It's the 31st of January — exactly one month since my cocky statement just before the New Year in which I promised to deliver at least one new Flash-based game per month throughout 2006.

So how's it going so far?

Well, except for the big blank spot under this

post, the schedule's going fairly well. I'm not defeated yet! I still have 22.5 hours (less time alloted to sleep, work, previous poker tournament commitments and Tivo viewings) to crank out this month's game.

Honest, it's coming.

Really. I mean it. Check back before midnight; it should be interesting to see what I can come up with before then!

Earlier this week, I updated the look of the site, so I figured what better excuse is there to finally upgrade the engine beneath it, too? Thus, I just spent the past half hour updating Turdhead.com to WordPress 2.0, and so far so good. If you see any glaring problems — or now of any snafus I should watch out for — please let me

know Otherwise, it's all systems go here.

Can't wait to play with the new API calls for plug-in development. Stay tuned for developments.

Apparently, one of the side effects of upgrading is that all our posts just got "republished." To all those seeing our old posts on aggregators, we sincerely apologize. Mea culpa.

It's been a while since I dabbled in developing Web interfaces using anything but Flash, and now I remember why: Everything else just sucks.

Having recently redesigned Turdhead.com's look and feel, I have renewed my love affair with Flash: Web designs that look just like I intended no matter what browser the user chooses to use.

Ever since Sun showed off its Hot Java browser as a multimedia alternative to the popular NCSA Mosaic in the 1990s, there's been no such thing as a true HTML Web standard — at least not in the sense that there is one thing you can do that any browser should be able to render consistently as you intended.

You can talk about such imaginary standards all day long, and the W3 Consortium can pretend they actually exist, but after 12 years of waiting for them to show up, I'm fairly convinced that no two browsers will ever render the same markup code — whether its HTML, XHTML, CSS or LMNOP — in the same way.

Sure, you can code your way around these "standards" by picking a few you like and writing bloated code that identifies, second-guesses and coerces each browser and shows it one of 18 different layouts depending on what User Agent the browser sends the server (assuming, of course, the browser does such a thing; one must never assume it actually will, though). But why???

Screw markup languages, their standards bodies and the vendors that choose to ignore them. Screw their limitations and screw their promises.

I'm going back to Flash. A few people may not be able to see it at all, but those who do will see exactly what I want 'em to see. And screw the rest.

Yes, it's another rant, and one that's been often repeated over the years. I'm tired, fed up and ticked off. I'd usually blame Microsoft and Internet Explorer, but who's to say their fake standards are any worse than anyone else's? (OK, I will, but regardless…) Dammit, I like Flash.

I may not have bathed in a week, and I'm beginning to dream in CSS and PHP, but it's finally arrived: Turdhead.com has a new look… and I think I'm actually happy with it. For two years now, I've been listening to questions like, "If you make your living in Flash and Web technologies, why does your site look like a 2-year-old crapped it out?" and "Do you really think your site looks any better than this?"

I've been well aware of the shortcomings of the old template for a while,

but to be honest, I couldn't figure out whether I cared enough to do anything about it. I like that Turdhead.com has always had a basic, no-nonsense look to it, but I appreciate that there is a difference between "old school" and "preschool." Thus, I hope you enjoy the new old school: a template I'm calling Turdhead Extra.
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