Mefight Club, along with every other community on the net, gaming or otherwise, has gone a little crazy over Minecraft recently. Our truly amazing multiplayer server, called the Aporkalypse for reasons too long to go into, needed a public face, so I used the opportunity to do some playing around with CSS3 and HTML5. It turned out very nicely.

Steve, a friend of mine, had been hand-crafting amazing solid steel mousepads for friends for several months, and decided he wanted to turn his passion into a business. I offered to create a showcase and e-commerce site for him. It was a massive success, so much so that he had to pull back a little, because the workload was so high. He’s still making them, though, and has some new product ideas and materials in the pipelike.

LRL™ is basically just an injoke for the Mefight Club community run amok, one that I will hopefully find time to flesh out eventually with some actual content and easter eggs and fun stuff. The domain and whizzy flash stuff is meant to make you think of a Giant and Clinically Evil Corporation that spends millions of dollars making games that just aren’t any fun, while possibly burning the brains out of test subjects to do it.

You know, in case the joke wasn’t clear.

This one was mostly just an opportunity to mess with customizing the swoopy-turny flash app.

Jobsee.kr is my entry into the too-crowded world of Korean job sites, but with a social media twist, powered by Buddypress. I’ve actually gone back to the drawing board post-launch on this one, after putting in about 6 months of work on it, because I want to pare it back to essentials, simplify, and make it more accessible to non-geeky users. The problem with Buddypress, powerful as it is, is that it is, in its current incarnation in late 2010, an unholy mess in terms of user experience.

Also, the color scheme was a massive mistake. So it goes.

Still, the time I spent working on the site was a valuable learning exercise — look for a grand relaunch in the future!

Since I was a child — and that’s a long, long time ago — my all-time favorite film has been the epic, madcap comedy It’s A Mad Mad Mad Mad World. There are a few fan tribute sites out there on the bitwaves, but I wanted to make one for myself and anyone else who loved that was pretty, at least. I hope that it might inspire random Googlenauts who’ve never heard of the movie to track down a copy and keep it alive in the scattered mind of the meth-head zeitgeist.

I can but hope.

During one of the regularly-scheduled arguments about copyright issues on Metafilter, someone suggested the possibility of insurance for copyright infringers, to protect against the malicious, chilling-effect lawsuits raised by the RIAA and MPAA and their representatives. A little research revealed that that wouldn’t be legal, but I thought it was a hilarious idea, and so: another single-serving website.

I created Mefight Club in 2007 as a forum for members of the famous Metafilter (called ‘Mefites’, though opinions on the pronunciation vary, which kind of ruins the pun). Today the site is a vibrant community of almost 1000 people of all ages who share a common love for gaming. I’ve been lucky enough to attract a truly amazing group of people there, and have many, many new friends as a result that I didn’t have 4 years ago. Meetups happen around the world, friendship reigns, and it might well be the thing on the internet I’ve ever built of which I’m proudest.

I’ve been working on a reboot of the site with a whole multicourse menu of social networking and web2.x gewgaws. Although it’s basically ready for launch, I’m holding back from releasing it to the community while I wait to see what happens with some performance concerns on the platform I chose to design for for the reboot — Buddypress. I have some concerns there.

Full Glass Empty Clip is a group weblog I built for the members of Mefight Club. The design worked out nicely, harmonizing well with the color scheme I used for the forums. I’ve pushed some of the limits of WordPress 3.0 with the site, leveraging custom taxonomies and custom post types, and completely customizing the administrative backend to make it easier for non-technical users, and adding Tumblr-like quick posting functionality for various media types, which are custom-styled in the front end.

Overall, I’m very proud of FGEC. I think it’s some of my best design work so far, and Matt Haughey of Metafilter called it ‘f**king beautiful’ in this podcast, which made me very happy indeed.

The Review-o-matic is an app I built for users of Mefight Club to easily post, rate and review games they love (or hate). It’s got a customized posting interface in the WordPress backend so members can easily and quickly add images and videos and their own reviews without messing around with custom fields, and although it’s a very specialized tool, it does the job well.

It’s twinned with the News-o-matic, which uses RSS to aggregates headlines from a variety of Hardware and Gaming websites.