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?

Related Posts:

• Frustrating!
• GCG… it’s alive!
• Finally finished my 2008 “spring-clean” of the IrishGamingWiki.com
• Planet Irish Gaming
• LiveJournal and WordPress

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.

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.

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• Add a “pligg it” button to your webpage!
• Frustrating!
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… 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.

Related Posts:

• GCG… it’s alive!
• Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming
• Maybe not the end of an era, but the end of something!
• A personal perspective of the demise of DiddlySquat
• 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.

Download the DokuWiki Authentication Extension (v1.2)

Previous downloads:Download the DokuWiki Authentication Extension (v1.1) and Download the DokuWiki Authentication Extension

Before you begin, you’ll need to be able to run MySQL commands on your WP database and shouldn’t be afraid of modifying some code.

Much of this work was based on the DW splitbrain.org wiki documentation. I used the phpbb integration as a template. See:

http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:auth:mysql
http://wiki.splitbrain.org/wiki:tips:integrate_with_phpbb

I’ve tested this with versions:

DokuWiki: 2006-03-09d
Wordpress: 2.0.4

I can’t speak for other versions.

Version History

1.2 (10/10/2006)

• The extension turns back on “magic quotes” which causes additional slashes in DW articles after editing.

1.1 (03/10/2006)

• Small fix for using WordPress tags while logged in.
• Documentation/Instructions updates

1.0 (27/09/2006)

• First Release

Notes on using this authentication plugin

I’d recommend that you get your users to use the WP’s Register, Login and Logout interface rather than DW’s. However, DW’s Login and Logout should work fine and they should log in and out of WP at the same time.

BUT you should use WP to add new users. If you use DW, they won’t be configured correctly to use WP as you need to modify two SQL tables and DW will only modify one.

By default all users are a member of the “defaultgroup”. WP does not have any concept of user groups. It does have a concept of roles which I have ignored because I wanted the flexibility of DW’s user groups. You can’t really remove users from this group unless you modify “wordpress.class.php”.

You can use DW’s “User Manager” to add and remove your WP users from DW’s user groups but avoid the “Configuration Settings” as this overwrites your local.php and seems to cause problems for the WP authenication.

This plugin also introduces a useful feature. Because it pulls in your WordPress files, you can then, anywhere else in DW, access WordPress functions. This means, for example, you can use template functions like “get_header();” or “get_sidebar();” if your skinning your DW.

First up: Installing WordPress and/or DokuWiki

For installing WP or DW, refer to the included installation documentation.

Install WP first and make sure everything is up and running before installing DW. Make sure that DW is installed in a directory at the same level as WP or as a subdirectory of WP. This is to make sure that the cookie domains are the same.

In my test environment I had wordpress installed @ ~/public_html/test/wp and DW installed @ ~/public_html/test/dw.

Now, configuring DokuWiki…

First, copy “wordpress.class.php” to /inc/auth. Open it in your favorite text editor and make sure that WP_ROOT is correct:

if(!defined(‘WP_ROOT’)) define(‘WP_ROOT’, DOKU_INC.’../wp/’);

I have it configured by default to assume that dokuwiki is installed at the same level as WP and that WP is installed in a directory called “wp”.

acl.auth.php

You probably created a “conf/acl.auth.php” when you installed DW initially. If you didn’t, make a copy of conf/acl.auth.php.dist and name it “acl.auth.php”.

local.php

You probably created a “conf/local.php” when you installed DW initially. If you didn’t, make a copy of conf/local.php.dist and name it “local.php”. Open it in your favorite text editor and add (or modify) these settings:

// Disable the ability to register: users should register via the WordPress interface
$conf['openregister']= 0;
// Disable password autogen: not important if users can’t register
$conf['autopasswd'] = 1;
// Disable password resend: let wordpress do this
$conf['resendpasswd']= 0;
// Enable access control
$conf['useacl'] = 1;
// Use wordpress authentication
$conf['authtype'] = ‘wordpress’;
// Not sure what passcrypt needs to be set to, but this works
$conf['passcrypt'] = ‘smd5′;
// Recommend you set defaultgroup to “user” and “superuser” admin group.
// as we’ll be creating them during our integration.
$conf['defaultgroup']= ‘user’;
$conf['superuser'] = ‘@admin’;
// Updating profile requires password
$conf['profileconfirm'] = ’1′;

Finally, modifying your SQL Database

First, backup your database. You can do this quite easily via WP’s Database plugin.

You need to create two new tables to support DW. In the code below I’ve called these tables “wp_dw_groups” and “wp_dw_usergroups”. If you did not use “wp_” as your database prefix for WordPress, you will need to modify these commands before you use them and replace “wp_” with the prefix you used. “wordpress.class.php” uses the database prefix to reference these tables.

Connect to your database and run these two commands:

CREATE TABLE `wp_dw_groups` (
`gid` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
`name` varchar(50) NOT NULL DEFAULT ”,
PRIMARY KEY (`gid`),
UNIQUE KEY `name` (`name`)
) TYPE = MYISAM;
CREATE TABLE `wp_dw_usergroup` (
`uid` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT ’0′,
`gid` int(10) UNSIGNED NOT NULL DEFAULT ’0′,
PRIMARY KEY (`uid`,`gid`)
) TYPE = MYISAM;

These will create the two tables you need. However, you need to setup some groups too. So these two commands will create a user and an admin group.

INSERT INTO `wp_dw_groups` VALUES (1,”admin”);
INSERT INTO `wp_dw_groups` VALUES (2,”user”);

Now you need to give yourself admin rights. Normally the first user created in WP is the admin account. This normally has the ID of 1. So now we will add admin user to admin and user groups.

INSERT INTO `wp_dw_usergroup` VALUES (1,1);
INSERT INTO `wp_dw_usergroup` VALUES (1,2);

Finished

Now you should be able to login and logout using your WP’s users on DW!

Related Posts:

• Frustrating!
• GCG… it’s alive!
• Some fun with Planet Irish Gaming
• Integrating Pligg beta 8.1.0 with WordPress 2.0.4 (v1.1)
• WordPress 2.0!

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.

I’ve kinda been consumed on a web project these last few days. All my spare “creative” cycles have gone into it. What started as a little demo, became a prototype, became a full working site! And I just couldn’t stop.

I wanted to show specky_ie what could be done, fairly easily, with existing open-source software for the Game Crafter’s Guild of Ireland website. As I discovered, a lot can be done. I’ll reserve the details of how and what I did for another post as I think it’d be useful for a lot of wordpress fans.

Anyway, the site is currently live, but we haven’t officially announced it yet. The Guild is place for people who want to be creative using roleplaying games. It’s not specifically for the online Irish gaming community at all. It is distinct, different and hopefully open to everyone who has or might have an interest, either as contributor, self-promotion or just wants to get the latest news.

Anyway, it’s online, it’s up. Go see it and tell me what you think (either here or there, I don’t mind). In fact, start contributing by joining the forums. It’s a shell waiting to be filled right now.
Now, my next big problem is, I think I may have to redesign my own website!

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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.

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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!

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

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• Planet Irish Gaming

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!

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• What a few days…