I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.

If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?

Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.

It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.

For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run Wordpress (with some hacks), do Wordpress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.

Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…

In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.

Also announced on Tuesday (before the news of Gary’s death): STOCs (irishgamingwiki link) one of the oldest running Clubs in DCU proposed “merging” with the Games Soc. STOCs is/was the gaming & roleplaying society in DCU and even though I’ve been long out of college, I still have strong ties to the club. The “merging” is rather actually being subsumed into the Games Soc which is oriented towards Computer Games (though originally the Games Soc was an off-shoot of STOCs, I’ve been led to believe). STOCs ran the small annual games convention Sillicon with it’s popular Pub Quiz (irishgaming wiki link). I’ve even ran and wrote games for Sillicon in the past. I do not know the fate of the future of Sillicon. This has saddened me.

(For those who don’t know or who aren’t members of Redbrick, Kidic are a rock band formed from various people who attended DCU. For the record, I did my third-year computer applications project with the guitarist).

Their music is pretty cool, similar to Radiohead before they went all weird. They have a music video, available online which is hilarious - only because I know them all from before, it’s so hard to take them seriously!

I wish them all the best! (And, yes, I did buy and download their single. So, eh, Spock, any chance of a physical copy of the single, for the collection? )

One of the big problems of Wordpress on Redbrick was that Redbrick is behind a proxy so all outbound connections have to go through the proxy. Wordpress has no build in support for it. I worked out all the changes needed (here). I also submitted a bug report to Wordpress (#3082) detailing the issue.

Well, they’ve closed the bug. Because someone else has submitted a fix for it that supports it properly. So hopefully, in the next release of Wordpress (2.1.4?), it’ll be much easier to install Wordpress on Redbrick. You’ll be able to configure the proxy in wp-config.php and off you go. More stuff will just work “out of the box”!

Now it’d be perfect if the mighty admins of Redbrick get CURL up and running. I’ve been informed this in progress but should be soon.

I had setup a duplicate of my website, did a test upgrade, so I knew exactly the problems I encountered, which were really only one, once I had gone through all the modifications required to get up and running on Redbrick. Besides upgrading all the plugins, I also had to change my code syntax plugin (using now SyntaxHighter). It’s nice. The previous one suited me fine too but it was incompatible with Wordpress 2.1. Still suffers a similar problem though that if you edit the post, you lose all your tabs and inline spacing. Pain in the hole.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed, so far, is the built in spellchecker (uses aspell locally) and that you can choose to write your posts in “code” (i.e. html) or a fancy visual editor.

(This post also suffers a dual purpose. It should also cross-post to livejournal to confirm all is up and running! )

Update: Arg! First bad point. It seems that if you have a “more” tag (i.e. the “Read More” link you see on posts on the frontpage), it won’t include anything after that tag in the RSS feed! That sucks. I’ve always included the complete text of posts in the RSS feed. I know some folk like just the extracts, however I’ve turned off some blogs just because, all I get is that extract in their feed. Damn. Have to see if someone has written a plugin to “fix” it…

Update #2: FFS! The admins had to shut down my wordpress because it was causing a huge load on the webserver. I believe this was due to this bug in Wordpress 2.1. Hopefully it’s okay now. I guess I won’t be creating a wordpress 2.1 install script until 2.1.1 now even though I’ve fixed it locally (fingers crossed). And now, bugger it, my old posts are pingbacking other posts on my site. Wordpress 2.0.x never did that. I’m getting rather annoyed by this “upgrade”!

Update #3: CompleteRSS plugin solves my RSS complaints.

Update #4: AJAX is quite funky in action. However it sucks when your trying to find which PHP files are being executed.

However, if your a Redbrick Member you could add this piece of code to any of your webpages that would all you or another Redbrick user to submit it to Pligg.

If you want, you can replace “document.location.href” with an explicit URL. I guess what we really need is a icon for Redbrick Pligg!

I’m considering adding it to Planet Redbrick and Redbrick Wiki. Is it a good idea? I could package it up in a Wordpress plugin but I don’t know how many Redbrick Bloggers use Wordpress.

The same also applies for Game Crafter’s Guild’s Pligg, however this Pligg is specifically for Gaming and Roleplaying related content, and we don’t have an icon either!

