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?

A thought-exercise: Redbrick “Web 2.0″

I originally posted this on the Redbrick babble newsgroup. If you don’t know what Redbrick is, this entry will have little interest to you. However, I’m posting it here because I think it’s interesting and also I’m hoping that it might filter out to some of the other Redbrick users who don’t use the newsgroups.

Frustrating!

… 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.

Getting DokuWiki to use Wordpress Authentication (v1.2)

This extension does not transform your Wordpress (WP) posts into DokuWiki (DW) entires. If your looking for that functionality, I’d recommend doing a google search for dwBliki plugin.

What this extension does is to get DokuWiki to use Wordpress’ authentication, i.e. DokuWiki to use Wordpress’ user database, using an authentication plugin for DokuWiki.

GCG… it’s alive!

So I’ve been quiet. Hidden away in a bunker, miles underground. All I had was a laptop and broadband. The data packets crackled with the potential of lightning. My eyes were bleary and red as I fumbled trying to stitched the limbs on… in my final moments of exhaustion, I was transfixed with horror as it opened it’s eyes…

“It’s alive…” I shuddered before I lost my mind.

Well the truth is, I probably lost my mind long before then.

Wordpress 2.0!

Wordpress 2.0 has been released! Did anyone notice?

I’ve upgrade my site(s) though it took longer than usual. For installing/upgrading on Redbrick, see the Redbrick wiki article “Installing Wordpress on Redbrick”. I also had to debug and update the themes for all my sites. That was a pain.

The interface in WP2.0 is all AJAX now; works nicely in IE but in Opera the notifications and confirmation are a little misaligned and don’t disappear like in IE. I can’t get the spam plugin to work either. It won’t accept my Wordpress API key! Argg. Still, other than that it’s quite nice.

Now I have to go validate, debug and update my “TheDeadOne.net Original Theme”, “Wordpress and AXS Integration Plugin” and “Search and Replace Plugin” so they are compatible with Wordpress 2.0. A bit too much work really.

The Occult is Dead!

I’m going to be getting rid of the redbrick ‘occult’ wiki that I’ve been running.

It’s been for 16 months but there is absolutly no content besides my own and it was serving no function for me.

But, it still had some links I’d like to preserve so I’ve created a mirror of it which you are free to download.

Redbrick Occult Wiki June 2005

Also the Redbrick Wiki is now no longer hosted on my webspace. It’s got it’s own spanking new space, dedicated entirely to itself!

My newest experiement: The Irish Gaming Wiki

Yep, The Irish Gaming Wiki. It’s an experiment at the moment but hopefully it’ll blossom into something wonderful!

Ah crap

By now we are meant to have moved in to our new place. By now the kitchean appliances, tiles and flooring should have been delievered. By now we should have ordered the curtains…

Well, eh, we’re still living in the Tramyards. Everything is packed, ready to go. We just dont’ know when. It was stressful enough getting ready.

Due to some legal muck-up (on the builder’s solicitor’s side btw) we can’t move in yet. Well we could but legally… we’d be doing something illegal.

So we’re back to waiting.. ah crap.

In the meantime, I’ve setup the Redbrick Wiki after numerous discussions on the Redbrick forums. Some funky stuff there already if your a Redbrick member.

I’ve also written a short story over the weekend. It’s been a while since I’ve written any stories. It’s called “Don’t Drink and Drive” and, like all the work presented here, is in a first draft. Enjoy!

December 6th, 2004 at 1:20 pm
Comments Off

Posts tagged with keywords "Wiki"