Jaclynt.com

Ridiculous x3

I know what you’re thinking. She updated her layout again? Yeah. I did.

I decided that the format of my former front page wasn’t working for me anymore. I also decided that I no longer want my other blog and want to keep everything in this one, especially since me writing “story updates” regularly hasn’t been working out. The truth is, I just can’t work on Sim stories all the time; I get into phases where it’s all I do for few months, and then the next few months I won’t touch the thing. Unfortunate, but I’ve accepted that’s just how I am.

Though, you’ll be glad to know I have worked on the next parts of I Woke Up LA a little bit the past week or so. I’m up to around 105 slides now. It will probably be 150+ by the time I’m done. Ugh.

I haven’t been playing Sims 2 very much the past few weeks because I’ve been too obsessed with Sim City, or I suppose I should say city building games in general. It started with a random urge to play Sim City 2000. Then Sim City 3000 and City Life. And toward the end of last week, I ordered the original Sim City and Sim City 4 from Amazon and they should be here in a few days. I never got into playing Sim City 4, though I did try it a few times. I think part of the problem was the time frame it came out in and me not giving it a chance. But I’m very much in the mood to play it now, so perhaps it will finally grow on me. And I got the original Sim City just for shits and giggles. Andy actually has this game for Super Nintendo, but I found it a bit impossible, plus the fuzziness of the ancient game on the TV screen was just too much for my eyes.

In other news, it’s Sunday, 4 PM. I just woke up, Andy is still asleep, and I’m already upset about having to go back to work tomorrow. Well, mainly about having to set my alarm and get up at crap thirty in the morning.

Layout Update - Oh, Boy!

So obviously, I updated my website layout. There was a lot of text I wanted to update, and while I was at it, I decided the other layout was yucky. One of the bigger changes is to my story reader! I decided to play around with Yahoo UI, and I made the pictures and text movable on the page. So, if you don’t like the text under the picture, you can move it where ever you want, as well as make the text frame whatever size you want.

I did this all this afternoon, and have not tested much yet. So hang with me another few days if you have problems. Out of laziness, I don’t have IE 6 or Opera on my computer, so I haven’t tested there yet; nor have I tested Safari. Oh, you know what, I can just remote into my work computer and look at it that way. Maybe I’ll do that. Ha.

Anyway, for those who don’t visit my forum, I’ve been sharing all kinds of teasers for chapter 6 there. Though, I haven’t worked on it this weekend because I needed a break, I still have quite a bit done on the chapter—95 slides written and 10 pictures.

That’s it for now! I’m pretty bummed about the weekend being over, how about y’all?

Story Viewer Website Code

I’ve been asked several times how I put my Sims Stories on my website. Basically, I use a combination of PHP and Javascript. And finally, I’ve decided to share my code with anyone who may want it!

This will most likely not be of interest to a lot of you with free-host websites that don’t offer PHP. But if you’re a bit of a nerd, here you go.

http://jaclynt.com/scripts/storyviewer/

REQUIREMENTS:

A web server with PHP 5. PHP 4 will NOT work, so make sure version 5 is what your server has.

A novice understanding of how the web works.
You need to understand that PHP files need to be on a web server and not run from your local machine.
You need to know how to get directory paths on your server—and you need to know the difference between a file structure path on your server and a URL.

You need to know how Sims 2 Stories are put together in your game.
How to associate web_xxxxxxxx.xml files with snapshot_xxxxxxxx_yyyyyyyy.jpg files and where to find them.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Download and un-zip: http://jaclynt.com/scripts/storyviewer/jaclyns_story_viewer.rar

Locate on your local hard drive, your web_xxxxxxxx.xml and all snapshot_xxxxxxxx_yyyyyyyy.jpg files associated with your story.

Upload them to a new directory on your web server.
Note the location of this new directory—both from the root of your file server and how to access it from the web (URL).

Open: index.php
(You can right click and choose open with Notepad, or download something that doesn’t suck, like Notepad++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net)

Set:
$storyURLPath to the directory URL where all your snapshots are located.
$storyXMLPath is the file path (not a URL!) to your XML file.

Example:
$storyURLPath = “http://jaclynt.com/scripts/storyviewer/story/”;
$storyXMLPath = “/home/jaclynt/jaclynt.com/scripts/storyviewer/story/webentry_b32c3301.xml”;

Got pictures other than 600px wide by 450px tall? Set the size of them (all snapshots should be the same size) in index.php:

$slideWidth = 600;
$slideHeight = 450;

CUSTOMIZATION:

You may change the HTML in index.php however you like. Just keep the DIV element “storycontent” and all its children AS IS.

You may completely customize the look of the page in style.css

You may rename the file index.php to anything else you like…

NOTES:

This script should parse [b][/b] and [i][/i] bulletin-board codes, but no others.
Web links and email addresses are made clickable within your story text.
Smart quotes are accounted for.

EXTRAS:

This is an example of a story placed into the system that was NOT generated by The Sims 2 game directly.

To use this version, you would need to understand the very very basics of XML, or rather just what it is enough to copy and paste in the appropriate spots.

This version is all manual, but you never know, some might find it useful.

See the files in the folder, nongamestory.

Here, you make your own XML file. Open the file storydata.xml.

See how it plugs in the file name for the snapshot and the text associated with it (if any)? Pretty self-explanatory, I think.

BUGS?

Report them to me, you know where to find me. This script it by no means perfect or final, and just made out of light hobby. So it’s easy for me to miss things here and there.

ADVANCED:

Something further you can do to automate the process is store your list of stories in a database. I keep a list of story titles, their associate XML file name, and give it a tag and chapter number which corresponds to its directory on my server. Then I pass my php page parameters of the story title, chapter, and tag. So there’s no copy the index.php file over and over.

Instead I call a page called something like “story.php”, and pass it parameters so it may look like: story.php?title=iwokeupla&chapter=1

Then I use Apache Mod-Rewrite to mask the URL so it looks like:
http://jaclynt.com/read/iwokeupla/1/

No Idea.

I was informed by Punki today that comments weren’t working on this blog. And sure enough–they weren’t! Very strange considering I touched nothing with this WordPress since before I last updated in December.

Yet it managed to somehow barf itself up one way or another. I thought maybe I messed up the theme files (since I use my own custom php there), but nope, when I changed themes it was still broken.

And I tried updating the install to see if that would magically fix it, but it didn’t.

So after a few more unsuccessful attempts, I just said screw it, I’ll delete it all and re-install. I didn’t have many posts here, so it doesn’t matter anyway. This is mostly just news too. If it were my personal blog that got fucked, or the Hangout’s, I’d be more annoyed. Although, all that is backed up too.

So all and all it’s not that big a deal.

Um, so if you missed the last post, SIM DOWNLOADS!?