Category: This Blog

Dev Digest RSS feed

Found one again at http://www.dotfour.net/coh. It has both Dev Digest and Community Digest items (and can be read either on that page or, as noted, as an RSS feed).

Maybe more gaming posting will ensue here, though a lot of the chat these days is tweaks and complaints over I13 goings-on, or (sadly) about Lighthouse’s departure from the Community.

UPDATE: Not sure why I didn’t spot these earlier, but RedTomax has a feed for Dev Digest, Community Digest and European Dev Digest.

 

 

Cosmetic improvements

In light of some recnetly increased activity here, as well as adding LotRO to the mix, I’ve done some reformatting of the sidebar on the main page. Nothing exciting — adding some LotRO material, reducing the lengthy stable listing of CoX toons, etc. Just wanted to acknowledge it.

We were down …

But now we’re up. 

SQL table problem, which happened on the blog this morning and which I couldn’t fix until I got home (since our office firewall blocks the port that CPanel operates under).  Took ten seconds to fix, after a day of frustration.  Sorry about that, chiefs.

Minor re-org

I’ve reorganized the sidebar listing of toons (which is both incomplete and full of folks we never play any more) to be grouped by (where appropriate) duos. May make certain scheduling and coordination tasks a lot easier.

I’m pretty sure a lot of Margie’s soloist info is out of date.

Notification

I’m pretty darned certain that the Notification checkboxes and e-mail-address form boxes at the bottom of each post are finally working. So if you want to subscribe to a post and get an e-mail every time a new comment comes up, you can. Huzzah.

Loggy Bloggy

So with the impending demise of the Alliance website (mutter mutter mutter) comes the question of what to do with the materials therein.

I’ve already done a “Save As” for all my individual character entries cross-SG. So the most important material (kindasorta) is safe. (Haven’t done that for Margie’s stuff, but that’s thinner on the ground). Question is, what to do with it.

I could post it on the new AoC Lite forum I’ve put together. Problem is … well, I’m not sure that’s ever going to be much of a community, more like a place to hang and post stuff that needs posting in a place that’s not, well, here. To be perfectly honest, while I look forward to continued CoXing with other members of the remaining AoC groups, I don’t see any of the current folks going into a big membership drive mode that would require a forum to support it.

I’m inclined to think, in fact, that we are in the end game, so to speak, of our (individual) CoX gameplay cycles — the remaining Alliance people will play a bit here and there, slowly decreasing, and gradtually wander away, gently, into that good night.

Okay, that was more depressing than I meant it to be.

At any rate, I’m not sure how much effort I want to put into recreating a Little Slice o’ the Alliance if it’s mostly a half-dozen or so people and their casual passtime. Feel free to disabuse me of my interpretation of the sitch.

The alternative, moving to a more personal style, is to post that character material here, on the Blog of Heroes. Put a pointer to it, perhaps, from the forums (in case someone goes looking), but take the individual posts and either do them up in a single block, or else, plug them in, dated appropriately, and have their own categories (“Log / Psi-clone”) here. The material stays at hand, in a probably-more-persistent format.

That’s the direction I’m leaning, at least for the character stuff (which I care most about). Thoughts?

Spam, spam, spam, spam …

I’ve added a new anti-comment-spam tool here at the Blog of Heroes, MT TinyTuring. This plug-in for Movable Type does a text-based question/answer that would be non-trivial for a spam-bot to figure out, but is exceedingly simple for a human. It’s sort of a text-based CAPTCHA, without the graphics/accessibility issue of that technology.

The other thing it means is that it’s not necessary to have a TypeKey identity to post comments here. It’s fine if you do (it makes authenticating you as a white hat for other anti-spam tests easier), but it’s not required.

I actually implemented this in order to help out BD, whose blog I’m proud to host here, but I “tested” it out on this blog first, and decided to leave it in place. Since TypeKey didn’t work well on BD’s blog (because of the different domain and the vagaries of how M$ implemented cross-domain cookie stuff in IE), this will help block a lot of potential spam over there. Here, probably not so much, but it does let people comment without doing
TypeKey registration, which some might prefer.

Virgil Irony

I am amused that this blog entry shows up as the fourth entry in Google if you search on “bat’zul infernal” (and this one is third). Yikes.
I am even more amused, as I read the post and its comments that Black Pharoh (who is on this SF with us) was one of the Sanguine Society folks who was also running the same SF that same day as the CoI was doing it.
I’m doing some research into the Bat’Zul/Infernal final mission to figure out how best to handle it. There are some good notes there. Lots of purples for the Stalkers. Figure out what debuffs, if any, we can throw on the Infernal. And, from Doyce since then, try and figure out how to rope Infernal and Bat’zul (and company) into all fighting each other. That latter is more difficult now that clicking the altars takes down invis, but worth consideration.

Hiatus

We’re off to Walt Disney World for the next week, so no CoX, and no Blog of Heroes, until next weekend at the soonest.
If you’re just dying for content, my regular blog will have both remotely-posted photos and pre-set posts going up on it all week, so you can get your ***Dave fix.
Until then — be safe, Alliance heroes! And don’t start I7 without us!

MT 3.2

I’ve upgraded my Movable Type installation to v3.2. If something seems odd or broken around here (at least, more odd or broken than usual), please let me know.

ALLIANCE FORUM

Given the chronic problems of the Freedomphalanx.com forums right now, if anyone wants to use this thread as an Open Chat area (not that anyone here feels particularly restrained in using any thread for that) for whatever they want that they’d be doing there (game coordination, commentary, bitching, whatever), feel free just drop comments in on this thread.
I don’t actually know anyone’s e-mail address aside from the few AoC folk, so feel free to pass the word, as you see fit or necessary.
And, in the meantime, might I recommend this observation …

On Lurkers

I know you’re out there.
A month or so back, someone approached Velvet (I think it was) in a train station. The conversation was along the lines of, “I know you. You have that blog …”
Then I got a PM on the forums today from Liberty Bill, saying he enjoyed the blog. He then expressed surprise when I told him he was welcome to comment.
Granted it’s not, upon reflection, completely transparent to a new user that anyone visiting here can comment. You just need to register, meaning you have to set up an identity in Typekey to sort of establish that you are a human being, not a spambot, and then sign in. The instructions are actually down in the comment section, but maybe not obvious.
It’s painless, commercial-free, and secure. And free, of course.
Once you’ve done that, you can comment away. And, in fact, you are welcome to.
It is odd, though. The folks who comment here are all (with the exception of the two individuals mentioned at the top of the post, and the former only comment once, I think) people I know in RL. Having virtual presences show up here is to be expected, but still a bit different. (At least for this blog.) I haven’t kept it a secret, nor have I publicized it (though if anyone clicks on the “www” button beneath one of my posts on the Alliance forum, they come here). It’s just been hazy barrier between the IC and OOC world, as much in my own imagination as in reality.
But now I can’t get over the feeling now that there are others, just out of sight, watching from the shadows (a la The Mark of Gideon). So, if you are … comment. Say hi. Set down and chat a spell.