Nuker.nl

The test week is over, that means I will be actively blogging again. Luckily, the test week went pretty well, so that’s one thing less to worry about. Time to focus on the upcoming exams. At the moment I’m thinking about renting a VPS, Virtual Private Server. That’s because I’m not really satisfied with my current host and because I want to have some more control. It’s too bad that a VPS can be quite expensive.

I’ve been playing some Garry’s Mod again. This time we decided to test a nuke on GM_FreeSpace06v2. And it worked quite well, as you can see below. After we tested some more nukes we started building a nuclear shelter. It included a laboratory and a ticket salesman. Of course, it didn’t make any sense at all, but it was fun! You can check out the Nuker.nl Gallery at the usual address. Make sure you select the right album!

Yes, this is yet another weblog update indeed! I’m still trying to fine tune my blog a little bit more. It’s getting even closer to perfect. This time I’ve added a ‘Nuker.nl Weblog Statistics’ page. You can basically find every available statistic about the comments and posts on the website. From most commented posts till Total Statistics. Just take a look yourself. Who knows, you might be in the statistics for some reason.

Furthermore, I also added a ‘Latest Readers’ box on my sidebar. This box shows the latest visitors who have a ‘MyBlogLog’ account. Don’t forget to join my ‘MyBlogLog’ community. Talking about the sidebar; I’ve sorted all the sidebar content boxes. It should be easier to navigate on my blog now. And last but not least, I’ve installed a menu replacer. It replaces the menu you can find at your profile page. It also replaces the menu in the admin area.

Yesterday I noticed my theme was being buggy. For some reason or another it didn’t wanted to add more tabs (home, contact me, etc) to the header. So I decided to check out the code. Yet, everything seemed alright. So I decided to code the tabs manually, and that did work out. The downside of this is that I need to add the tabs manually to the header. Always look at the bright side, at least the header is fixed.

I’ve been playing quite a lot of Garry’s Mod 10 the last couple of days. During those gaming sessions I’ve also made some more screenshots. This time it was ragdoll posing and a Ferris wheel. I must say ragdoll posing is still quite hard, but the shots I’ve taken look pretty nice. About the Ferris wheel, it has chairs on it which also spin around. So it’s somewhat like a double spinning Ferris wheel. You’ll definitely throw up if you enter one of those! You can find the Garry’s Mod 10 screenshots at their usual place, the Nuker.nl Gallery.

Eh..? Hello up there…

I’ve added some more Garry’s Mod Pictures to my Nuker.nl Gallery. This time I’ve been building a rollercoaster and a couple of space(ship) contraptions. All the screenshots were  taken on either the GM_SpaceBuildv2 map or GM_FlatGrass map. There will be more pictures on the way, that’s for sure! Please note that the pictures have large resolution, 1650×1024, due to my widescreen monitor.

“Hard Gay, whooo…!”

Yes indeed, another couple of small updates have been introduced on my website. I’m still fine tuning Wordpress. This time I’ve increased the anti-spam measurements. I’ve installed a couple of anti-spam plugins for Wordpress. The ‘Bad Behavior’ plugin blocks spammers before they get the chance to post or even read your website. You can see my Bad Behavior statistics on the bottom of the website. I also installed ‘Comment Timeout’. This plugin disables comments on older blog posts. If you want to secure your Wordpress be sure to read Yorick’s 5 tips on securing Wordpress.

Besides those anti-spam measurements I also installed a photo gallery. You can visit the Nuker.nl Gallery by clicking on the link in the Links menu. At the moment there are only a couple of Garry’s Mod photo’s. But that will most likely change soon.

It’s time to upgrade Wordpress once again. Version 2.1.1 has just been released. This new version includes bug and security fixes. It’s good to see that Wordpress is still being actively maintained.

“Version 2.1.1 includes about 30 bug fixes, mostly minor things around encoding, XML-RPC, the object cache, and HTML code.”

This means it’s time to upgrade Wordpress. You might experience some errors on the website while I’m upgrading. As usual, this shouldn’t take long.

Edit: the updating has finished.

I’ve installed a couple of new plugins and added a few things to the lay-out. To start with, I activated the spam filter because we got some spam-bot around here. Furthermore I added a sitemap and also a bookmarker. Now you can add a post to del.icio.us by clicking on the bottom link. But you can also do this by clicking in the new menu on the left. This new menu on the left also contains links to submit the post to technorati, dig, etc. I also fixed some small issues with the lay-out and theme. Last but not least I added threaded comments. This plugin allows you to reply to comments made by others. If there is anything else that should be added just give me a call, or message.

I love community’s, really. Especially those with a forum and chat so you can have a good time with other users who also visit that community. I think I’ve been visiting community’s since I had ADSL for the first time, which was around 2001-2002. ADSL allowed me to stay online the whole day and downloading without a 56k limit. I also prefer large community’s, that is if they are maintained well by their moderators and administrators. The first community I ever joined was the Operation Flashpoint community

Operation Flashpoint, talking about a good game. It was one hell of a war simulator. The Operation Flashpoint (OFP for short) was a mature community. The average age on the forums was quite high, and obviously I was young compared to the average age. But that didn’t matter. The OFP community helped each other, no matter what. I must say I have been playing OFP for quite a long period of time (2002-2005). But you have to move on some day.

The next community I visited was a Tibia community. Tibia is a free 2D MMORPG. The in-game community sucks big time. Less then half of all the players online actually speak to each other, since most consider everybody else being ‘PK’, ‘BR’ or ‘NOOB’. And beside that most of the people playing the game were kids, with no knowledge of the English language. Yep, that in-game community sucked. But luckily there were fan sites available which provided a much better community. Tibia.de was such a fan site.

Even though Tibia.de has a German TLD it was not entirely German. The forums, for example, were English. The Tibia.de community was O.K., it lacked maturity. While browsing the Tibia.de forums I noticed this section called Open Tibia. I noticed it was about so called ‘private servers’ for Tibia. It looked interesting for sure, so I decided to become active in that part of the forum. Eventually Tibia.de closed down the Open Tibia (OT) section of their forums. We all moved to otcommunity.

 Otcommunity was a fan site dedicated to OT, it had everything you need to get started with OT. I managed to become a moderator of the Dutch forums, and eventually a semi-admin of the whole forum. I noticed that I liked doing that kind of work. But to bad otcommunity didn’t worked out quite well. That was because the rules and guidelines for users and moderators were not clear. And it turned out a lot of forum moderators and administrators were inactive for one reason or another. So otcommunity turned into a big mess, it was time to move once again.

Welcome to OTfans, the number one Otserv community. Yorick invited me over at otcommunity to join him in his quest for a better world, eh… community! And so OTfans was born, and I was one of the administrators. OTfans has come quite far now, we even got our own licensed vBulletin board. Managing OTfans takes quite some time and luckily we got our well trained moderators *wink*! I think OTfans will be around here for a while.

I wonder where I will go after OTfans. There is huge chance I will be paying the Armed Assault (which is OFP is basically OFP 1.5) a visit. The demo was really great, only a little buggy. But so was OFP unpatched. But only time will tell where I will go! I have quite some experience with community’s now, and I must say I love managing community’s. You could see me as some sort of community manager.

As you might have noticed I haven’t updated my website for about 4 days. That’s because I’ve got a flu. A pretty bad one to be honest, I haven’t felt this bad since a long time. I hope I will be able to write some more at the end of this week. But right now I don’t feel like doing anything at all. I’m going back to bed, but I’ll be back!