I’ve recently setup Pligg for Redbrick. It’s only available to Redbrick users and you can only login with your Redbrick user name and password, thanks to the power of PubCookie. I only did this as a demo. I wanted Pligg for something else, but a few people have started using it.

Anyway, because of that some users had suggested Redbrick’s services are not very well integrated. There all little distinct bits and bobs, not really connected or talking to each other. i.e. There not “Web 2.0″. Now I think “Web 2.0″ is one of those bullshit phrases, however, the idea of integrated services much like MySpace is an interesting idea and I started thinking, a thought-exercise if you will. Here is how I would see Redbrick becoming “Web 2.0″…

BTW Any software I suggest is only because I’m familiar and have in some capacity setup, hacked or modified. I’m not saying they are the best in class, only that I know what can and can’t be done with them.

Backwards Compatibility

Forget it. The first thing to do is, get rid of the newsgroups. Why? Well any new service setup has to integrate with the newsgroups or worse… synchronise in some fashion. This is never well done and discourages use of the new service as people revert back to what works. Also, because it’s a set of newsgroups, readable via only an archaic text browser, it’s impossible to take advantage of the many new web-based applications (like Pligg) and integrate them to give a complete feel. You can’t extend newsgroups with new features!

Also our newsgroups do not archive and do allow us to reference a post in other software. A big pain if you want to integrate with something like Pligg and allow people to submit their “posts” for voting, for example. (On the flip-side it means there is nothing to save making it easier to ditch).

Then there are the inevitable comparisons. “This software sucks because it doesn’t do XYZ feature in SLRN”. I’ve heard arguments in the past in a different community on a mailing list from people who stubbornly didn’t want to have a web forum, cries of “splitting the community!” and that email is so much better than using a web interface. Do you see me shedding any tears? And there is also the social aspect to consider, people use it because they know it and everyone else is using it. Until the majority stop using it, the majority won’t move.

I’ll come to “hey” in a minute…

I’d like to point out that I’m not advocating that Redbrick does this, only that this is probably what is needed to “move forward” into Web2.0. I don’t think Redbrick would need to get rid of all its technical
services like shell access, user webspace, vhosting, etc. to do this either. Both can easily live side by side.

Now that we can start with a clean slate, what should Redbrick 2.0 do?

Now What?

The boards formed the social centre point for the users of Redbrick software. So to replace the newsgroups, we need a web forum. One that’s extendable, hackable and just plain cool. My personal preference is for Vanilla (http://getvanilla.com) which is a very nice looking piece of software and is certainly not like phpBB. We need to be able to easily extend the software and I’ve played with Vanilla and it’s quite easy to extend. It’s built on adding “extensions” and has extensions for RSS feeds, permalinks, signatures, bookmarked discussions, blocking categories, threads and users, etc. I haven’t tried integrating it with Vanilla but I’m pretty confident it can be done.

BTW It does have a spell checker plugin. This uses GoogleSpell, however it won’t work on Redbrick because it won’t work through the proxy with https. We’ll need to get curl installed on PHP to do it.

Now we can start integrating the other services. Let’s start with Pligg. To integrate with the Vanilla forum, we need to make a “virtual” category that actually submits a story to Pligg. A simple approach would be to create a theme for Pligg that matches the forum and then create an extension for Vanilla that shows Pligg has a category. Submission and voting would be still via Pligg.

With the Wiki, it depends on the level of integration we want. MediaWiki is a monster of a piece of software. Modifying the look and feel is a headache. The most basic integration would be that the “Talk Pages” actually go to discussions on the forum. This could be just redirection or something more integrated. I don’t particularly like the idea of importing Wiki entries from discussions posts or threads (or vice versa) but you could easily write an extension to autolink to Redbrick Wiki entries and there is a Wiki markup plugin available for Vanilla.

As for Planet… well Planet is good for the combined Redbrick Blogs feed. The best thing to do is have entries in Planet submitted as new stories to Pligg. The interesting ones get voted up and become “published”. It is questionable though if you want to provide users with web services like blogs, if they should be automatically submitted to Planet and Pligg or should it be an opt-in/out like service.

Chatting

“Hey”: the other corner stone of Redbrick. It’s great now that Redbrick has a Jabber server. Why do we need Hey? For the same reasons as the newsgroups, why do we need to have a Jabber to Hey service?

