Oh well... hi there! It's been a long time since my last entry, I would like to take this opportunity to make some announcements and sort out the reasons of the lack of updates lately.

One of the reasons was the ads inserted by my webhosting provider until a few days ago, it was only a test on the profitability of the sites they host and they have announced it with plenty of anticipation. But the ads broke the page layout and that pissed me off.

Another reason is the increasing difficulty to find a demo to feature on the only semi-constant column on my blog, the Sunday Demo Show.
I have been thinking of discontinue the column entirelly, or transform it into a general retro-Scene related column, featuring not only demos but graphics and music too. Haven't decided yet which path to follow.

About the 3D projects I was posting about, the 3D Commodore 64 is canned at the moment. I've enter the current Hardcore Modeller Challenge on CGTalk, you can follow my progress here.

The announcement I talked about is the 'new' URL address for this site:

Retrocomputacion.com inaugurates new frontpage with new features:

• News items
  
• User submited content such as articles and tutorials
• A new categorized link page
• Renewed collection section, each user can submit and edit his/her collection items.
  

Due to a small error in the comment form, (& were accidentally replaced by &) it was imposible to post comments. It's fixed now.

That's right, a year ago, 19th of September of 2006; SolidState started. It's not a very active blog, and I've been maintaining the blog code more time than I actually spend writing posts.

New Design

As you may see, the blog sports a brand new design since today, originally based on a  free template by STUDIO7DESIGNS, it has heavy modifications both in design as in function.
Also added an RSS feed displayer at the bottom of the page.

New Engine

Since early august, the site has been running fully based on flatfile databases. That required a lot of coding, but the final result is almost as good as when it used MySQL. The only drawback is that the blog becomes slow at the high transit hours.
On a previous post, I stated that this flatfile engine was only to be used until the time I get 50 posts on the host's forum. Well, it turned out that when the day came for all accounts w¡thout 50 posts to lose access to MySQL; the host changed the rules again and the only way to activate MySQL after that day was by paying a small fee.
I'm not going to pay any fee, so the flatfile will stay for undetermined time.

Wiki (Spanish Only)

In the navigation bar on top of the page you'll notice a new 'Wiki' link, by clicking it you'll be sended to Wikifericos, a wiki about old computer peripherals & expansions.
There's almost zero information in there right now, as I got into rewriting the blog engine and redesign just after I started the wiki.
The wiki is only available in spanish and will remain that way for the time being.

Due to a new policy in my host (110mb.com), which states that 50 posts in the host forum are needed to keep the mySQL database working after August 5th, and as I have only half that  amount of post, starting next month SolidState will fall back to a flatfile db.
This means that page execution will take double the time to process than before.

No data will be lost in the migration process, and visually the blog will be the same. At least until I finish a new template I'll be working on.

This will last until I get the required 50 posts on that forum, but it will take a while.

Just found this on AkihabaraNews:


PC Darts is an USB dart Dashboard manufactured by Epoch and available in Japan for 120€. Comes with software with various game modes.
See a simmilar old product after the jump...

This is an entry that I've been delaying for some time now, and is about the mods I did to the original script used in this blog.
This blog is based in the PluggedOutBlog script by Jonathan Beckett; the first thing I added was the bilingual capacity. After that I added image gallery capacity by modifying the iFrame Gallery script.
I took the idea (and part of the CSS) of the entry thumbnails you can see on the sidebar from DannyChoo.com
A modification the reader can't see is the ability to embed .txt files onto an entry content, with the double advantage of not using mySQL space and be able of design the entry in pure html rather that bbcode.
Finally, originally the blog script didn't had the capacity to paginate the entries, to achieve that, I used the great Paginator script, written by Jorge Pinedo

Well, the site back online, but there is some glitches as you can see on the top of the page...
There is also some missing files, but I'm going to upload those later tonight.
Update: The scripting problems has been resolved, still some files left to upload....
Update2: Finally!!! Everything seems to be working fine and all the files have been uploaded. If you find anything wrong please leave a comment

After the installation of CPanel on this page host (110mb.com) we're back online!!!