DavidGoodman.Net

Back in a tick, talk amongst yourselves.

Edit

And we’re done.

First off, GTA IV is… well, it’s bloody amazing. Filmic in its visual quality, hilarious as usual and the gameplay is a completely different beast to the older games. Superb. I’m maybe five or six missions in and loving it. A more detailed impressions post to follow, once I’ve had a good explore. Oh, and once I’ve given multiplayer a try.

In other news, some spamming fucker hacked my old blog, Happy Dave, so I’ve had to nuke it, and my photoblog along with it. Four years of posts gone. Seriously kids, keep those Wordpress installs up to date, even for blogs you don’t work on actively anymore. In a way I’m sort of glad - starting this new site on the main davidgoodman.net domain was meant to be a clean break, and now it really is - all gaming (and the odd bit of politics) all the time. Plus I’ve saved the pieces of writing I’m really proud of from Happy Dave over there in the essays section. Still, very annoying. I spent a lot of time building the 200-odd posts there. I think they’ll still be available in the database, if they haven’t been overwritten with spam. One day when it’s not nearly midnight I’ll have a go at recovering them on a vanilla Wordpress install.

I’ve heard a lot of grumbling from people about the new Wordpress backend interface, but personally, I think it’s a piece of genius. Heck, it’s actually got me eager to post, because it’s such a joy to use - the profusion of old tabs is gone, adding media (like the Gears pic in the last post, video or flash music players) is a cinch, and some nice AJAXy/Javascript touches make the whole interface much more slick and web-app like. It doesn’t feel like a bunch of PHP pages hacked together by enthusiastic amateurs anymore - this feels like a professional, easy to use, fun web publishing tool. I’ve been a Wordpress user since the 1.0 days, Blogger before that, and I personally think this marks a really positive change in user inteface design, for Wordpress in particular, but blogging tools in general. The new interface has set a very high bar.

Oh, and auto-saving on posts? SWEET. Never again will a random PHP hiccup eat half an hour’s worth of writing.