Web developer and retro gaming nut.
My usual holiday site update for the GTW project… Yet another game preserved 
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I was pretty happy the other night getting a late goal against a friend. I played as the half star rated Accrington Stanley against the 5 star Arsenal. After a scrambled equalizer, I was dared to get the free kick in which followed 5 minutes later. I never thought in a million years i’d bloody get it…
In the end I held out and won 2-1… I was sad enough to be the only one who thought it was cool 
As we push towards a more semantic web overall, we are somewhat limited with XHTML in trying to describe what our information means to machines as well as humans.
With Microformats, we are given an approach to better describe our data through the use of standard XHTML markup. With the following HTML: “<p>Joe Bloggs is a web developer at the University of Kent.</p>”, in a browser this can be easily interpretted by humans, but to a machine it is just a string with no particular meaning.
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Well, its been years in the making, but finally the MegaCart has arrived, and mine has just arrived yesterday!
The MegaCart in full - The guys have done a great production job!
What is a MegaCart?… Well, it is a brand new cartridge produced in 2009 for the Vic 20, the C64’s older brother. Overall it contains every single cartridge game ever released for the machine all on one cartridge, along with a selection of disk/tape games, utilities and hidden extras.
Everything is very well produced, as well as some very neat packaging, you get cartridge acting as a tribute to the classic Vic 20 carts of yesterday (Now complete with an Action Replay style reset switch).
Plugging in for the first time, you are presented with an excellent menu system with plenty of shortcut keys and boot features. You can select from a range of impressive tunes to play (and mute when you’ve had enough), add games to a favourites list and pick a random game from the impressive library.
Additionally the cartridge helps to provide the one-stop solution by providing RAM expansion boot options, and a touch of Action Replayness with the addition of the excellent EasyLoad+.
All set up and raring to go... The Vic 20 in the background is in a Rotronics case, but sadly the Space bar isn't working, so I need to rip this one apart and sort it.
Although I still really need to sit down and enjoy my new purchase, overall this was an excellent purchase to dig out my Vic 20 again and fire up some old memories.
For more information on the cartridge, check out the website here.
Good news, but work is now finally under way on the redevelopment of GTW64 (The C64 sister site), which could take sometime… but at least i’ve started
At present a project plan is being produced to ensure that the process is as quick as possible. We will be going with a Drupal CMS based system, which is useful as i’ve been building a large scaled archival project at work for almost 2 years now, so there is some reusability there and potential to get a prototype set up fairly quickly
The largest challenge still remains, where we need to tidy up the existing reviews/shots and bits and get an automated way of getting everything into the new system. Plans for this are underway, but it means going over the existing site and tidying up. Whilst doing this i’ll be improving the metadata to increase searchability of whats there for now – which is one of many broken aspects of the old 5-6yr old design.
I’m not sure how long everything will take, but what is difficult is working on the web all day and coming home to do it… so it will take some knuckling down to sort out. Additionally I want to keep the project running simultaneously to keep up the findings, so this will slow things too. Overall the searchability of the site, findability and readability of content will be improved which in time should help ensure that ex-developers are more likely to find things. At present Meta is poor, which does not help users to find what we write, and in the modern day web we could end up being buried away too much
Anyone following the main site will have noticed a few cosmetic changes, but behind the scenes there have been various improvements to fix a few its problems to keep things ticking over. Plans will be to later move the main site into Drupal and enable the main site to be able to search across its own content, as well as GTW64 based items (With potentially being able to hook into the other sister sites too… though more research required there with the different systems being used). This is lower on the priority list, as the main site isn’t anywhere near as dated as the GTW64 site, and its migration should be a lot more trivial in comparison.
I’m thinking from my work aspect to keep updates via a few blog entries every so often, so keep an eye out on my blog.
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