I think people would need to start using Jabber more, in fact exclusively. Jabber and some magic web coding could be the greatest replacement for Hey. Like Gmail, when you’re browsing the new Web2.0 Redbrick forum, signed in to Pligg or the Wiki, you could have a “chat” window popup when someone tries to talk to you. It would be nice that you can also use Jabber to “hey” someone who happens to be logged in using a shell.

As for IRC and chat services… well, em, I don’t really use them too much. I leave that up to someone else.

Tagging

“Tagging” stuff on Redbrick would be the big thing or the most challenging. Tags can be just superficial and give a nice visualisation/”tag cloud” of Redbrick or they can be useful like in Flickr where people use tags to group stuff.

You need some sort of API or service that would allow Redbrick users to freely add and remove tags from any forum thread, wiki page, pligg entry and possible from user’s webpages and blogs. I’m sure it can be done but it’d need some thought.

Making it look the same

I think this is a pretty major and important thing. If the services are integrated, they need to look the same. However this isn’t challenging. It’s just a lump of work that someone would have to do.

Frontpage or rather, bringing it all together

Yea. Redbrick Frontpage. If we’re going to have all these services really tightly integrated, the frontpage is the place to bring it together. This isn’t just “links” but rather a summary of the latest Wiki pages, new forum threads, published pliggs, etc. But that’s not all though, I mean if you’re like me, you’ll pick and choose the RSS feeds you want and never have to visit the Redbrick frontpage.

The frontpage has to encourage discussion, commentary, etc. In a sense, it should be more “blog” like. News should have comments and trackbacks so we know Redbrick bloggers are interested. It should have an RSS feed as basic! Podcasts and guest blog entries from Redbrick users. Rants from Associates, etc. Moderated by the current committee/admins. A sort of “best of Redbrick”, kind of place.

Conclusion

Why bother? Everything works well enough for us now.

… and just a little soul draining. My last few entries on my blog have all been about the Game Crafters Guild website and mostly technical in nature. Here, here and here.

I thought the idea behind the GCG site was/is a good one. It would be something I would contribute to and participate in. So I made a new feature-rich version of it and it went live a little while ago. I didn’t just plug together some pieces of software, I wrote code to join them, tested it, created new themes and templates for and brought it all together. It works. It is alive.

However, it is barely shambling forward.

I only know a little about getting communities started. I believe I succeeded with the Redbrick Wiki, failed with Project Freebrick and Occult Wiki. The IrishGamingWiki.com is ticking over, at least more so than GCG. I’m only involved in running Redbrick Planet but that seems to be trickling along.

The Formula: People must want it, then you fulfil that need and off you go. Once you have three or four people who believe the idea other than you and start using it earnestly, things start to happen.

With GCG, I was under the impression that there were quite a few people who would be interested in it. But I guess I did the site upgrade in a sort of vacuum. No-one was calling for it. No-one was arguing about it. Just me, thinking it was a good idea. Still do. Still working on the site. But there was no “buzz” anywhere about it. It just happened. Perhaps I should start some flame war on igaming or irishgaming.com/forums… that would generate interest, polarise people for and against the idea…

It’s just frustrating that barely anyone has logged on. I can imagine more than few had a look at the site and went “hmm, that looks good, when people start using it” and then buggered off… not realising that we need to turn you lurkers into users. I feel like a cafe manager sitting in a brand new cafe, that’s totally empty with the staff constantly cleaning tables to look busy. People look in and see it’s not busy, so they’ll come back later!

Maybe I’m just coming down off my “creative” run with it. I did do a lot in a short space of time. Maybe I’m not patient enough, that it’ll happen in good time. Perhaps with the impending Gaelcon, people are too busy but after Gaelcon will start using it. Maybe. The worst thing is when your friends say, they like it and would use it and they’ll log on… and then don’t. They have good excuses and all that, I can’t fault them per say, but they all have excuses and reasons.

What do people who read my blog think about it? Is GCG a good idea? Would use it and if so, why aren’t you, what’s the thing its missing?

One of the more frustrating elements about it is that I put some other personal projects on hold to try and finish the site. In a sense, I got buried in code so I can’t contribute to the site as a user would, as I would if someone else had created the site. I have a project (mentioned here and here as “COG”) that I had planned to use the site to do something with for example but that’s paused right now. I had a few blog entries I wanted to write about too, which are now just empty drafts waiting patiently to be filled in.