AcornArtwork Blog

If there’s something I’ve always been avoiding to draw, it’s nature landscapes and elements. I find foliage, trees, rocks, water, mountains, and even grass hard to paint realistic, because I’ve never invested any time practising drawing those. But since I want to be an overall better digital painter, (and let’s face it, those elements are nearly impossible to avoid), I figured it was about time to do something about it. I started painting loads of grass, trees and rocks. The first several paintings looked like a kid had drawn them. Seriously. I’d take a step back, look at the painting, and decide it was so bad that I never bothered to finish it. I kept trying, acquired a few good Photoshop brushes, learned how to use them, and gradually I learned a few tricks. Finally I had enough confidence to actually finish my first nature based painting.

The original: Screenshot from the game

Whenever I try to learn how to paint something new, I always look at references – images or photos – or use some kind of image as a starting point. Inspired from the recent repainted Monkey Island games, I figured I’d try the same. That way I have a basic image with room for taking some liberties. I found a screenshot from the adventure game Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis (1992), a game I played when I was much younger. The scene consists of several nature elements I find difficult to paint: grass, bushes, trees, mountains and skies – but also a parrot, a wooden stall and an old Mayan temple, all of which I’ve never tried to draw before.

The scene repainted

I’m far from fully satisfied with the finished painting, but it had so many intertwined layers that it would be easier to start over than to change something. So I decided that’d do for my first finished painting consisting mostly of nature elements, and rather continue practising on new paintings. I still have a long way to go, and I hope to finish something better next time.

Around Easter I started a personal project on creating a Griddler game (read the post here). The ultimate goal is to develop an Android-based Griddler game, but as for now I want to begin with a web-based version. Since late April I've laid the project on pause of several reasons. For one, I got myself a job in May and I no longer have as much free time as I had being a student. I'm also currently busy developing a web site for a school in my free time (more on that later). But this rainy weekend in June the Griddler game project got picked up again.

Deciding to further develop the project is more or less inspired from work, where I'm working with jQuery and was reminded how awesome it is. I also learned a few new things at work, for example how to use Ajax in my scripts. And I also seem to finally be able to adjust to working hours versus free time. But enough talk already, let's get to the project. Its progress has been rapid, and my brain has been twisted in ways it has never been twisted before. In other words, I've learnt alot. And I love that. (...)

Wordpress is an excellent and popular CMS, mainly used by bloggers but also used for managing non-blogging web sites. But in many cases people want to use the Wordpress system only as a part of a site, allowing them to use their own code or perhaps another CMS as a frame on the website. So how can we take advance of Wordpress' many functions, such as displaying the latest posts, on a non-Wordpress page? It's really not difficult, you only need some PHP lines in the pages where you want to integrate Wordpress. This guide'll tell you how.

Just to make it clear, in order to integrate Wordpress into your non-Wordpress site, Wordpress must be installed somewhere on the same site, for example in a sub-directory (popularily called blog). This site, AcornArtwork, is not managed with Wordpress or another CMS. It consist of selfwritten php- and html-pages in different subdirectories and one external CSS stylesheet. But the blog you are currently reading is powered by Wordpress, installed in the subdirectory blog. I have created my own theme for Wordpress so the blog looks just like it's a part of the rest of AcornArtwork. This way I can take advance of Wordpress' blog functions for my blog, but can also integrate the blog's content with my other pages, such as my portfolio subdirectory or front page. If you click into my portfolio in the menu above, you'll see a sidebar displaying my latest posts that are related to the chosen category. And on the front page you can see a list of the latest posts. These pages do not reside inside Wordpress. Enough talk, let's get to the how! (...)

Edit: I've added a working example in the sidebar to the right, "My Facebook status updates". The code is exactly the same as shown below, except I've wrapped it inside a Wordpress widget. I've omitted the linkback for privacy reasons.

After having written a working pure PHP code to fetch and parse both Twitter tweets and general RSS feeds such as Wordpress blogs, I was curious of how I could do the same with another popular social media, Facebook. Just as the other two I'm interested in writing a code simple as possible with no additional libraries, scripts or software that needs to be installed, and no JavaScript.

Writing a feed parser for Facebook turned out being a little trickier than Twitter or for general purposes. First of all I was looking for status updates only, not anything else, such as people "liking" stuff, comments, activities such as games, wall posts and so forth. It's really a matter of privacy. You wouldn't want your name or comment to be displayed for the public on your unknown friend's friend's blog, would you? So in a way Facebook status updats only becomes like Twitter, a channel that displays your latest thoughts or happenings. But with good help of time, Googling and pieces from here and there, I have assembled and now sharing a working pure PHP feed parser that fetches and displays your Facebook status updates. (...)

I'm not a Twitter user myself, but displaying your latest Twitter updates (or tweets) somewhere on your blog or website has increasingly become popular. And since I've written a pure PHP RSS2.0 feed parser earlier, I decided to try writing one targeted at Twitter. As always I'm always looking for the simplest solution which requires as little additional software, scripts or external libraries as possible, preferably none if this is at all possible. After some digging and modifying my existing basic RSS feed parser, I've written, and now sharing, a pure PHP code which retrieves and displays your tweets. You only need your Twitter username and PHP (version 4 and up I believe).

This is meant as a tutorial for someone who is looking for something just as simple as this, or a pointer for someone who is wish to write a complex feed parser for social medias. It's targeted at people who know and understand some PHP beforehand. This code is as simple as it gets, including only the absolutely necessary things. This excludes for example error handling. I would also prefer that you read through and write it out yourself, not just copy-paste it. If you write it out yourself you can customize it to your liking, and you learn much more. (...)

Most Norwegians spend their Easter somewhere up a mountain in a cabin, skiing, and eating oranges and "Kvikk Lunsj". I'm spending my Easter holiday nerding, scripting, occasionally shouting out frustration moans, tweaking and Googling by my computer in my apartment in the middle of Oslo city. (Yes, I'm a nerd and proud of it!) More specifically, I'm diving into old skills of programming, aiming to create a software or platform where you can solve Griddler puzzles. What is Griddler, you ask? I'll explain.

Solving a Picross puzzle at picross-time.net

Griddler is a logic puzzle game that has many aliases, such as "Nonograms", "Paint by Numbers" or maybe more familiar for the Nintendo DS fans, Picross. Griddler is very similar to the popular Sudoku puzzle game; they both consist of a grid where you have to logically figure out what and where to put in stuff inside the cells. Whereas Sudoku requires you to fill in numbers, Griddler requires you to fill the cells entirely and leave some blank according to the numbers in the leftmost and topmost rows and columns. The goal is to fill the whole grid according to the clues given and reveal a hidden picture.

Griddler is my favourite puzzle game, and is great for killing time on the bus or so. I have been solving Griddler puzzles for many years, on paper, in my Nintendo DS and lately at picross-time.net, a Flash-based website that has more than a thousand puzzles available, created by other players. So if I have all these places to solve puzzles available, why do I want to create my own? (...)