1st Place in Coding Competition

At the first annual, Computing For All Competition, I won 1st place! Yay!

Forums

Yus, that title is not a typo, the Programia blog officially has forums!  A few days ago I was looking at how crowded the scratch forums were, and decided to do something about it. The new Programia forum is just like the scratch forums, only it's easier to get you're projects featured.

How featuring on Programia works:

• Project stays up for a week
• Project is reviewed by me
• You get a love and fav from me
• Project is posted on the Programia homepage
• Project is put in the "Featured" tab
• Project is announced in scratch forums*
• Project is featured and announced in Programia forums

As you can see, there are a ton of things that are better.  Though there isn't too much publicity, this blog still gets about 1,000 views per week, (which isn't too bad :D). To use the forums, you do have to make a "Lefora" account, but that isn't that hard.  Anyway, I'd LOVE if you guys could submit projects, because I will happily display them.  So please participated and scratch on!

Link to forums (click here or simply click the tab at the top of my blog): Programia Forums

*Still working this one out with the scratch team.  Hopefully I can make it work.

5 Million Users!

For those of you who don't know already, scratch recently reached 5 million users!  Aah so exciting!  Just felt the need to say that.  Scratch on! :)

FPS?

Upon posting my previous post, I got some immediate questions about how I tracked FPS.
I decided to do a mini tutorial about how to track FPS on projects, because when developing, knowing your project's FPS can be very helpful.

How to add a basic FPS client on scratch:

1. First make 3 variables:

FPS
FPS Number
Test

2. Then, in each sprite (including the stage), put in this script:

3. In the "Stage" script, put in this script:

4. Also in the "Stage" script, put in:

5. Lastly, in the "set FPS to..." script, replace the "2" in "FPS Number / (1 + 2)" with however many sprites are in your project (excluding the stage script).  This is a key step.

Now you are finished.  This basically measures the total run speed of the project, and in turn tells you the frames per second.  If done properly, your FPS in a basic project should be anywhere from 20-30.  In my "Space" project, I had a high amount of cloned sprites, so it was around 10-15.  Anyway, I hope this helps you when developing scratch projects!  Enjoy!

~Rant

Dev Code!

Aaaaaaah!  I've been gone for so long!  Sorry, school has been eating me.  But I'm partially back now, so you can expect more posts. YAY!

Anyway, I'll get to the point:

Over winter break I was working on a simple project, and needed inspiration.  I had a random spaceship simulator, and didn't really know what to do with it.  I got a random idea to add a development console, which basically shows stats about how the project is running. I made this post to essentially say that in all my future projects, if you press the keys "d", "e", and "v", or "dev" at the same time, it will show the development console.  Try it out on my space simulator below!

Looking for Mods!

I'm on a hunt for moderators for my new chat.  I already got one friend on the job, but I need a few more.  If you're interested, create a chatango account, and then tell me the chat your scratch username and your chatango username.  Thanks for the help!

Winter Break is Coming!

Well, people of scratch-land, today is my last night of actual homework.  I have a field trip Friday, and everything is due tomorrow, therefore tonight is my final night of work.  It's a hard one though.

I have 7 prompts to edit and revise, one prompt to extend and revise, piano practice, soccer practice, 10 spanish sentences to write, a science assignment, and a social studies group project.  *whew.*

But, I'm almost done, AND I'm procrastinating by telling you guys about it all!  Win-win! Anyway, I'd mostly like to share with you some random physics project I made about planet gravity.  Here it is:

Dog

Hai everyone!  I'm back in action!  Today I'm going to tell you something extremely important:

I HAVE A DOG!

(I almost published that and had "dog" spelled "god".  Good thing I revise!)
Anyway, I have a golden retriever poodle mix, her name is Macy, and she's 11 (very old). She is amazing.

Turtle

Got bored so I drew this turtle:

BorrisTV Story Contest

You guys have probably noticed that I haven't been very active on my BorrisTV account.  I did post one episode of Redwater (which was terrible) and a Mondays episode (which was actually pretty good), but otherwise no Borris Park episodes.  I have all of the characters drawn, I just need a good story.  So that's why I'm coming to you all for an answer.  

If you can come up with a good short (and feasible) story for my first Borris Park episode, I'll use it!

Thanks for the help guys! (Also, please post your story in the comments or on the chat.)

Here are the basic characters: (tee-hee)

Chat

Yay!  I just added a chat Programia!  Enjoy!

Winter Break!

So excited for winter break!  I get out on friday this week!  I'm probably going to go sledding with friends and do some scratch.  Comment what you guys are doing for you're winter break!

Should scratchers be able to be featured twice?

After being featured a second time, I have come to a conclusion.  I don't think scratchers should be able to be featured twice, because it just uncovers the same person twice.  Featuring is for uncovering lesser known scratchers.  Repeating the feature is kind of a waste.  You may not have this opinion though- you can give your opinion in the poll on the right side of the page.  

The poll data will be presented to the scratch team January 1st, so put in your opinion quick!

OP Free

Since a lot of people were complaining that the pills in my game "Bumperz" were too OP, I made a pill free version.  Enjoy!

A Random Update

Just got followed by this person and felt the need to share it with you guys:

Introduction!

Hey everyone!  I just started this thing up, mostly because something very exciting happened recently!  I GOT FEATURED A SECOND TIME! :D

I opened my computer and found 1014 messages waiting for me.  I pretty much flipped out.  I called at least half of the US telling them the great news, and also sent email to everyone I knew.  I was (to say the least), excited.  

And what I think is cool about what the scratch team does is that everyday they lift the burden of being a "nube", or a "new scratcher" from one user.  And for the rest of that day that one user pretty much doesn't care about the outside world and is drowned in the excitement of being noticed.

So that way my happy tirade about featuring.  Anyway I'd also like to announce the point of this blog. First of all, I blab about scratch and how awesome or terrible (depending on the mood) it is, I also recognize scratchers for good projects, and give updates or funny stories about what's going on in my life.  

I would recommend bookmarking this on your browser, because you probably don't want to miss out on the rest of the stuff I'll be posting.  So enjoy your day and feel free to comment!

Check out my page if you wanna: (link)