Technorati Tags: web development, mobile devices, touch, mouseover, hover, web design, retropolis

Through the liberal use of lasers, faceted coprolites, sub-aetheric rays, and a 3/8" open end wrench, I’ve now completed the MUG-O-MATIC edition of Cornelius Zappencackler’s Pulp Sci-Fi Title-O-Tron. It’s glowing where it ought to be glowing and it doesn’t make that high-pitched noise that attracted the squirrels any more.

Though I always liked that part, myself.

So you, too, adventurer, can now harness the awesome power that is the Mug-O-Matic: it randomly generates the titles of pulp science fiction stories that don’t exist, but often ought to*, and then it slaps your favorite titles onto coffee mugs, travel mugs, and mugs of other mysterious and malevolent kinds that it were not well to mention here.

Okay, not really: I just got tired of listing them. Fun little toy, though!

*every now and then it manages to re-create a title that does, in fact., exist. Which is even stranger than the thing with the squirrels.

Technorati Tags: thrilling tales of the downright unusual, mug-o-matic, title-o-tron, random sci fi title generator, humor, coffee mugs

I just had some fun playing through a text adventure game called Choice of the Dragon (try it!).

It was created with a system called Choicescript. Choicescript games are free to play on the web, but are also available as iPhone and Android apps. There’s (so far) one more game called Choice of Broadsides.

In a lot of ways these resemble what I’ve done with Thrilling Tales of the Downright Unusual – in fact the basic differences are owed to the two facts that I’m simultaneously developing for the web and for print, and I’m illustrating my story nodes. As it stands the Choicescript games don’t support illustrations but it wouldn’t take much custom Javascript (and/or php) in the page template to fix that. Choicescript allows you to set variables depending on the player’s actions and one of those variables could easily be the URL of an illustration. A little document.write, and you’re there.

If you’re interested in playing with Choicescript – some user-created games get hosted on the choiceofgames site – you can start out with the blog.

Technorati Tags: text adventure, game engine, choice of games, choice of the dragon, choice of broadsides, roll your own

A couple of weeks ago I posted the first in a series of articles about my experiences in putting together a single web site that combines products from several different print-on-demand companies. For a better idea of what I was trying to do, and what I felt the design priorities were, you should have a look at that article.

You’re back? Okay then.

In order to get the basic function of the site working, I used three different solutions from three different sources. I’ll be writing about each of them in detail as we go. For today, let’s start with an overview of those three solutions.

They are CPShop, for Cafepress content; the Zazzle Store Builder (ZSB) for Zazzle content; and myPFStore, for Printfection content. Here’s a basic description of their features.

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The first in a series of articles that describe how I combined products from several different print on demand companies into a single web site at my own domain.

The design of a web site is always about several things, and only one of those things is "making it pretty". In fact the way you make it pretty all depends on the decisions you’ve made about what the purpose of the site will be (often not as obvious as you might think), what the content will be, how the user will find that content, and how the user will understand where he or she is within the site – and then be able to get elsewhere with as few clicks as you can manage.

The answers to those questions determine the framework within which you will make the site pretty. That’s because these answers tell you what you’re designing. If you leap off to figure out what it’s going to look like without answering those questions first you’re going to end up with something that (presumably) looks great, but whether it does the job it needs to do is left completely to chance.

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