I also loved having this blog. It was my own personal outlet, a place I could do with whatever I wanted.

But the time has come to shut it down. I've learned quite a bit from blogging, from web stuff to my own personal preferences. What I've realized is that I'd prefer to be part of a community of conversation than just bark at the world on my own. There's never a want for conversation out there.

I've greatly appreciated the folks who have stopped by to comment on what I've had to say. The beauty is that if you did that, chances are I've seen you somewhere else anyway. So I hope to see you there again

/wave

PS. I've been getting slammed with spambot comments, upwards of 75 a day. Must have hit some critical threshold or something. So I've shut down comment posting as well. If you wish to contact me, please feel free to email me at darniaq@darniaq.com.

• I updated Links page with a few additions, notably Mike Rozak's MMORPG Dev Kit list, which he referenced in the comment thread about Multiverse at Raph's place.
• Multiverse Client is now available, though you can only move and chat in it (apparently, since I can't get it to work well yet). You'll need to register a free account with a valid email address so you can confirm it.
• I also found a good complementary tool for Babelfish in InterTran. Seems to cover a lot of Eastern European and some Slavic languages that AltaVista's tool does not. The tools at Tranexp are designed for folks who want to add translation services to their site. I might actually do that someday.

And as usual added about ten more games I forgot I had played or have been following. I just scared myself…

Anyway, over time I've completely reformatted my Links page, something I never really did in the last iteration of this place. If anyone has any comments on it, please feel free to tell me about it here. I am specifically looking for any game recommendations to add to the longterm radar sections, because, you know, ya just can't have enougn MMORPG!

There actually isn't a "full story" here. I just wanted to put this line in to open up the Comments section. Fooled ya!

There seems to be some issue with leaving Comments here, as I've heard on three different occasions. It has worked for some people and not others apparently.

Basically, after some digging, it turned out to be related to the theme I was using (Pool). The theme's comments.php file contained data that would prevent comments from being uploaded to the system. I had to replace that comments.php file with the one that comes from the default theme.

So comments work again.

Woot!  

• Easy. I'm no programmer. I can hack ok, but I really am dependent on the quality, depth and breadth of truly gifted programmers to get me started, and almost to the finish line.
• Customizable. I need to know I can, in theory, change everything if I ever learn how. I prefer when the system lets me do this through their interface.
• Free. Because free exists and the services that charge didn't seem to offer anything I needed.
• Comment Tools. I needed a way to quickly view all comments, moderate them, block them, allow them, all that fancy stuff. Plus I wanted additional requirements to post them in the first place.
• Plug Ins. I wanted something that was popular enough that a lot of people supported it with their own work. I got spoiled by phpBB.
• RSS Feed. I don't have the time to write every day, and nothing I write is going to be equally interesting to everyone. I love RSS feeds!

With those in mind, I got to looking around. Tools Maybe I just needed to make a Portal off of my forums, post stuff in the phpBB back end and have something like create a front page out of it. I downloaded and installed mxBB, and it worked ok. But there's no way to have users add Comments without getting into the forums, and I really didn't want to have a forum system. Blogs Branching out, I stumble across Blogspot/Blogger, but found both either didn't have the options I wanted (like categories and the ability to pre- or post-date articles) or they weren't customizable enough. Typepad and EasyJournal also caught my eye, but the former wanted a monthly payment and the latter didn't have the realtime Comment controls I wanted. I perused a few more options from these lists until finally landing on Wordpress here. Wordpress Originally I thought I'd use the service where they hosted the blog. But while this service technically had everything I needed, it did not allow for enough aesthetic customization. So instead, I went with the download approach, which similar to phpNews and phpBB2, involved me downloading files, installing them on webspace and configuring the Wordpress to talk to my SQL database. Installation was basically a snap, and I now have access to more features than I ever thought I'd want (I once spurned WYSIWYG post entry. Foolish of me!). Good luck to the spambots! Customization will be an ongoing process, as it always is. But what I really like about Wordpress is that I can spend all that time on aesthetic. I was never really satisfied with the old look. I rushed it so I could start writing and somehow lost two years in the process. Nothing like the permanence of "temporary". So now I get to dig in, build a good site look, and integrate it atop the excellent work of people who really know how to program. So welcome to Darniaq 2.0. Poke around. I tried to maintain the information flow from the old digs.