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Showing posts with the label web development

Violating Flickr's terms of service

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 Flickr said I had violated their terms of service by having non-photographic content. Another user had reported this. I had not been using my Flickr account much so I experimented by adding images with captions containing tips and news.  The images were drawings from 'openclipart.org'. I also made a gallery of screenshots of my game. I removed these images. I left some graphs showing probability distributions of getting a 'line' or 'house' in bingo. I had no more trouble for a few months. But now, I cannot login. Flickr says my username is not valid. If I use a link to my images, then I get a a '410' HTTP code meaning the content was intentionally removed. Yahoo! acquired Flickr in 2005. Yahoo! let you store lots of images, and even videos. In 2018, Yahoo! (now owned by Verizon) sold Flickr to SmugMug. Now Flickr tries to be a community of photographers. I still have all the same images on Pinterest together with the captions Pinterest only allows short...

Coding in small steps can be boring

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 Breaking coding down into small steps can make coding boring. People sometimes say you should break down programming into small steps so as to 'keep it simple'. I have got into the habit of coding in very small steps because I am often tired in the evenings when I am coding. I spent several weeks adding an option to the settings page of my game.  Previously I might have done the whole thing in one evening. However, I work on around 7 or 8 improvements to my game at any one time. I use a very old browser at home where I have no connection to the Internet, so I need to visit my local library to test on modern browsers.  Also my game takes several minutes to load on my 25-year old Pentium computer.

Problem with mobile testing tool

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 My game looked strange when I tested it on mobile phones run by 'appetize.io'. There was a thick border around the boards of players. And the game seemed to hang when I pressed a button. I thought maybe Chrome was adding an outline when an 'input' element got the focus. So I tried setting 'outline: 0'. This did not fix the problem. However, when I tested my game on mobile phones at 'browserstack.com' then everything looked fine. I realised that maybe there was a problem at 'appetize.io'. However, 'browserstack.com' only gives you one free minute per device.  Whereas 'appetize.io' gives you 30 free minutes a month. 'appetize.io' worked fine for tablets. This was a few months ago. Now my game looks fine on mobiles run by 'appetize.io'.