---

Comments:

---

'I shall write a title for this comment, here' by Bman
Submitted on 2006-06-22 04:35:07 CST
Looking good. Not sure I'm thrilled about having to log in to post comments, but I'll live. :) Must have been a bunch of work to create this all from scratch. Did you use a PHP framework of some kind?

One bug I noticed is that none of the RSS feeds (that I've seen) have titles, so when I added them to bloglines, it just shows the URL for the title.


'Me too. Maybe comments don't need titles?' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-22 08:35:21 CST
No frameworks were employed in the creation of this site. I jsut noticed that feed title thing too and I'm somewhat baffled by that because I didn't change anything related to the title, but I'm sure I screwed it up somewhere... In my RSS reader it says "[autodiscovered]" which is even worse than seeing only the URl. I'll figure that out today. I want to enhance the feeds as well. I simplified them a bit when I did this.


'and...' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-22 08:53:56 CST
I recommend never coding RSS feeds by hand if you can help it. It looks easy at first, but can be extremely painful due to weird details such as this and don't even get me started on charcater encoding... ack.


'oh, and...' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-22 09:10:57 CST
Hey BMan, logging in might be slightly annoying, but not as annoying as captchas, right? Plus when you log in you get all the extra features like customizing a news feed and getting to post your own news finds. Yes, this is me marketing the idea to you. What say you? Three cheers for logging in, or shall it be free and clear to every surfer (and troll)?


'Looking good' by Heartless
Submitted on 2006-06-22 11:01:21 CST
Keep up the good work :) Now I have to work out my blog to include the news script :)


'RSS Feed Titles' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-22 11:17:31 CST
Looks like the RSS Feed Titles are coming in okay now, at least they are in my reader. Let me know if you have any issue with them from here on out.


'Believe me...' by Bman
Submitted on 2006-06-22 13:51:27 CST
I am all too familiar with the pain of building RSS feeds by hand. Both the feeds on Falcon Twin are generated that way. Strip all the HTML tags, decode all the character entities, reencode only the ampersand and left/right chevrons...ugh.

Looking forward to exploring the custom RSS feeds. Does they only show stories you've already marked good, or can you say "show me everything about WoW, EQ2, EVE and GW"? (Just wondering aloud really, I'll find out myself soon enough.)

After sleeping on it, I'm fine with logging in now. I never minded captchas, but since there are other features you get with the login besides just being able to comment, it works for me. I say run with it.


'Return, carriage! Return!' by Bman
Submitted on 2006-06-22 13:53:52 CST
Looks like newlines in the comments aren't being converted to linebreak tags, so multiple paragraphs get squished together into one big one.


'Custom RSS' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-22 15:14:32 CST
Yes, at the moment the custom RSS syndicates everything you clicked "mark it". The "it's good" selection is like digg's "digg it" button in that it assigns karma to the article. You have given me a good idea for the future of the rss feeds though. It woul dbe nice if there was a more robust feed selection screen that allowed a truly customized, and automated feed of news for specific games. Good idea. Oh, and yes, I'll put that CR in on the comments so you can line break. Been meaning to do that. I'll probably add some ability to do links as well as long I can do it safely. Thanks Bman.


'Looking snazzy' by HeadOrange
Submitted on 2006-06-23 10:40:03 CST
Looking good Brent. I'll be contacting you as soon as things clear up here at work. Sorry for the delay on my part... i really dig the new look and feel.

Might want to run some news on Saga of Ryzom and the new player content system they are launching as well as the new free to play "newbie island." I tried this game out back in it's beta and HATED it.... it's a huge imporvement on everything in that beta, very cool system.


'Line Breaks' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-23 12:52:56 CST
There are now linebreaks in comments. Please rejoice with me. Thanks for the suggestion Bman. Line breaks from old comments that were not showing are in fact preserved as you can see above...


'And there was much rejoicing!' by Bman
Submitted on 2006-06-23 15:31:15 CST
Say, when submitting news, will it be possible to select multiple related MMOs - for instance, with today's NCSoft news?


'perhaps' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-23 15:38:53 CST
I've been pondering that as well. I think it'll be necessary, so I'd better jsut go ahead and do it eh?



'Wonderful!!' by Saylah
Submitted on 2006-06-27 15:41:30 CST
Hi Brent - Congratulations on a fantastic update to your sites. I don't know how you find the time to play, write AND do development work on the site too. I'm still loving all your gaming news and the podcast, which is the audio highlight of my week!


'Probably Too Much' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-27 16:27:37 CST
Saylah -

I'm afraid to calculate the time I spend on this each week. But I figure I spend about 2 hours each weekday on it when I'm not doing heavy development like I was last week and another 5 to 8 hours on the podcast including research, prep notes, recording, editing, mixing and publishing. So, it's probably about 10-20 hours each week on average not counting development time. I tackle new development about once a month, so usually there is one week in the month where I'll spend close to 40 hours on VirginWorlds. Yeah, I probably shouldn't have computed that. I appreciate the positive feedback because it helps me continue doing this to myself each week!


'however...' by Brent
Submitted on 2006-06-27 16:28:55 CST
I'd rather spend 50 hours doing this every week than do the stuff I do at work every day.



To post comments, please login.