DotA: Defense of the Ancients
DotA is one of the most played, online, team-based, strategy games up to present. Defense of the Ancients also known as DotA is a custom map running on WarCraft III engine. DotA is founded by IceFrog. The current map runs on WarCraft III: Frozen Throne 1.24 client.
You can get updated DotA maps from getdota.com and if you want to learn or share strategies from the community then you may find good stuffs from playdota.com.
Here’s a complete step for you to be able to play DotA:
- Download and install WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos
- Download and install WarCraft III: Frozen Throne
- Download and install the latest patch for Frozen Throne and install it
To play it locally on LAN:
- Download and copy the latest DotA map to the Maps folder
To play it alone with AI heroes:
- Download and copy the latest DotA AI map to Maps folder
That’s it! I will be updating this post whenever possible. Have fun and enjoy playing DotA!
Classes for PHP
PHP is currently the most trusted web programming language. PHP is recursive acronym for PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor. Aside for being fast when it comes to execution, it is a perfect match for the most widely used database which is MySQL. Together, these open-source technologies can create power applications. PHP scripts can be written using procedural or object-oriented programming style.
During my free time, I am writing scripts for PHP Classes that I can use for my projects and sharing it back to the open source community. Here’s a list of my published classes:
EBM2BMP Class
Entitize Class
Entitize Class for PHP 5
Google Chart for PHP 5
MySQL for PHP 5
Please check back as I will be updating this post as soon as I publish more PHP classes. I hope you find these classes useful.
Google Code Search
There are lots of experiments on-going that you can find in Google Labs. One I find interesting and useful at the same time is the Google Code Search. This Google feature is still in its experimentation stage but is available for public usage. I am very much impressed they have thought of this developer-friendly search.
The feature, unlike the usual web search, returns pages that includes individual files, mostly source codes of different programming languages. This doesn’t only search for the page that contains codes but do search the source codes itself. You have to try it to see it for yourself.
By searching again and again, I have observed that Google Code bot is crawling codes available for public viewing, mostly open source programs, zipped applications, compressed libraries of files and public SVN/CVS repositories.
I like this since it will help developers like me to search for specific classes or functions in a particular application. I can even search using the author’s name or email as the keyword and get the results I wanted. You can also use the version numbers as keywords to filter the versions of the source codes you are searching for.
Here are some screen shots querying Google Code Search for the keyword papervision. Screen 1 is the first page of Google Code Search. Screen 2 is the result page after submission. Screen 3 is the actual source code you did choose from the result page.
If you are a developer or programmer that constantly checks for open source codes, you will definitely love and find this tool useful.
I got hooked into Tribal Wars
Tribal Wars is a free web-based strategy game that is comprised of individual players in different tribes. Every individual is entitled of a single and small village at the start of the game. Here is the actual image of a fully upgraded Tribal Wars village as well as the map of one sector in a single continent:
The player must grow that village until he is able to defend his own village and conquer another. He must balance the resources, train defensive and offensive troops, form his own tribe or join another, find allies and conquer other tribes.
During the period of MMORPG, browser-based games started to pop out. At first, I thought I won’t be playing Tribal Wars for long due to its poor GUI and not being real-time. But guess what, this is my fifth month playing Tribal Wars and I’m still enjoying it.
The images are good as well as the interface. They have a Premium Account program which a player could purchase that gives more advanced and easy-to-use buttons and links. I haven’t purchased a premium account since I’m already satisfied with the standard interface.
You might want to try it and see if you will also get hooked to it.
Cloaking can be ethical
Another term other than cloaking should be made in reference to this kind of SEO practice; maybe alternate content or backup content perhaps. Showing content with different presentation or in different format is not a bad SEO habit. This is just to optimize your content for whatever device that reads your content. Examples of readers are standard web browsers, text browsers, SmartPhone/WAP browsers, hand-held devices with built-in browsers, screen readers and search engine bots.
Cloaking is practically a black hat SEO method that presents a totally different content rather than the content it should present. So how can cloaking be an ethical SEO method?
Consider a full Flash site with all the content embedded on it. How can search engines crawl the content on your Flash-based site? The solution is simple–cloaking. By utilizing the CSS method of making a block invisible, you can display your Flash site as well as the content you intended to get indexed on search engines.
Consider this Flash site with cloaked content: Wideout Technology Services, Inc.
The content you see is embedded on Flash itself but I did include the same original text within the HTML and did use CSS to hide the text to the actual audience. Now, try viewing the source code (View then Page Source or CTRL+U on Firefox). You will notice the original content on the HTML itself and if you look more closely, you will see the context enclosed in this block:
<div class="noflash"> <h1>A True Global Workplace</h1> <p>We believe that a business should not submit to geography. ... </div>
And in my style sheet goes the trick to hide the text content to browsers but not to search engines and text/screen readers:
.noflash {
display: none !important;
}
For the conclusion, you can ethically use cloaking to your site’s pages provided you are still showing the same original content to both search engines and your actual viewers/users.
