Site will be temporarily offline today from about 6pm to midnight (probably). Theoretically cloudflare should prevent this from being an issue as it should continue to serve up my content, but just incase…
Thanks!
The Portal problem
After playing Portal 2 co-operative through, a friend and I were chatting and realized a bit of an issue with the physics in Portal, and neither of us were sure if this is something Valve even thought of when producing the games.
The graphic to the left ((images for this post were generated with Omnigraffle using a stencil I produced from vector images obtained from here. All are unofficial)) shows a situation where in Portal 1 and 2 ((Portal is a registered trademark of Valve Software)), you could put a portal on the ceiling, and one on the floor, and basically fall “forever”. But, for those that have done it, you’ll remember that there was a terminal velocity that was reached where you couldn’t fall any faster. Terminal velocity being the speed at which the air resistance of the falling object is great enough to counteract the gravity that’s pulling the object down. And that rate changes based on the shape of the object (so a person falling with hands at his/her side, legs together, pointed down, will fall faster than someone falling spread out, chest down).
404’s and sitemaps
Just did a bit of a tweak to my site to address something that I always thought sucked, but never really looked into: 404s.
404s traditionally are ugly, and unhelpful. They say “can’t find what you’re looking for” and that’s about it. With the advances since PHP and CMS’s have come about, this doesn’t have to be the case. So, I’ve replaced my previously stock, and ugly, 404 page with the wonderful 404 info from Yoast, as well as implemented an HTML sitemap as per his other post here. The only other thing I did was modify the 404 page a bit so that if someone tries to look for a file on my site that’s a PNG, GIF, JPG, JS, etc, they get a basic “file not found”. This code came from here.
It’s all pretty boring, but I think it’ll make the user experience of my site a bit more friendly. And it’s more inline with Google’s current thoughts about 404 pages.