Jordi Romkema

Recently I launched Snospace which runs on a Media Temple dedicated server. At first it didn't really cross my mind to make backups. I'm used to managed hosting where they usually take care of this sort of stuff for you. I know it's highly important to backup your important files, but sometimes I forget... like eating vegetables.

I wanted a clear and simple solution that would backup my entire server, or at least the most vital information such as website source files and databases. For me it was really important to get these backups, without any human intervention to either an FTP account or my Amazon S3 account. Obviously in the event that something does go wrong, it should be easy to restore from a backup. Read the rest... »

I don't really like the style of the standard Xbox Live Gamercard. It's cool and all but I'd like to personalize it so it fits the design of my site, the standard Gamercard however does not. I searched for solutions to create my own Gamercard. I found some such as MyGamerCard where you can customize your own Gamercard but only limited to certain preconfigured styles. I figured there would be some sort of public API by Microsoft where I could just pull the data from and display it in a neat way, only to find out you have to be an official Xbox Community Developer to get access to this API. Bummer!

Then I came across Xbox Live Nation where the main developer, who has access to the official Xbox Gamercard API, created his own API which is public. With this Xbox Live Nation Gamercard API I created my own Xbox Live Gamercard and some of you have emailed me wondering how I did this. Therefore I wrote a little tutorial explaining it step-by-step so you can recreate it yourself with your own design. Read the rest... »