle in #xna on EFNet. If you have a video you would like added, feel free to PM me. I’ll add it when I’m around.

When you see it…

You may remember Garry talking a while back about switching from iGoogle to Google Reader for his RSS feeds. (I can’t seem to find the post) Well what he didn’t mention is that there’s an iGoogle gadget for Google Reader that will show the latest unread posts. Just make a new tab for it and set the layout for one column. That way you can keep track of feeds more efficiently without giving up all those gadgets.

I recently switched to Google Reader for my feeds. I had no idea I had this many feeds in iGoogle. (about 30 feeds, 200 items a month) The trends page is really cool. I discovered that one of the political blogs I visit makes an average of 16 posts per day.

Speaking of blogs and feeds, anyone know any good PHP/webdev blogs?

Been a while since my last post… Seems like I can never think of anything to blog about. TFH is The Flaming Head, in case you’re confused.

I’m currently in the process of rewriting my entire site using the CodeIgniter framework. Not counting my blog and the forums, that is. Actually, I’m not sure if I want to keep the forums up. Nobody uses them, and frankly there’s no reason anyone would want to. And now that I think about it, some sort out shoutbox would probably work just as well. I’ll have to think about it. I’d appreciate any suggestions too.

CodeIgniter has been really fun to work with. This is my first experience with a web framework (apart from Ruby on Rails, which didn’t go so well… something about “convention over configuration” seems a bit communist) and MVC is really awesome. For the first time, I have a feeling like I really know what I’m doing and I’m not just a noob anymore. I think it might be because MVC was sort of an epiphany for me as a programmer.

I’ve decided to be more proactive with learning PHP; trying to learn the sort of things that didn’t really interest/concern me when I was just doing it for fun. Design patterns, for instance. I want to eventually get ZCE (Zend Certified Engineer). Which means I may end up starting on my own framework in the near future. I want to start doing doing freelance online. My biggest obstacle right now is a lack of real experience and, unfortunately, confidence.

As far as non-web programming is concerned, I’ve recently become interested in GUIs, both designing them and implementing them. Usability issues have always interested me because psychology has always interested me as well, and the two seem to go hand-in-hand. I mentioned before that I wanted to mess around with WPF a bit, which I still haven’t gotten around to, unfortunately.