Sorry about the late Weekend Reading post. It was triple digits today (in real heat) and rolling blackouts would have made working a pain in the ass. Luckily I planned ahead and just slept all day so I can now work all night, when it's relatively cool. It's now 11pm and my desktop weather widget says it's 95F outside. Yikes. Our low is 82F.

But enough weather bitching. One more thing before I launch into this week's roundup: Featured Journals on the main page. I update them every Monday, Wednesday and Friday but I only do so if there are entries really worth featuring. I'm not going to go around digging for an entry to feature just to fill that spot, and yes I read them all. So if you don't see any updates, it's not likely because I forgot. So get to writing when an update is overdue cause it means that slot is up for the taking!

Here are your Journal Land entries from the period of 7/15 - 7/22.

Featured GDNet+ Journal Entry

Writing Web Games - Battagline discusses whether it would be better to use object or iframe tags when embedded your game in a web browser to get indexed by Google efficiently

Featured Member Journal Entry

Just Let It Trickle - adeyblue takes a more in-depth look at what's going on under the hood (or "under the sheets" as he puts it to stick with his hooker theme) of his active hooks tool

Hey there and welcome back Trapper Zoid!!

From the Staff

• GameDev.net Staff Journal - Hop in on the discussion of the ratings/reputation system on the forums and let me know if you're interested in volunteering to help develop the forum software further to aid us in making some of the changes needed to the aforementioned system as well as the website as a whole
  Project Updates
  
  
  • Journal of Lee Stripp - mixmaster has some photo proof of lsCDL and vortX GE running in Mac OSX 10.6.8
  • A non-programmer's programs - szecs has implemented automatic smoothing generation for the shading of models in Paper Modeller. He shows off the feature with some screenshots, has a look at the algorithm and mentions what he would like to tackle next
  • Walking Towards The Sun - here's some nifty cloud generation and simulation in freeworld's eco sim. The pixelation just makes it cooler with the whole mosaic feel
  • OddGames development journal - O-san mocks up portrait inclusion into dialogue windows. I like
  • The Bag of Holding - ApochPiQ has spent this whole past week deep in code to streamline and optimize the Epoch compiler. He has many thoughts and musings on the subject so hit his main journal page to check them all out
  • Writing Web Games - Battaglinehas taken his Mahjong word game and tweaked it into a Mahjong math game. It's live on the internets for you to try out
    Game Dev Stuffs
    
    
    • RetLee's Journal - RetLee has a cautionary tale common among developers - don't overshoot your capabilities. Aim high, and recognize that you need to in order to find your limits, but don't expect to achieve all your lofty ambitions when you first start out.
    • Journal of Aardvajk - Aardvajk is looking into making his own scripting language. Follow his musings if you're thinking of doing the same thing with your project.
    • /* Why you crying? */ - JTippetts is thinking of making his Accidental Noise Library into a header-only library. What do you think of this idea? Let him know!
    • New Old Things - Endurion cleans up some problems left over from Step 13, like screen redrawing after item pickup and not letting the player fall through holes in the level left behind by picked up items
    • Digital adventures through the third dimension - shadowisadog has a tutorial on how to allow DLL files created in C# to be used in the Unreal Development Kit