Ree’s musings

Behold, after many months, there came an edit to a MoonBurnt test post, and its significance was thus:

I rock.

I've been wanting to get that settled for far too long. Having it done is like nerve aloe.

I've almost got URLs working the way I want them! No more visible query strings -- tuck those buggers away! Hee.

This ties into MoonBurnt stuff, weirdly enough. Most any web trick I try to learn has a possible application to MoonBurnt if I just think about it a minute. In this case, my URL rewriting means I'm finally getting regular expressions to work. It's going to take regex to correctly link Mbt usernames to the corresponding wiki pages (to turn spaces in usernames into underlines in the wiki page URLs) and that's something I'm quite keen on, so that I got something regexy to work is most excellent.

Most of the other Mbt stuff is on hold. I really want to get an uber custom style going there, but a new release of PunBB may be released at almost any time and it's going to have a new style structure. I'm not sure if the old styles will even work or not, and I'm not going to bust my hump tweaking something that may work for just a week or less if the new release comes early. I also want to get the archives formatted to match the live PunBB forum pages, but again, the HTML and styling is due to change and I'm not going to do something just to redo it later.

I'm itchy about it though. I want to tear through the templates right now, modifying avatar handling and profile styling and pretty much everyfreakingthing.

But at the moment I am more hungry than itchy, so it's time for sloppy Joes (which quickly end up as sloppy Ree-shirt) and then I suppose I should write the essay that's due tomorrow.

A couple years ago I ran a roleplay board. I wasn’t much of a story leader but I loved dorking around the layout and wished I could dirty my hands in the software guts (it was a hosted piece of shite, though it served its purpose until recently).

In the last year I have discovered RSS. I currently read 217 feeds through Bloglines, plus a few more in My Yahoo (if I don’t care to catch absolutely every update, just the current stuff) and Livejournal (so that I read blogs from specific groups of friends together and can sort of follow patterns in their posts).

Logical conclusion (to my mind)? I want to run a forum and I want it to do RSS!

I’ve found two systems for this so far and they both have aspects that leave me biting my lip.

Drupal looks exceedingly capable, though doing feeds with it requires a taxonomy setup or just following user blogs. It’s also hella easy to get lost with a large Drupal site, which puts off new users — including me with an old RP haunt of mine that moved to Drupal. JesusGod that’s big. It appears Drupal’s index does not default to the forum (which makes sense in software that can also run one or more blogs without having a forum at all) — I personally think that would be bad for my setup. I think a site based around forum interaction should have the forum on the main page. However, this may be possible and I just haven’t seen it done.

BBpress, from the makers of WordPress (huzzah!), is tiny where Drupal is fucking huge. It does not have avatars, much less the kerfluffle of many board programs with sigs and detailed profiles and crap. While I like the idea of a stripped-down board, I’m not sure many roleplayers would appreciate having to part with their beloved bigass sigs and weekly-rotated avatars. (It looks like once they get the plugin structure going, there will be a plugin to use Gravatars with BBpress. However, that could be some time from now. Gravatars are only 80x80 pixels, less than the 100px some may be used to from Livejournal and other sites. I wouln’t want to start a pixel mutiny.

There are doubtless other systems out there that can do forum RSS that I just haven’t found yet. I’m particularly drawn to Drupal for the ability to share databases with other Drupal sites — the roleplayers now getting used to setting up their characters on their Drupal site could easily use that login data at another Drupal site. If I set up a Drupal roleplay site, they would be much more likely to come by, I think. They’d have to set up their profiles anew but that seems minor.

Enough babble.

I have had a very scary thought. See, in my enclosed little world, vampires are not sexual. They are capable of sexual acts but have no particular desire to do so. It's a bloodlust over crotchlust thing. *shrugs*

And that means... Pasht was actually even hornier as a human.

I need a shower. With lye. Gah.

At least my classes are going well. I need to sort through some more MLA style examples, but the assignment that wouldn't let me sleep last night has been postponed. The instructor realised he forgot the upload the sheet actually explaining what on Earth the assignment was, so he's doing that shortly and the work is due next weekend, instead of in a few short days. Rock!

MoonBurnt was upgraded to the latest version of PunBB not 24 hours after the upgrade was released. Bow before thy empress administrator! Man, that'd sound much cooler if I was actually a sysadmin. Well. One thing at a time. Now that I isolated and removed the glitch in the last upgrade, everything's peachy and I feel far cooler than I deserve. (You be quiet, Sesh; you're biased and you know it!) I'm still trying to nail down the mod I want to make; progress is slow but present. The lack of proper RSS autodiscovery tags irks slightly but that should be handled automatically in an upcoming release of PunBB, so there's little point in working it out now.

Did any of that make sense? Um. Ree big happy for Ree. Yeah, that! *g*