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Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming


So I’ve been doing some hacking for and analysis of Planet Irish Gaming and I’ve added one new feed and welcomed back another.

Using the power of python, I wrote a site scraping script that generates a feed of LiveJournal blogs that are members of the irishgaming LiveJournal blog i.e. an RSS feed of the friends page. It’s updated three times a day (which seems to be good enough for the rate of posts) but any post that doesn’t have comments enabled can’t be included (because the site scraping script can’t generate a permalink for that post). The link to it is here on Planet Irish Gaming and it’s included in the big feed. It’s pretty nifty.

I continued with my script-hacking and created a script that “fixes” the feed from irishgaming.com. There are some technical problems with their feed so that I couldn’t include it in Planet Irish Gaming. As far as I know, they were not going to get fixed any time soon. My script fixes them and generates a valid feed so now I can include the feed. Yea! :)  

Ah scratch that. I just checked both feeds and they have totally the wrong date. *hack* *test* *debug* *fix* … an hour later… fixed. It seems individual items in both of these new feeds were picking up the latest date rather than the last date the item was added. Should be working fine now.

Because I added the “fixed” feed from irishgaming.com to Planet, I saw this morning that they have added “ads” to irishgaming.com. So I guess I shouldn’t really have been worried about adding ads to the irishgamingwiki.com - not that it’s earned me much (if anything).

If you’ve been using the big feed from Planet Irish Gaming, you’ll know that it gets very busy. Quite a large number of posts per day. Mostly polite drivel from forums around the place, so much so I barely scan the feed. I thought that normal users might find it overwhelming. Well, thanks to the power of Wordpress, you can just grab a feed without forums (I’ve even added this feed link to the frontpage of Planet Irish Gaming) and that includes the new friends feed from livejournal so it’s pretty digestible.

Still though, even doing that, there isn’t really that much genuine roleplaying or gaming news in there. There isn’t really that much genuine Irish roleplaying and gaming content to be honest. The thought had occurred to me that I add a new category to the site (and hence a new feed) that contains only items that actually pertain to roleplaying and gaming. What I could do is add a “vote” like link to the other feeds and if an item gets a few votes it gets automatically added to this category, much like digg.com or reddit.com. However this would require users to interact with the site on some level and I’m not sure the effort I’d have to put in to implement this feature would pay off in terms of people using it. Anyone got any opinions on this?

Why I’m not ready to move to Google Reader yet…


What RSS reader do you use?

I’ve been using Bloglines for quite a while, long before Google Reader hit the scene. I have approximately over 80 RSS feeds I read daily. Not a big number I grant you. I know Bloglines is not perfect (it uses frames FFS!) but it does nearly everything I need, except for one thing that has been bugging me for a while.

I have a number of feeds that fill up quite regularly but when I open them in Bloglines, it marks them all as read, before I’ve even seen the headlines of all the items and if it takes me 10 minutes to read through all the items, it’s kind of annoying if I don’t read through all the items at that time. I have to look at all items in the last “hour” and try to remember which ones I hadn’t read. But Google Reader, using all that Web2.0-ajax-funky-shit, will only mark an item in a feed read as you scroll past it! With Google Reader, I could just pop into one of these big feeds and read as much as I want and not miss anything!

Google Reader is much smoother and nice-looking. No frames for a start. But when I first tried Google Reader, it didn’t work in Opera so therefore it was an instant no-no. But now it does. So I went and imported my latest subscriptions. Easy peasy. But then I thought, if I’m going to start using a new tool I might as well organise my feeds, put them in the right folders, delete the ones I never read etc. Removing feeds easy. But I couldn’t rename a folder! I had to delete it and recreate it. Arg! Also, in one place tags were called folders and you can browse around your feeds using them, in another they are purely tags you have to add tags to feeds instead of adding feeds to tag/folders.

Bloglines has a nice drag and drop interface where you can drop feeds in the folders you want. Okay, so it’s not any more efficient than Google Reader or using a text editor, but it’s visual and augments the organisation process. With Google Reader, you have to select the feeds from a list of all the feeds. Yes tags are more powerful, but there seems to be a bit of drawback on the user-interface for managing them. You can filter but it just didn’t feel easy. I found it would be easier and quicker to modify the exported opml file from Bloglines with a text editor than try and use this interface. It was disappointing. Yes, I’m lazy. I could do all these modifications. But Bloglines works fine for me right now. I know the guys at Google will improve the Google Reader interface in time so I’ll just wait and see.