Ein2 » G5mes http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2 Ein Zwei: Even More Ein! Fri, 01 Mar 2013 15:38:40 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.2 [WoWKindness on the Web] http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2/2006/02/10/wowkindness-on-the-web/ http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2/2006/02/10/wowkindness-on-the-web/#comments Fri, 10 Feb 2006 21:34:57 +0000 Eingang http://einiverse.eingang.org/blogs/ein2/2006/02/10/wowkindness-on-the-web/ I have to confess that I’ve been spending oodles of time finetuning the web site used by my World of Warcraft guild The One. In comparison with some of the web sites for guilds also on the European server Thunderhorn, ours is beautiful to behold and very functional, with a public site and a Wiki/blog portal for the guild to build knowledge.
To support our efforts, last year I secured a non-profit license for Atlassian’s enterprise-level wiki/blogging software Confluence, and it’s on this end of the guild’s web site that I spend the most time. Over the last year, I’ve added polls, group chat, calendars, dynamic tabbed content, and many other features, plus upgraded the backend database and wiki software more times than I can shake a fist at.


One of the reasons that I chose the Atlassian Confluence software, instead of just a plain forum (as many other guilds use) or dedicated blog software, is because I wanted other guild members to be able to contribute links and content, as well as have a forum-like mechanism where people could post pictures or topics and others could easily respond. The forum-like mechanism works well. It’s been a little harder to get others to voluntarily contribute content because of technological barriers and other reasons (typical for any kind of collaborative project, actually), but it’s still been an interesting journey with some nice results. It’s also contributed nicely to my strong, continued interest in tools to foster community, started with electronic bulletin boards in the 1980s.
Behind the scenes is all kinds of web goodness that perhaps others don’t appreciate, from XHTML-compliant two- and three-column CSS layouts, to RSS feeds (and a way to create your own custom feeds), AJAX cross-browser WYSIWYG editing, Java servlets, IRC servers, Apache Tomcat servers, Velocity templating, modular plug-ins, and SOAP services. I’ve barely scratched the surface.
Is it fun? Yes! Is it time consuming? Oh yeah! Is it worthwhile working on The One @ WoWKindness Wiki? I think so and I hope others do too. Will other Thunderhorn World of Warcraft guilds be envious of our fine wiki and web site? We hope so, because … We are The One!

]]> http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2/2006/02/10/wowkindness-on-the-web/feed/ 0 [Exult in Exile!] http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2/2004/04/19/exult-in-exile/ http://einiverse.eingang.org/ein2/2004/04/19/exult-in-exile/#comments Tue, 20 Apr 2004 01:14:03 +0000 Eingang http://einiverse.eingang.org/blogs/ein2/2004/04/19/exult-in-exile/ Myst: Exile again from the beginning. He bought the deluxe edition when it first came out as a present for me, but I put so little priority on game playing in my life that I never really had the chance to get far in it. In fact, I don't think I've finished Riven yet, which is something I was trying to do prior to starting on Exile.]]> EinSweetie and I have just gone back and started playing Myst: Exile again from the beginning. He bought the deluxe edition when it first came out as a present for me, but I put so little priority on game playing in my life that I never really had the chance to get far in it. In fact, I don’t think I’ve finished Riven yet, which is something I was trying to do prior to starting on Exile.
I’ve always loved the Myst genre and not just because it was first a Mac game. The games have always just been so beautiful to look at, with each subsequent one getting better and better in terms of the audio-visual experience. I also like that they’re not complicated to learn how to play. If you can point and click, you’ve basically mastered the interface. That doesn’t mean they’re easy to play by any stretch of the imagination. I remember putting Myst down for more than 6 months because I was stuck on a puzzle and refused to get help. It turned out that the puzzle was a little glitchy but Riven, too, had its share of puzzles that I don’t think I would have easily solved in a reasonable amount of time without help. The big danger in these kind of games is that the puzzle solutions are too arbitrary; that the environment doesn’t supply sufficient clues to actually solve the puzzles. For the most part, the Myst series has avoided this, supplying an enjoyable level of difficulty.
What lies ahead for us in our Exile? In three or four hours on a Saturday evening, we explored the terrain of J’nanin fairly thoroughly and were able to enter the “central tusk” plus the “red tusk.” We entered anothert tusk as well, but it has no floor, so we can’t yet get at the book it contains. The “red” tusk has taken us to the world of Voltaic where we’re happily playing with dams, water, and power. There’s much left to explore of Voltaic. Will we uncover the secrets of Releeshan or even reach it? Adventure on!

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