I decided early on that I did not want to do pre-designed invitations and Save the Dates (STDs). None of them feel like Zelda. Almost all of them are flowery motif crap. So I designed all of my own stationary, instead.

I've heard the STDs are a chance to be fun and show your personality, whereas the invitations are more formal. I gave the design a very Wind Waker like style and added a cute drawing of Mike and I on it in a paper cut style. I reused some elements from the website design.

I got the design printed on postcards from psprint.com (fast, cheap, great quality!). It cost $30 for 100 printed cards and shipping (but I only mailed 70 of them). I then purchased envelopes for $25 through amazon.

Include postage and the total came out to about $1.25 each. Not bad, eh?

Being a web designer, there was no doubt that Mike and I would have our very own wedding website. You can visit it at ZeldaWedding.com (I was surprised no one else snagged this domain).

A wedding website is useful for:

This page has a variety of images from Legend of Zelda and gives people a sense of what the game is about and the spirit of what we're going for.

Many of our vendors were unfamiliar with our venue, so we provided some pictures to give a sense of what the place is like; outdoors and woodsy.

Every wedding is different. Some are a formal and elegant affair, while others are more laid back. It was important to me that our vendors understood that this was meant to be a light hearted, colorful, and whimsical event. A word cloud is a simple way to communicate this.

Most weddings usually have one, maybe two colors that are used. But I wanted it to be clear to our vendors that we are using the full rainbow of colors. These are all colors that I thought felt most like The Wind Waker. I didn't stick strictly to these colors because it's difficult to get exact matches of fabrics, etc, but I did use it as a starting point.

More posts to come soon!

I've probably re-written the following blog entry countless times. I've struggled to find the right words without sounding too depressing or long winded.

So let's just keep it simple...

October 2009 to October 2010 was 12 months of hell. My Dad was diagnosed with Frontal Lobe Dementia and my life had been consumed with dealing with the emotional challenges of seeing my Dad's mind deteriorate, the stress of pursuing a conservatorship, his objections to the whole thing, moving him into assisted living, clearing out his house, and a financial battle with his siblings.

There wasn't much time for personal projects or blogging. But thankfully, my involvement now is minimal. He has a professional conservator taking care of his needs and financial affairs.

Now I can get back to wedding planning and get on with my life.

I previously mentioned that I would start rewriting much of my code on PaperDemon to become its own platform. Recently I completed a Comment component. I rewrote the old commenting system completely to be easily configurable, powered by sexy jquery and ajax goodness. I can now easily have one set of code to power each comment section for art, writing, comics, blogs and soon I'll be adding comments to photos and possibly other stuff too.

A major part of the comments rewrite was to get rid of the pop ups. Previously, when you went to post a comment, a pop up would appear where you'd type up your comment. Popups are annoying and outdated. Instead, it's now right there on the page when you're viewing an artwork entry. A major strategy behind this interface change is that by making that comment box readily available, I hope it will entice more users to post a comment.

So far, it appears to be working. But I'll be watching the data closely as time goes on.

So I've been working on rewriting my code into almost like a turnkey website sort of thing where i can easily install it on other websites. But I'm not quite sure of the best way to do it. But one thing that's really made a lot of decisions easier is Smarty. Man I can keep the display component completely separate. Totally awesome. Unfortunately, you can't define multiple template directories. I was hoping to keep all art gallery stuff in one folder, all profile stuff in another folder, etc. But then again, keeping all the templates in one folder may make sense if you want to make it so the designer can only access the template files.

jQuery has been really helpful as well. It's been really quick to turn an app into an ajax one. Damnit I love Ajax. And I've been playing around with jQuery UI which has some nifty features too. I hope to convert all my ajax stuff from Sarissa to jQuery.

It's really hard to organize everything though. It may make sense to keep everything related to a component (such as art gallery, photo gallery, web page cms, profile) in its own folder. In that folder would be the php class, php pages, template files, JS, CSS. But it's hard to do that. Sure you could put all the JS together in one folder, all the PHP in another, etc. But then when you need to install a component in another site you gotta copy paste stuff into like 5 different folders rather than just copying one folder.

Still trying to figure it out. Maybe it shouldn't be componentized. Maybe everytime I install my software on a site they get all the components. I dunno. I need help with this one.

 I'm pretty excited to say that I'm getting back into working on my animation projects again. My friends are excited too. This past weekend we recorded the finale for Zarbon's Masterpiece Theater. This episode is pretty epic. So epic that it will require me to storyboard it. Something I've never done for ZMT.

And we are getting back into working on the other new Anime Spoof show which we still don't have a name for. Anyway, I'm fucking excited. Yeah.

BogusRed Out!

Oh and I just watched Snakes on a Plane. I hate that movie.

 Just about every PHP programmer has heard of or used Smarty Templates.

I had heard of it a long time ago, but only just recently started using it. For the longest time, I have been using good old phpLib's Template.inc. It is simple and suits most of my needs. But it's quite old. I've been using it for like 7 years.

A colleague of mine convinced me to try out Smarty. I used it to create a new RSS feature for PaperDemon.com's blogs (and also added an RSS feed for my blog on BogusRed.net as well, subscribe to me!). I did it using Smarty because it seamed like a good thing to templatize and also because Smarty has a really good caching system. So if people's RSS readers are constantly pinging the RSS feed pages, the PHP won't have to pull from the database every time. +1 for performance!

I've been wanting to redo my keyword system on PaperDemon for a while. There were a couple things I wanted to change about it. One was to change it from storing the text of each keyword everytime it's used. The other, is I wanted to change it to a tag cloud where it makes the common words larger and less common words smaller. I love this type of visualization of data.

So I decided today was going to be the day that I build my tag cloud class. And it only took me a day's work to finish it! So far I have only integrated it into the Blogs system. This is because PaperDemon's blog system did not have a keyword/tag system yet so it was easy to plop one in. You can see the start of our very own blogging tag cloud here:

http://www.paperdemon.com/blogs/

I will migrate artwork and comics to it eventually. However, I'd have to first migrate any existing data into the tag cloud which is not going to be an easy feat. Especially considering artwork has +75,000 keyword entries.