Christmas giveaway winner

Christmas is here and, as promised, i will giveway the game “Mystery Case Files: Huntsville“. I used random.org’s list shuffler to create a winner from a very short list. The participants as entered were:

1. Raju
2. Sire
3. Madhur
4. Andrea

The list was shuffled and the result was:

1. Raju
2. Madhur
3. Andrea
4. Sire

Obviously, congratulations to Raju! I wish there were more names there but i am not that popular as it seems Also, i wish i could giveaway a game to each of my readers but that can’t happen either. Anyway, i contacted the winner for his present. This post is here just to tell him a congrats. I wish you all a very happy Christmas holiday season with helth and love.

Merry XMas!

I think that the best way to give you my best wishes is to quote John Lennon and the song “Happy X-Mas”.

And so this is Christmas
I hope you have fun
the near and the dear ones
the old and the young
a very Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year
let’s hope it’s a good one
without any fear

Merry Christmas everyone! I wish you spend some quality time with the ones you love!

BloggerBuddy: My approach to RSS readers

I’ve been upsent for quite some time now. This is because i was onto something. I was learning the framework of Adobe AIR. It’s a quite nice tool for rapid desktop development with Web standards. You actually use Javascript and HTML to code desktop applications. In order to find my way around this new technology i needed a project. Some people find it convenient to learn by buying a book. What i do is i throw my self into some serious coding. That is my way of learning. So, i decided to go on with a project. It is called “BloggerBuddy” and it is an approach of mine on an RSS reader.  I have tried many readers before and they all organize feeds in a certain way which does not suit me. The one i liked the most is Google Reader but i wanted something to integrate on my desktop. Besides that, BloggerBuddy has another advantage. It is designed from a blogger (yup that’s me) for bloggers (and that is you!). It has a nice feature where when a post is marked as a “commented on”, next time it tries to fetch the latest comment. This way you will be able to easily track the activity on posts you want to see how the discussion goes. So, go on and check it out. If you find any bugs or you have any suggestions take a look at the “Feedback” button on the left of the homepage.

Other than that, i have about three posts in a draft state for quite some time and i want to post them soon. So, keep on visiting!

“MCF: Huntsville” Christmas Giveaway

The days to come constitute a period on the year that i love the most. Christmas trees, happy, jolly faces, elevated spirits, carols and singing all over the place are among the things that i like. Of course, what is Christmas without shopping and gifts? Well, it would still be Christmas but in a different way. It’s all part of the happy spirit. Even the smallest thing can bring a smile to your friend’s or relative’s face and that is all that counts. I was thinking what i could give away to my readers as a present. It’s my first year of blogging so i would like to make some kind of tradition. The other day, Big Fish Games came with an answer. They gave away coupons, to their game club members, for a free game to give away to one’s friends. The game is called “Mystery Case Files: Huntsville” and it’s a hidden object game fun to play with. It’s not their latest but it’s still free. Since i am not in a financial position to buy a fancy thing for you guys i thought that giving this is most appropriate (since you are my friends anyway).

I guess here would be a point where i would start listing the things that you have to do to get this game. Well, there is no special requirement. You don’t need to subscribe to my feed. My numbers are very low (below 10) and frankly i don’t care that much as long as i have people coming in and commenting so i won’t feel alone. You don’t need to blog about it. I wouldn’t mind if you did but you are not required to. You don’t need to tweet. Well, not to list all the ways you don’t need to do anything. So how is it going to be done? Well, i would like to give away a present to all of you guys commenting, but since i can’t, here is how we will do it. Just leave a comment saying you want the game. I will collect all your guys names and on Christmas day, 12PM GMT (find your time here), i will use random.org’s list shuffler to produce a winner. I will write down all the names of the contestants in the order they made their comments and i will shuffle the list. The name that will come up first on the shuffled list will be the winner. Simple as that. This is not a marketing thing. If it was i would have used all the ways described above. I am not above that.

I wish you all a very mery Christmas season with all the people you love by your side. May our Lord bring peace in your heart and harmony in your life. Thanks for reading and sticking with me!

Small hiccup on the “Featured” post

A few days back i posted on how to create a small place on top of your posts in your theme to keep a featured post there (just like the one running here, as you can see on top of the posts). Validating my blog today against different browsers i stumbled on a serious mistake i did. On that tutorial there is a line of code saying:

That has a serious bug that’s lurking around not ready to be found at all. This line shortens the post to the first 500 characters so it will appear like an excerpt. But here is the problem. When using a “more” tag to cut your posts the following text is inserted in the post:

The problem is when the cutting of the text stops just after the:

There is the problem. The above character sequence is the markup for HTML indicating that the text following is comments! There, the parsing stops. So, after that point your page will not render. That is a major problem as you can imagine. I have a fix for it though. Please replace the above line of code with this one:

This code makes an extra callto the str_replace function replacing the more tag with the empty string. This way, there is no way a problem like that can occur. Hope it didn’t happen to you guys because it’s scary! If you encounter any more problems please report them back to me!