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THE MAKING OF THE DUNGEON
EIt was a nice summer day in Mexico (a Sunday I think). We had a small family get together overlooking the mountain range which covers my Dad's town.
The Negra Modelo and Mezcal (worm included) started flowing.
You'll be amazed at how nerdy people can get once they start drinking.
It was my sister-in-law's husband that said "man, we should find a way to keep in touch more often. Messages are cool, but what if there could be a website where we all talked about anything and everything. But not fracebook, that shit sucks."
I told him "hold my beer".
Then went on to expalin to hime for the next fourty minutes or so what a forum is and how I would go about setting it up and styling it.
The explanation was that long becuase he kept asking questions, good ones too.
I'll gladly talk php and server edits all day when possible.
It was locked in. I would set up (another) forum with phpbb and invite my closest (spanish speaking) friends and family.
Private of course, just like DEV.
Now, there really is no reason to make the forum invisible. But it is fucking cool to log in and see the site populate just for you.
Hopefully, my peeps can feel special.
It wasn't sure what i was going to call the place. Suddenly, I remembered an old Warcraft theme that I had tried out before. The theme was high fantasy. But of course I wanted to tweak it as much as possible.
The layot and graphics on the borders remind me of the classic Warcraft 3 Blizzard site. Man that was sexy.
Then it came to me: with that theme, I can call the place "The Dungeon".
In Spanish, Dungeon can be translated as: "el calabozo" or "la mazmorra". I am not calling the fucking place "mazmorra".
"El calabozo" it is.
I am proud at how decent I am when navigating and setting up a phpbb forum. But this build was going to test me. See, it all started after I created the sub-domain.
Normally all you had to do was log in. Go to the marketplace and do a one-click install. Honestly, the trickiest part there is to not choose the wrong domain from the drop down list. I have literally done this at least fifty times before.
It didn't.
I decided to contact my provider. After a few minutes I was chatting with someone who's name I can't even pronounce (not hating on the name, hating on the fact that I have to contact someone overseas to discuss my issue).
After about five minutes of dude besandome los huevos, thanking me for being a valued customer, I explained in detail my problem and even provided screenshots.
Dude said he would gladly look into it.
About another five minutes and four apologies later, dude came back telling me that as their marketplace is a third party provider, they cannot offer any support.
I closed that chat before I could finish reading the sentence. Again, not being a jerk, but the fact that no one could help me did suck.
Now, I'm sure they're just reading off a script (hell, I did it during college). But I do hate when something is offered, and nothing works.
This is actually the main reason why I stopped using themes and content management systems. Because if something breaks, you are shit out of luck.
So, I did what any mentally ill person would do:
I went to the phpbb site and read ALL of their documentation.
Every. Single. Line.
Turns out I can follow instructions like nobody's business. Hell I even managed to fix a "403 - Forbidden" error. I even felt like Elliot from Mr. Robot.
Hell, I even managed to set up a SQL database.
Touch it baby!
Fuck you, Tripa! (only legends from El CETis will get that joke)
I always try to do projects where I can learn something new. This was a (second) wake up call. The first being breaking out the html in order to get this site up and running.
What I really mean by that is it does feel fucking awesome to learn how your stuff works and bulletproof it.
(that Elliot feeling again)
Once the dungeon was up, I made sure everything was working properly.
I even got the inspiration to use Shining Force graphics throughout the entire site.
I'm so nerdy.
