Announcement: indie rpg planet (alpha)

[oliof]

Hello,
I have set up a planet where the goal is to have all the feeds of indie design/discussion blogs collected people deem interesting. I would call the current setup being alpha quality, as much of the needed infrastructure (self registration et.al.) is still missing.

You can see it here: http://planet.mausdompteur.de/

Of course, the whole people-deeming-interesting stuff is not automated in any useful way (I should work on that soon), and the list of referenced blogs and pages should be bigger.

If you know pages that should be added, PM me or write an email to planet@mausdompteur.de.

If you think this is a bad idea, please let me know. If you know how the planet could be improved, I am all ears (eyes, rather) as well.

Regards,
    Harald

[joepub]

So it is an Indie RPG blog link-site/reference-site?
or are you actually hosting these blogs?


and is it specifically blogs, or are there forums, articles, etc as well?

[Nathan P.]

Have you seen these Squidoo lenses?

RPG Diaspora Lens
RPG Design/Discussion Lens
Game Mastering Lens

[oliof]

So it is an Indie RPG blog link-site/reference-site?
or are you actually hosting these blogs?

I am not hosting these blogs. I just set up the software that pulls together the articles from all their different sources.

and is it specifically blogs, or are there forums, articles, etc as well?

It's all web sites that feature an RSS feed. No need to be blogs as well. I see my little project as a complement to what the forge already offers. I wouldn't have the time to take good care of a forum myself, but could be talked into hosting articles  - although I'd rather think articles better fit here as well.

Regards,
    Harald

[oliof]

Have you seen these Squidoo lenses?

Hey Nathan,
I haven't been aware of Squidoo or what it does. Do you think all's done there I could ever achieve, or do you think I could do better by adding certain things Squidoo does not offer?

Regards,
    Harald

[RobMuadib]

Oliof

Took a look at your site, seems pretty good, and given that the Squidoo.com is still in beta, and a startup, never hurts to spread out your eggs.. I thought of several good features you could add, First see if you can put a link to the main blog page for each RSS feed, 2nd add the names of the author's to the blogs if you can, as many people recognize peoples names from the community, but are not likely to know the name of their blog. 3rd, see if you could seperate out the pure theory/design journal blogs from the Stuff and theory Journals. Some of the feeds are thin on gaming talk and thick on personal/ranting/newsblogging stuff. Additionally, Smerf (Thomas) has a feed o' feeds page at http://www.thesmerf.com/, you can see what he is doing. Smerf is also talking aobut a central blogging/feed site setup, and apperantly Clinton R. Nixon has something in the works. But a nice independent feeds page never hurts. Oh, and your page is grabbing my feed from my Blog right, and therefore probably sucks:)

Best

Rob

[oliof]

Oliof

Took a look at your site, seems pretty good, and given that the Squidoo.com is still in beta, and a startup, never hurts to spread out your eggs.

Thanks for the encouraging words!

I thought of several good features you could add, First see if you can put a link to the main blog page for each RSS feed, 2nd add the names of the author's to the blogs if you can, as many people recognize peoples names from the community, but are not likely to know the name of their blog.

That sounds like a good idea. I will look into this, either by abusing the categories, or by adding a specific author name info to the feed metadata (at the moment, I can do 'Name of the blog', 'feed URL', 'site URL', 'category').

3rd, see if you could seperate out the pure theory/design journal blogs from the Stuff and theory Journals. Some of the feeds are thin on gaming talk and thick on personal/ranting/newsblogging stuff.

Yeah, refactoring the different types of blogs might be in order. With some, this might get ugly though. Need to add tagging to the list of features...

Additionally, Smerf (Thomas) has a feed o' feeds page at http://www.thesmerf.com/, you can see what he is doing. Smerf is also talking aobut a central blogging/feed site setup, and apperantly Clinton R. Nixon has something in the works. But a nice independent feeds page never hurts. Oh, and your page is grabbing my feed from my Blog right, and therefore probably sucks:)

I have had some conversation with both about the matter. I think that will continue after the festive season to get some results. Oh, and where do you want me to feed from?

Regards,
    Harald

[Victor Gijsbers]

Hey, good work, but:

1. I see lots of html-tags as, well, html-tags, unconverted to lay-out.
2. The site is too wide to fit into my browser window.

My screen resolution is 1024 x 768, and I'm using Firefox 1.0.7.

[oliof]

Hello Victor,
1) I haven't come around to sanitize the feed input. I see this as well. This is part of what needs to be fixed, but shouldn't be too hard.

2) I work on the same screen size and have the same problem. I am still looking to find the time to fix the theme to have a smaller font size for the articles.

thanks for the encouragement!

Regards,
    Harald

[oliof]

I have changed the theme and layout a bit. This should fit small screens better. People with larger screens should be able to adjust the font size easily.

Regards,
    Harald

[oliof]

And, on another note: The HTML fragments are in the comment feeds. I could either try to work out why that doesn't work as expected, or think hard about possibly not needing the comment feed on the site. I think they are quite valuable, as they do show what's said about the articles. Maybe that will become even more useful if I can find out how to show the author info instead of some vaguely related value (especially true for multi author blogs. I can't do anything about it if the RSS feeds do not show that info, though).

Regards,
    Harald

[oliof]

Victor,
the HTML Tags are encoded wrongly by the feed generators, i.e. the feeds do send

Code:

< br >

instead of

Code:

<br>

[Victor Gijsbers]

Hm! You can't put them through a converting script before your php-scripts (or whatever you use) add them to the content of your page?

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

It's time to take technical dialogues about the site to private communication, like private messages or email. Thanks guys.

Best,
Ron

[oliof]

Hiya,

It's time to take technical dialogues about the site to private communication, like private messages or email. Thanks guys.

Best,
Ron

Right. Anyone who is interested, please mail me at planet@mausdompteur.de. Ron - thanks for reminding me.

Regards,
    Harald