So long Halo 3 Players…
Due to a general lack of interest (I’m assuming most players of Halo 3 have moved on to Halo: Reach by now) and a lack of resources, time and money, I’ve decided to discontinue Halo 3 Players in it’s present form. I would really love to rewrite the whole thing for Halo: Reach at some point in the future but I am not sure when I will be able to get this done so I’m not going to tease anyone by saying “soon”. I appreciate all the support from Halo 3 Players. We started out as the underdog and slowly but surely ended up being the most used Halo 3 stats app on Facebook. Halo 3 Players was my first “large” project and I had a lot of fun writing it. I hope to have just as much fun writing every else in my near and far future. I apologize for the lack of notice to the few active users Halo 3 Players still has.
Stay tuned here for more info on what I’m working on and if Halo: Reach Players ever does materialize, I’ll post about it here first.
It’s been a fun ride!
Halo Reach API
Bungie has finally gone and released their API. This would have been a god send when I was creating Halo 3 Players way back in the day. You have to be a Bungie Pro member to get your API key.
The API documentation providers in the stats API group on bungie.net didn’t please me ascetically so I went ahead and reformatted it a little bit and threw it online here. Feel free to use that for a quick reference guide if it suits you better than Bungie’s official documentation.
Also, it looks like the community is ramping up pretty quickly. HaloReachAPI.net is a new wiki that went up already and looks to be a pretty great resource for anyone using the Reach API. Head over there and contribute if you can!
Halo: Reach (Review)
Halo has always been one of my favorite franchises as far as gaming goes. The balance between fun and competition has always been perfect and it has provided me with countless hours of enjoyment since I picked up my first xbox and Halo: Combat Evolved. I have a couple of thoughts about Bungie’s last hoorah in the Halo universe after getting acquainted with the game for two weeks.
I should have posted this two weeks ago. Those of you not living under a rock already know by now that the final game in my favorite franchise was released. Review to follow!
Xbox 360 Wireless Headset Problem
I’ve been having a strange problem with my wireless Xbox 360 headset that would not let it sync to player 1. It kept going straight to player’s 2-4 (even though there was no controller connected for those players). It turns out, after using a wired headset for so long, some sort of buildup inside the connector tricks the controller into thinking it still has a headset connected. I blew out the connector at the bottom of the controller and wiggled a toothpick around in all 3 of the holes and low and behold, it worked! I can’t be certain this isn’t going to crap out on me or anything, but I saw a lack of support for this issue on google so I thought I’d throw it out there and hope it helps someone.
Mephisto Plugin for Twitter
I’m late to the bus. I just found twitter yesterday and I think it’s a pretty cool concept. It’s nothing entirely useful, but it’s just fun. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve HEARD of twitter, just never tried it out until yesterday. Also, yesterday, I started screwing around with Dan Webb’s mephisto plugin for lastfm. What do these 2 things have in common you might be wondering? After looking at how easy it was to grab an xml file with users timelines from twitter via their api, I realized how easy it would be to modify Dan’s excellent lastfm plugin to work with twitter. So that’s what I did. I created a quick edit of the lastfm mephisto plugin to create my very own twitter mephisto plugin!
It seems to work pretty well. I’m actually intending on making it a little more feature packed in the future. There’s not a whole lot more you can do with it considering Twitter’s super duper simplicity, but I might take a stab at adding basic authentication so you can view ALL of your timelines with this plugin or maybe even come up with some way that you can edit create new status messages from your blog or your blogs admin page (when mephisto matures a little more to support admin plugins). Anyways, enough blabbing by me. Here’s the 411 on how to use it.
Install it like so from your mephisto root.
script/plugin install http://svn.dnite.org/mephisto_twitterRestart your mephisto (I’m pretty sure this is necisary to load up the new plugin) and you can edit your layout page (or any of your liquid pages) to include your twitter status!
{% twittertimeline user: 'swemoney', type: 'user_timeline' as status %}
{{ status.text }} - {{ status.relative_created_at }}
{% endtwittertimeline %}If you want to know where your at in the loop, twittertimeline.index will return that for you. Any questions, post them here!
New Trac Theme!
I’m not a huge fan of the default Trac theme and, as far as I could find, there aren’t many other themes in distribution. So I decided to throw together a theme that would go well with this blog. You are all more than welcome to give it a try if you’d like. Tell me what you think. Give me suggestions. Whatever you feel like. A lot of credit has to go to evil.che.lu for the excellent theme to work with. Try Me!
