Right now I do not have the time to write new articles and I know that there is a throng of readers out there who eagerly await my majestic writings so I decided to be gracious and draw your attention to an old series of articles, namely 'The History of Real Time Strategy Games'. This was written about two years ago and was a project by a guy known by the nickname Phantom for the Gamereplays.org website. Many people took part in it everyone writing articles about different games. Yours truly is responsible for the articles about WarCraft II and WarCraft III. I am really proud with my participation in this project. I am filled with pride by the very notion that I was and still am a part of the 'growing tech-savvy group calling themselves 'gamers'' that changed the world of entertainment and art in the 90s. Some people still try to downplay the importance of computer and video games, electronic sports and the cultural impact they bring but this group is slowly dying of old age. We are taking over the world and now all your culture is belong to us. If you are interested in the history of one of the most important genres of computer games you can download the PDF version here or read the original articles on the Gamereplays.org website starting here.

   Happy programmers' day to all programmers, IDE operators and PHP writers. We know that we and not those fancy business guys do the work that makes the world tick. Sometimes we are scared to death by this thought because we have seen it from the inside and we know how fragile our systems are but I am sure that if the giants could see us they would be proud.

   The day of the programmer is getting momentum and this year it has been accepted as an official professional holiday in Russia. Soon in your country!

   Abandon all hope you who read this, for this is where you will find how simple programming problems can turn out to be really hard. For our current project we wanted to implement a seemingly simple functionality – when the user posts a comment via a text area new lines should be converted to "<br />" in the resulting HTML, HTML tags should be encoded so our project would not be vulnerable to script injections and users would be able to post HTML in the comments and finally URLs should be detected and converted to links. Sounds simple? As soon as I was charged with this task I remembered reading a post by the wise Jeff Atwood on his famous blog Coding Horror about how hard URLs can be. The post deals with the issue of a closing parenthesis at the end of a URL and I immediately decided that I was going to ignore this issue like most systems do. However while working on this task I hit many more walls...

    Our team has just released the newest version of the Personal Website Engine - 1.2.1. In this version we have replaced the TinyMCE editor with the AJAX Control Toolkit editor. This one is a bit of a downgrade because TinyMCE has more features. However the AJAX Control Toolkit editor has better integration with ASP.NET and seems to be a bit faster and more stable. What is more we can make use of more controls from the toolkit in the future.

    We have also refactored the admin interface that had a lot of duplicate code between the add and edit functionality. Now they share a common control.

    Here is the new look of the admin part:



    As always you can download the source code and contribute from the project page at Codeplex. Please report any bugs you may encouter although we are incapable of writing buggy code so this would mean someone has sabotaged us.

   Мрежовите карти на клъстъра от сървъри, на които се помещава този не-блог се пукат по буксите от наплива на многомилионната ми аудитория също както Бургас се пукаше по шевовете на 14ти Август неспособен да побере народните маси придошли за Spirit of Burgas. На око изглежда, че на първия ден на фестивала са дошли тройно повече хора отколкото бяха дошли миналата година по същото време. Това направи невъзможно намирането на квартира в града (да не сме в Каварна?), за което е виновна само моята простотия. Явно подцених колко големи са хеадлайнерите тази вечер. Проблеми има и на входа където е настанало голямо блъскане. Към 8 и нещо успявам да се вмъкна и тръгвам на контролна обиколка по сцените...