What I've been up to - 10311

My weekend was pretty busy with projects - or more specifically, games ;) I spent the weekend burning people up in Team Fortress 2, as I had recently found The Backburner, and setting up a Minecraft server on a spare computer I had laying around.

It went pretty well, I used MineOS Crux for the OS, a really nice bare bones Linux distro made specifically for running a Minecraft server. I had it up and running in minutes, and after sorting out some issues with my network adapter, it’s running great.

After I set it up, I noticed it was a bit laggy when myself and my friend did resource-intensive stuff like blowing up 10 TNT (this is in Minecraft 1.8, btw) and it even crashed a couple times while we were exploring. Well, yesterday I found an awesome plugin for Bukkit, appropriately titled “NoLagg”. And it’s one heck of a plugin. My friend and I successfully blew up 34,580 blocks of TNT without one bit of lag. I was surprised.

Later, we tried 92,460 blocks of TNT in the Nether, and it ran great for a while, until the server got so overloaded it stopped receiving connections. However, after stopping it safely and starting it back up again, the crater was there, so that was great :) I can’t believe it took that much TNT to blow it up though.

Also been experimenting with CloudFlare’s RocketLoader, it’s still got a lot of issues with the JavaScripts used on my forum. But I think I’ll be able to work with it by switching it on in manual mode and editing some <script> tags so they can be used with it. I think the social buttons will be a great place to start with that. They’re one of the slowest parts of the site.

I’ve also been experimenting with Vanilla as well. I realized day before yesterday how powerful it can be to put the topics directly in front of the members, instead of giving them a load of forums and leaving them clueless as to where to start. I think my next forum will be using Vanilla, with WordPress as well. They fit so well together.

Another thing on my mind was which direction I wanted EC to go. I know we’re a technology forum, but that’s really broad and unspecific in my opinion, now that I’ve thought about it. I think we should move into opening support forums, and providing dedicated sections or tabs for each subject, such as Technology, Internet, and Gaming. I’m not sure how I’m going to do the tabs, IPB doesn’t seem to have such a plugin, but it would be awesome if I found one.

So that was my weekend. Might make this weekend post an everyday thing, but I don’t know yet ;)