Other Stuff

Ed Mack Well, you've came this far, so I may aswell ramble about myself for a minute/eons. I'm Ed Mack (actually David, but thats another story) and I live in Northern Ireland. I have a really really cute cat, which you can see here. I have made previous sites, all dead for some reason or another. I made Roller Coaster Tycoon Maddness, which went well, and used a php engine, like this site does (notice how you are always viewing the same page, index.php???) only that one was more hard coded, and not as smart. It required the pages to be varibles (which have big problems when the yhave to include symbols like "quotes" ect...) and was more trouble than it was worth, bit the site went well. Next up was Simtycoons Simsville Section, hosted by the same guy that runs this server, only this time this space is mine for whatever I want (do see www.gamgeared.com, its a great site, and hosts this one. Weirdly I ended up making a games site.). This site used ssi, (a way of including files in one page) and wasn't as dynamic as this, which made it very hard to update (though not hard to make small changes). And then comes this site (I'm only going through the main ones). I converted this site to use a very dynamic php engine, and a nice new look due to personal want and popular request (I agree, the last look was a bit boring). Now every page is just some words in a single file, with perhaps some little html for links, enbolding ect... but mostly content is kept very far away from look. The engine is easy to update, and can show you images on their own page as well (one of its many features) so everything keeps the look. I also created Clan Directory, an Asp script for Gamegeared.com (my hosts). All this was developed on PWS (Personal Web Server) that comes free on the Windows 98 cd, with PHP parsing added, which you can download from Zend.com for many webservers. This setup allows me to create the site through the day, and then at night when I can go online, upload it. This is a lot easier and faster than the usual method of write, upload, try, re-write, upload, try and ifnd more bugs.. which also requires you to be online, which cuts down developement time too. Well, I'll probably update this sometime, as I'm not dead :) This site now resides on my own hosting, with the wonderful people at www.justthehost.co.uk Along with other bits of info. the name project is now gone, since I lost the data from when there was lots of interest, and the code was a hack and just falling apart, sorry. Anyway, I'm about 2 years older now, and still do play Startopia. It is still one of the better Sim type games and I really wish that it had got better advertising and took of, as Muckyfoot really deserved the cashflow for such an interesting, funny and unique game. Everything down to the credits is Hilarious. I just hope Muckyfoot bring out another god type game.