Where Worlds Collide

I’ve followed Carl Cravens over to the dark side, and set up a twitter account - my username is “Kalyr”.  Time will tell if it’s any use - depends how many people I know are on it.

Warning!  This post contains tech geekery, using TLAs.

Karen Cravens wonders about roleplaying blogs and mailing lists cannibalising each other’s readership, and ponders a possible solution.

In fiddling with the next release of the software that powers the Phoenyx, I’ve been considering how to integrate blogs. A lot of us (including me, on occasion) have roleplaying blogs, and I think to a certain extent that’s drawn conversation that might otherwise go in GAMERS….

What I’m thinking is: if you’ve got a roleplaying blog (or a roleplaying section in a multi-topic blog) that has posts that would be appropriate to post to GAMERS, you register its feed, and when you post to your blog, the Phoenyx magically treats it as though you’ve posted to GAMERS as well. If you provide a comments feed, I might treat that as though the commenters have posted followups, too. (It’s up to you and your software to get the GAMERS replies treated as comments on your version - the Phoenyx can provide the feed, but I don’t know of any blogging software that’s set up to import it. Therein lies one hurdle in my plan)

Thoughts?

My immediate thought was rather than depending on some probably non-existant Wordpress plugin to read an external RSS feed and import the contents as comments, it would be better if the The Phoenyx were to ping this blog using XML-RPC with any followup comments.

I would guess there are serious cans of worms involved in a 100% two way synchronisation between the comments thread in a Wordpress blog, and a discussion thread on a web forum/mailing list hybrid, quite possibly at a social level as well as a technical one.

Anyone in the wider Wordpress world ever tried something like this?

Charlie Stross has been driven to this:

I’m seriously considering pitching a detective novel, about the hunt for a serial killer. The unique selling point will be that as the detective homes in on the killer, he gradually comes to sympathize with him, and ends up questioning whether he should actually collar the murderer … because the victims are all spammers.

As I’ve said before, there’s only one thing to do. Nuke Florida from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure. (Actually, Charlie’s plot summary sounds a little bit like the plot of Iain Banks’ Complicity)

I’m about to upgrade this blog from Wordpress 2.1 to 2.3. That should explain any strangeness for the next hour or two…

Update: Seems to have worked so far.  No nasty-looking database errors, and it doesn’t seem to have eaten my theme.

As you’re proably noticed (unless of course you’re reading this via RSS), I’ve tweaked the layout of this blog a bit.  Not a complete new design, more a second attempt at what I was trying to achieve in the first place.  It now actually works properly in Internet Explorer (i.e it looks the same as it does in Firefox)

Let me know if it looks strange in any other browsers.

I’ve reinstated the coloured background rather than white, but I’m not totally sure about that.  What does anyone else think?

I was wondering why I wasn’t getting any hits from Google for recent posts.  Turned out I had a bug in my .htaccess file that caused the web server to return a 500 error rather than a 404 when looking for robots.txt, which meant that the Google spider skittered away rather than indexing my site.

I’ve fixed it now.  The above may be complete gobbledegook to non-technical people, but it does mean this weblog is now the #1 search result for the string “Stoat eyed acolytes“.   Which it wasn’t before…

I’ve added the Subscribe to Comments plugin to this blog.  If you ask it nicely (by checking the checkpox when you post a comment), it will email all subsequent comments for that post.

Slacktivist looks at the sort of organisations making use of Microsoft’s Powerpoint, from bat-crazy heretical fundamentalist churches to corporations run by the pointy-haired boss out of Dilbert.

In evangelical churches, Bill Gates’ computerized Colorforms has supplanted the flip chart and the overhead projector (as well as, disastrously, the hymnal).

The slide here is taken from a PowerPoint presentation from the site Last Days Mystery. It covers the very same territory Bruce’s presentation does, the “seven seals” of judgment from Revelation 6, except it uses spiffy bullet-point lists. You can find lots of similar PowerPoint presentations on other “Bible prophecy” Web sites.

This is the ideal technology for this task because, as Edward Miller notes, “PowerPoint … can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn’t very much coherence or content.” This is, for many PowerPoint enthusiasts, a feature, not a bug. The illusion of coherence and content is precisely why PP is the preferred technology in corporate America and among Bible prophecy “experts” (and why it was used almost exclusively in Donald Rumsfeld’s Pentagon).

At some point in the far, far future, historians will recognise the release of Power Point as the point where Western Civilisation went into terminal irreversible decline.

One way to tell the lawn needs mowing:

• From the upstairs window you can see next door’s ginger cat asleep in the middle of the lawn
• From downstairs, you can’t see him at all

Useful things, strimmers.

Wonderful rant by Charlie Brooker on the subject of fashion

Last week, hardcore idiots across the nation stood in rows at dawn, desperate to get their hands on a cotton bag with “I’m not a plastic bag” printed on it. Right now, a group of determined oafs is camping out in preparation for tomorrow’s launch of the new Kate Moss clothing range at Topshop. If Grazia magazine printed an article declaring it fashionable to smack yourself in the forehead with a limited-edition ball-pein hammer designed exclusively by Coleen McLoughlin, a mob would form outside your local B&Q before the ink had dried on the page.

It’s a mystery to me. If the whole point of fashion is to distinguish yourself from the herd, why queue up to be part of it? Am I missing something here? I suspect not. But then I don’t “get” fashion. I once went out with a girl who was obsessed with dressing up; a real clothes nerd. While we were together, she developed a serious jeans habit. Each week, a new pair. She’d bring them home and show them to me, bubbling with excitement. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference between one pair and the next, and I was staring pretty hard, in case there was a quiz at the end of the relationship. Doubtless a fellow jeans spod would’ve been thrilled by her purchases. To me, it was like trying to spot minute discrepancies between two marked playing cards.

I’m with Charlie Brooker here. Last Friday night we had a works do which ended up at some dreadfully trendy nightclub full of fashion victims, everyone just posing around, with a DJ playing ‘cool’ (i.e. crap) music. I felt totally out of place, as if I’d landed on an alien planet, and just stood around wishing I was somewhere else, like the gig the week before.