NeWs! Compatible

Posted on April 1, 2012 by Ben

Hello folks,

Just a quick post testing a few new features of the website.

First off you’ll notice that the Ben-A-Ball website has received a makeover, it’s now more compatible and less glitchy. It also works on mobile devices far better now.
There is now a new ’Quick Post’ option in the sidebar, I actually used it to write this post, so, yeah… If you want to be quick.
Better ratings system, I’ve replaced the old star rating system with a better one, also you can now rate comments
Universal activity feed, click the ’Activity’ button in the lower menu to see what everyone on the site is doing
Fixed categories, also added the ’Productions’ category to the top bar
Ben-A-Ball to NeWs! user share. Now you can log into the NeWs! website with your Ben-A-Ball account, you can also log into Ben-A-Ball using your NeWs! account. But in a less confusing manner, think of it this way. Now the NeWs! website and the Ben-A-Ball website share the same users.
Built-in Time Travel, users can now travel back in time, just send me a blood sample in the mail, followed by all your banking details and we’re good to go. (I kinda missed out on April fool-ing people… so, there we go. IT’S A JOKE, though money would be nice.)

Well I think that’s it,

Have to go… good day!

New Stuff! A fresh start+

Posted on February 26, 2012 by Ben

Hello, how do you do!?

So there’s going to be some big changes here, not changes that will force you to go explore and re-learn the website. Oh no, I think I’m done with the redesigning for now. But what is new will definitely clean up the site, introduce you a form of entertainment on Wednesday nights, bring all my works together, and make this blog/site a way better experience. I’ve got new shoes, a haircut, a more annoying personality and sleep deprivation from thinking this through all last night. BUT, nonetheless, I know what I’m doing (Probably.)

So what’s going on?

Ben-A-Ball United

No, I’m not starting up a football team… although that would be quite interesting… Since I started Ben-A-Ball I’ve been using all these different free services such as Zymic and 4Shared, Box.net and Dropbox. There are many others that do different things, but the point is, it’s very untidy. By clicking on a download link for one of my programs it would take you to 4Shared or Box.net, although this is nice, it really takes away from the site, because it just feels … messy.

Zymic.com is a free hosting service that I joined in 2009 when I had my old blog, the reason I created it was that my old blog, (On Blogger.com) couldn’t store files, so I wanted something I could use to post downloads and stuff on. I also used it as an update server for all my programs. My account is now gone, I’ve deleted it. I haven’t pushed updates to all my programs, so they’re going to be a bit lost. Unfortunately people will have to come to the site and download new versions of the programs when they’re ready. The other problem with Zymic is that because it’s a free service, many people create dangerous virus-ridden sites, this means that the shared IP is blacklisted and you can’t actually access my site on there.

I also used Zymic to send game development news to my games, I apologise to those incredibly weird people who actually still have those games, and play them. But it’s for the best. I’m bringing it all to this site.

Ben-A-Ball Downloads

One thing that the Downloads section of the website never offered very well, is downloads. They were displayed inside a disgusting grid and were linking to all other websites and … yeah, yuck. But now, Ben-A-Ball Downloads, is awesome. Now its cleaner, displays all content created by myself, and you can easily download Software, Graphics and more organised by category.

Free Media

It’s also exciting to introduce the Free Media category of the Downloads Page, basically if you have a project to do, whether you make money out if it or not, there’s now a growing collection of completely free media to use. I plan to release “Ben’s Library” at some stage, which is my own collection of photography, recorded sound effects and music which I’ve built up over the years for use in my own videos and graphics. So something to look forward to if you’re a YouTube developer who is sick of all those pesky copyright notices.

Ben-A-Ball Podcast

At this stage the Ben-A-Ball Podcast isn’t pumping out anything at all, but it will be soon, hence the reason iTunes has turned its nose up at it. I planned on making the Ben-A-Ball Podcast about the posts I write on this blog, so, it will be. Every week a new podcast will come out, but they won’t appear on iTunes to begin with, so, that’s where this next heading comes in.

Talking about podcasts, want to hear something really exciting? For those that like NeWs! a school show that I’m the producer of, you might be interested to here that the NeWs! Podcast is now available on the iTunes Store! In case you missed it! Click here, here or here.

