Thats what I’ve been spending my non-work non-family energy on recently. This is what I posted to the igaming mailing:
Inspired by the relaunch of IrishGaming.com v2 by Nick last month, I
decided to give Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki [1] a big spring
clean (not a relaunch). I’ve changed hosts, upgrade the software,
gotten rid of all the spam and other malicious edits, re-did the
front-page (more to do there) and allowed file uploads. I hope people
take a moment to have a look and see if anything important to them is
up to date.
I have also updated Planet Irish Gaming [2], brand new spanking
software, tons of Irish Gaming sites, its actually very busy compared
to the old planet. There are also features to create a post directly
to the feed and the ability to submit new feeds.
During my spring cleaning, I found a number of articles about groups
and websites of which I have no idea of the state of them:
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/SaneSpotting
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/DU_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Gamers_Realm
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/White_Elephant
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/D15_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Fabled_Games
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/STOCS
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Red_Branch_Guild
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Vaticon</a>
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Forgotten_Legacy
Anyone able to give an update on their state or current
web-location/presence of these things?
Also the http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Convention_Calender has died
a death quite a while back. Is there another resource that’s actively
used? I know there was one for a while on the IGA/Gaelcon site but
that seems to have disappeared.
[1] http://IrishGamingWiki.com
[2] http://IrishGamingWiki.com/planet
Someone has since updated the Convention Calender, which is cool. There is a lot of work still to do on the wiki, but for the moment I’m content to watch over it and if someone starts the initiative, I’ll help and finish it. For example, I’d like to have “templates” for conventions, retailers, groups and organizations. Right now they are all done sort of ad-hoc and the current status of a lot of them, I don’t know.
Anyway, if any of the readers of this blog know of something on the wiki they might care about, please take a moment to update it or even better if you know something about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying community that <i>isn’t</i> on the wiki, please feel free to add it! 
And if you have any feedback, you can drop a comment here, or on igaming or the wiki itself. Those three methods are the best way to get a message to me about the wiki.
I don’t know if they’ll be a reaction to my plans for the IrishGamingWiki.com but I certainly know that within the online community there are a few that have strong opinions (or use to have) but I also know there isn’t that much concern between projects or users about these things. To put it another way, I don’t know if people care what happens to the Wiki.
I hope people do because I’m certainly feeling guilty about letting it languish over the last good while. I couldn’t update the MediaWiki software without a bit of effort on my part and it got spammed heavily. But recently I did do an update and finally cleared out the spam and blocked users and IPs. (If spammers continue to be a problem, I’ll look at better spam-fighting techniques). The administrative and backend parts of the Wiki need some love, certainly some work on the webpage look and feel, updates to the RSS feed, etc. I even have a logo designed at home that I haven’t scanned in yet.
I haven’t set aside time to do this necessary work. I haven’t had the motivation at all. I did recently update and tidy up Planet Irish Gaming as I was briefly inspired after IrishGaming.com was kind of re-launched (IrishGaming.com has nothing to do with me in any way). But beyond that, my motivation is still waning. I’ve even been tempted to find someone or group who would be willing to take over the wiki because there is a lot of cool info captured there. No-one has shown any interest to me about it up until now and I haven’t see any group I’d trust with it (things for Irish Gaming have a tendency to appear and disappear with frequency online).
So what is my big plan? Change host for the IrishGamingWiki.com and stick Google AdSense advertisements in the side bar. That’s it.
If you’ve just shrugged your shoulders and thought “so what?”, I’d agree with you. I have AdSense ads running on my thedeadone.net and, to be honest, the income generated so far would indicate to me that it probably won’t cover the cost of hosting the website over a year (even though hosting it is relatively cheap).
However, payback in nearly any form is a great motivator. Certainly, while working on TDOMF, which is completely free, donations, gifts and ad revenue that I have received have been great motivators (though peoples’ feedback is by far the most rewarding). Without it, I don’t think I would have continued to support and extend TDOMF so far (and to think that came originally from the failed Game Crafter’s Guild of Ireland website). So hopefull I’ll be more motivated to put effort into maintaining it and doing work on it.
Anyway, comments, feedback, criticism welcome but name-calling will have you tarred!
My last post was about Planet Irish Gaming which is part of the uber-cool and useful Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki. One of the biggest uses of the wiki was the convention calender, which is updated regularly enough by lots of people. Though this may now be superseded by a Google Calender yokey ran by TygerKrash but at least the wiki page is still free for anyone to correct the information.
Well, even without the convention calender, the wiki is certainly not dead. It’s regularly getting updates and this last little while a user called Oldfartgamer has been doing a tremendous job of doing lots of historic updates.
So I’m calling out for help in filling in lots of blanks. Oldfartgamer has added a number of stubs for people and has been trying to restore information about cons gone by like Gaelcon 1996.
If you “know stuff, like” about Irish gaming and roleplaying, which I’m sure you do, you can add to the wiki. If you’ve doing something in Irish gaming, such as shop or independently publishing games, check to see if you have an entry (and make sure it’s correct!).
Check out Planet Irish Gaming.
Yep. That’s the whole purpose of this post. Plugging Planet Irish Gaming. It’s something I setup a long time ago and it’s been running for quite a while, and I’ve been adding feeds as requested. I recently did some tidying up of it and added some new features (such as getting updates as emails!).
So if you’ve got a feed that you’d like me to included, please drop me a mail (or leave a comment). Anything related to Roleplaying and Gaming (nominally related to Ireland) would be welcomed.
(I guess I should I should add a feed from thedeadone.net…)
Yep, The Irish Gaming Wiki. It’s an experiment at the moment but hopefully it’ll blossom into something wonderful!