My feed got accepted by RPG Bloggers Network. I had to make a change to the wiki engine I'm using. Traditionally the creation date is part of the page name since blog posts live in the same namespace as ordinary wiki pages, thus every page name has to be unique. This might look a bit weird in a feed aggregator because these usually also report a date. Oddmuse provides the date of the last major change for this field; so in most cases readers would see two dates, one being part of the item title, the other being generated based on the publication date. The requirements of their RPG “planet” forced me to finally jump ship and fix this little usability problem in Oddmuse RSS feeds. A note on terminology: As far as I can tell, a “planet” in the blogging world is a blog-of-blogs – just as PlanetEmacsen is a collection of blogs about Emacs. Planet Emacsen uses Planet Venus as the software. It looks easy and straight forward to use. I don’t know about the technical backbone of the RPG Bloggers Network.
Anyway, the RPG Bloggers Network also displays a logo of participating blogs. Except that my blog doesn’t have a real name except my own – Alex Schroeder, and the RPG category doesn’t have a separate logo, and even if I took the site’s black and white X-Face, its 48 × 48 pixels are not enough: The logos ought to be 170 × 50. I whipped out Inkscape, loaded the map for my Alder King game in a second layer and started experimenting. I wanted a bit of that old school hex map feeling as part of my logo. I had to increase the contrast for the map, but I think the result looks ok:
I’ve added the RPG Bloggers Network to my Firefox toolbar. I’m not going to read all the posts in there (specially since I already read a lot of these blogs), but I like to quickly skim the front page and follow one or two of the links that seem interesting. I ended up on some new RPG blogs and have made some additions to my list! Try this OPML file if you want to check out all the gaming feeds I’m subscribed to: Alex Gaming.opml. The one that really made a lasting impression on me is Grognardia. I actually read the entire archive. Wow! (The articles about book covers are not my thing, but sometimes James uses them to discuss interesting related topics. The other stuff is gold, though.) Right now I’m clicking myself through the archive of Jeff’s Gameblog.
Oh the joys of interesting RPG blogs! 😄
Anyway:
http://rpgbloggers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/rpgbloggers_banner_x1.png
Enjoy!
#RPG #thoughts #Blogs
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I’m finding the RPG Bloggers Network to be fantastic! THIS is what social networking should be all about - like-minded folks sharing what they already do and spreading the word. Terrific stuff.
I’m glad you made the changes to oddmuse too - I’ll be looking into them more closely when I get my new wiki off the ground 😄
– greywulf 2008-08-09 11:29 UTC
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I must confess it beats scanning the thread titles on EN World. 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2008-08-09 21:09 UTC