Vlog My Blog

Call it a late decision for a New Year’s Resolution, I will be producing this show that will be on every Wednesday on YouTube, it will be myself talking about the post of the week, (next heading will explain that) and discussing it further. It’s also useful if you would rather listen than read. Can I keep up this ridiculous idea? Am I really that crazy to stress myself out even more? This year is going to be a lot harder than last year, and I was dying last year with time limits and such… Ah, I can sense the stress creeping up already. This series will be very different to usual videos I’ve been taunting people with for the past 3 years on YouTube, so I’ll probably lose that fan base… yeah, 4 people, I think I can handle that. [It's actually 120 odd, they must be alien like me.] So hopefully you’ll tune in here and enjoy the series every week throughout 2012. This podcast/show will start on the last week of February, possibly sooner!

Post-letics

Well that didn’t really work, it’s meant to mean Post-letics as in Posting and athletics together, so that it’s almost like a sport. The spell check just came up and told me that I meant “Prosthetic.” What I mean by ‘Prosthetics’ is that I’ll now be posting more regularly, once a week in fact. Sometimes there might be more than one post a week, if I’m feeling extremely argumentative. These posts will all be about 500 words+, so reasonably short, yet still a bit of a read. They’re about half the length of this post. I feel that I will definitely have a few complaints with this one, something tells me I won’t be able to keep up, so, if that is the case, just shhhhh.

Author Resources 2.0

The Author Resources page was a measly attempt at helping authors of Ben-A-Ball write posts, and since it was created the site has changed so much that the stuff that’s on there doesn’t really work anymore. SO! The Author Resources page has been revamped to help out Authors in a more clean, informative and useful manner. Yeah, yeah, so at the moment it doesn’t look as flash, it’s more like a downgrade, but who cares! Off you go Authors! Get cracking!

Eycon – USB Customiser 2.0

What’s this? If you haven’t heard of it, Eycon – USB Customiser is one of my programs, and it’s recently received a fantastic makeover along with bug fixes, tweaks, enhancements, and a built-in icon gallery for those that can’t be bothered searching the web for an icon. The next program I have to finish off is Scribble’s Notepad 2 as well, so that’s coming some time this year I hope.

SO! There we go! A list of things to come, things that are coming, things that are already here and meh…

It’s going to be an exhausting 2012!

Time to fix that

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Ben

Hey there!

Whoooah . . . rather excited/nervous . . . basically because MyState has finally uploaded all the MyState Film Festival entrants to their YouTube page, and mine happens to be one of them. As shabby as it may be, and as much as it annoys me to see every little glitch and hear every little sound problem; there’s simply nothing more to do then to accept your effort and hope for the best.

But I won’t talk about that now . . . I’ll write a post about the film festival later on, for now I wanted to talk about this new change to the site, not just the visual change, but also in what I actually want this website to be.

You’ll notice the new theme, it’s bright, clean and lightweight. A look I’ve actually been trying to get for a long time now, when I’ve had the time to procrastinate of course. I tried many different lightweight, bright themes, but the problem is many of them simply weren’t the right layout for the content that this site produces. One of the themes I tried out is this one here:

Yes it looks rather nice doesn’t it?

It’s a beautiful theme called Minimatica made by One Designs. I really loved this theme a lot, and actually considered ditching my entire site and just starting clean with it. But it really wasn’t a very thoughtful option considering I had many other authors using the site. Along with the added problem that every post requires pictures a picture for it to really look good . . . since I don’t usually post pictures in my blogs it would have been an extra inconvenience, resulting in fewer blogs. Nonetheless I fiddled around with this theme for a considerable amount of time, trying to integrate it with the social platform BuddyPress, which controls all the snazzy friendship, profile and wiki features on this site. However, finally I decided to just forget about it. I had things priorities elsewhere (the MyState Film Festival being one of them.) and really needed to just leave things as they were, leaving my dreams of clean, shiny interfaces aside for another day.

The current theme I’m using is a self-modified version of Frisco by David Carson. I stumbled across this theme the other day, the first decent looking BuddyPress-compatible theme I’d seen . . . ever . . . I added the theme, made a few tweaks . . . then decided I wanted it EVEN CLEANER.

So OFF WITH THE HEAD . . . er!

I removed the logo, the category navigation bar from the header, and placed them so that they only appear on the main page. One person kindly said that “it’s bad web design” to have the navigation and logo only appear on the main page. But I actually disagree, and also ask the question . . . Why?

What makes it bad web design? Why must we see the logo on every page of the website? It actually speeds loading times up by not having to load my jQuery logo slider (vSlider) on every single page, besides, it gives the site a great clean feel, and a quite unique feel at that. If you’re logged in, I urge you to click on your name in the sidebar, just look at how nice the profile view looks. No silly logos or non-relevant navigation bars in sight, just a beautiful large profile that actually makes you want to use it. It just feels right, no distractions.

For those that think I’m silly for setting the site up like this, that I’m “Doing it wrong” obviously haven’t heard this inspirational speech about being different by Steve Jobs, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA. When Steve passed away the other week I was shattered, he is without a doubt one of the most influential people this planet has ever seen. I don’t care if you have a thing against Apple, I don’t care if you have no interest in technology, and I don’t care if you don’t care. Without him this world would be a very different place. If you think otherwise then leave this site, because you’re obviously an ignorant prat.

BACK ON TOPIC

Basically the one thing that’s been annoying my about this site, is that unless I’ve got something to rage about, there’s not really that much content on here. I actually think it’d be a lot better if I actually wrote about things like videos I’m working on, songs, filming, photographing. Whatever it is I may be doing.

I want my posts to be more intriguing and interesting and less, raging and ranting.

Well, hope you enjoyed this “short” post better get back to work, I’ll post some cool stuff when I get more time. =)

Ben,

New Features! Let me explain.

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Ben

Aloha! . . . oh wow, that’s how you spell it? I thought that the spell checker was going to throw a fitzy at me . . . oh, there we go, “fitzy” is underlined in a blood red wiggly line, oh technology, you’d be a beech.

Okay, onto business! I’m here to tell you about a few new things that I’ve added/fixed with the site, this is the reason it was offline a few times . . . I ran into a spot of bother here and there . . . Here’s a little list of the things I’ve added:

CHANGES

New link checker thing! It plays YouTube videos from links on posts, and even allows you to search a term by highlighting it, handy dandy! It allows you to stay nice and comfy on this site while you access further content.	New Forum! This new forum no longer has the stupid glitches when posting topics or replies, the only downside is that it’s no longer integrated with the groups… But it works!	New Point System! You can earn points by visiting the site, commenting on things, writing blog posts, these points can then be used in the store to purchase stuff!	New Group Wiki! Now creating a group on Benaball.com is even better, start a group with friends and all work on a project or book. You can all modify it and add to it, similar to Wikipedia.
New Report button! Is there a nasty spamming mongrel trying to sell stuff? Or a rude arrogant mongrel that obviously came across this site by mistake and is picking on you? You can now visit their profile and report them using the “Report User” button!	Random posts widget! Come on, let’s relive some of our awesome content from the past. The random post widget found somewhere in the sidebar, shows off a selection of posts from the site at random.	Resources button! Up along the top bar that hovers with you, you will find the “Resources” button, this takes you to the Author Resources area, where you can read how-to’s . . . the page itself needs to be updated . . .	Auto-direct! When you log in you are now taken straight to where you wanna be, your profile. So have fun?

There are other minor little tweaks and bits around the place. But apart from that, if you’re interested, I’ve stuck the main new features into this video here:

New Features – September

There’s another feature right in front of your eyes! See it?

There’s a small video icon next to the link above, hover your mouse over it and you get to play the video! Tadaa!

The point system is going to need a few tweaks, I obviously won’t be selling the NeWs! Tshirts in the store for points because I’d lose far too much money, and I’d end up selling my cardboard box to survive.

Things that you’ll be able to purchase is stuff like upgrades, pictures, games, music.

Legal of course, I’m not posting other people’s games or music, it’ll all be my own, or other members work.

Well thanks for reading and enjoy the new features!

Ben,