The Defias Blog » Off-Topic

EVE-Online Blog Pack

Havohej — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 16:21:10 +0000

Because of the way the current blog theme is designed, there is an issue with page/sub-page functionality. So, for the sake of my own sanity, rather than have CrazyKinux.com’s EVE-Online Blog Pack listed here as a sub-page of the EVE Links page, I’m going to put it in the form of a post permalinked from the EVE Links page. When CK makes a change to the official blog pack, I’ll update this post. Here is the current EVE-Online Blog Pack as presented by CrazyKinux at CrazyKinux’s Musing:

A Merry Life and a Short One, by Hallan Turrek <– New
A Misguided Adventurer, by Xiphos83
A Mule in EVE, by Manasi
Broadside, by Sard Caid <– New
CrazyKinux’s Musing, by CrazyKinux himself!
Dawn of EVE, by Melissa Dawn
DeafPlasma’s EVE Musings, by DeafPlasma <– New
EVE Network News, by Serious Sally
EVE’s Weekend Warrior, Tony
EVE-Pirate.com, by Ander & co.
Flashfresh – A Pirate, by Flashfresh (one of my personal favorites!)
I May Find Peace Within The Emptiness…, by YoMma <– New
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, by Kirith Kodachi
Kane Rizzel – A Pirate’s Perspective, by Kane Rizzel <– New
Letrange’s EVE Blog, by Letrange
Life in Low Sec, by Mynxee
Miners with Fangs, by Dee Carson
Morphisat’s Blog, by Morphisat
Nuyan’s Hangout, by Nuyan
Ombeve, by Ombey
One Man And His Ship, by Karox Lominax
Postings from the Edge, by Zapatero
Punishment, by Alexia Morgan (aka Black Claw)
Roc’s Rambling, by Roc Wieler
Sweet Little Bad Girl, by Shae Tiann <– New
Votrian’s EVE Blog, by Votrian
Wandering Druid of Tranquility (The), by Ga’len
Wensley, by Wensley
Winterblink, by Winterblink
Your Money or Your Life, by Ka Jolo

Use this link to subscribe to the whole pack!

And here is an OPML file to help you with the list of links – courtesy of Ga’len.

Volunteer Webmastering is Hard!

Havohej — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:47:21 +0000

So, being a gamer that believes mightily in community and one that has little else to do with his free time, I volunteered to host and run a website for the PotBS society I joined, Nine Winds. They’re a great bunch of folks and the website they’d had previously hadn’t seen a lot of use or attention. However, having run my own corporation in EVE-O (fairly successful, compared to MOST corporations) with a forum that got well over 5k posts in a couple of hundred threads, I felt confident that 9W could benefit from a forum as well – people need something to do while they’re at work after all! And since the shared-hosting account my eve-dfias.com and insurmountablelogic.com are hosted on has unlimited sub-domains, it would be simple for me to add ninewinds.eve-dfias.com and get it going.

Since then, the society has grown and changed slightly, and the forum has grown with it. So much so, in fact, that the hybrid forum software I’d been using had outlived its usefulness and needed to be upgraded. Unfortunately, there are no working converter scripts to easily convert the database info from the old format to the new format, so in order to preserve important threads, the would have to be manually copied and converted.So I set about on the internet trying to find out how to do it myself because as you may know, most hosting companies will charge $75/hr or more for that sort of work – a good bit of money when you’re employment is neither steady nor conventional! Well, it took a couple of days, but I found a long-dormant forum thread that held a kernel of knowledge that got me pointed in the right direction and managed to figure it out myself. So, I went ahead and started manually copying these files so that the new, more powerful forum wouldn’t have to be completely re-populated and crucial posts that people had worked very hard on wouldn’t be simply lost.

Then, this afternoon, one of the society’s higher-ups named Johan Rutan found me on IRC and said he wanted to spring for our own hosting account and domain name. This was brought on largely by the person who shares this hosting account with me having concerns regarding file storage and bandwidth and worrying that if things progressed too far, we might have to upgrade to a more expensive hosting package; due to those concerns, I had to disable certain file attachments to save on space and bandwidth. Very generous of him to offer to do that for our society! And if he was willing to spend more than a hundred bucks to get a year’s worth of hosting and domain registration, I couldn’t say no to getting everything set up on a new domain name. After all, I’d gotten it all set up the first time around, right? Couldn’t be too hard to just copy everything, especially since I had already done a .sql dump to backup a database. I was right about copying the files… I was wrong about the databases.

The original website was just Joomla!, with a Joomla-Fireboard forum. Then, I added an SMF forum. There was a Joomla! mod that was supposed to be able to integrate SMF into Joomla!… but it didn’t work. The mod required that the SMF forum be set up on the same database as the Joomla! installation, so now I had one single database with all this stuff in it. And since I knew now that this modification was useless, I no longer wanted them on the same database on the new domain name, in case I should need to do something in the future that would be made overly complicated by that.

I could spend the next hour going into all sorts of technical details that I don’t know all the lingo for anyway, and it would all be very, very boring. So to make a long, complicated story short, over the course of about 7 hours, I managed to teach myself how to split and migrate MySQL databases from one domain name to another across two hosting accounts. At what seems to be a pretty standard rate of $75/hr, that’s $525 saved and one happy video game society. Not bad for an amateur webmaster, eh? Woot!

Foot in the Door?

Havohej — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 04:26:57 +0000

Of the writing world, that is? Maybe, maybe not.

In the last few weeks, I’ve spent less and less time playing PotBS and more and more time looking for community resources and how I might be able to improve them. Of course, much as I’d like to say I’m just an all-around nice guy (I am!), I have my own motivations for this. MMORPG.com has been looking for what they call “Game Correspondents” for several MMO games that nobody else is spending a great deal of time on. These Game Correspondents aren’t employees so much as freelance writers; game enthusiasts with a passion for writing and who are willing to take the time to deliver relevant articles for the MMO gaming community at large. They are not paid by check, but they are compensated in the form of having an account subscription for the game they write about paid for by MMORPG.com. They already had one for EVE, but not for PotBS – until now.

Given that I haven’t had a “steady” gig for some time, and the area I live in now makes it extremely difficult to find one (especially with 400 jobs terminated by a recent factory shut down), every little bit helps so having my hobby paid for frees up that extra 15 bucks (which, by the way, is a lot less than I used to spend on cigarettes for the month).

So, I wrote to inquire about this Game Correspondent deal and it was explained that a potential GC must submit an article for review. If that’s accepted, it’ll be published and then you write a second one immediately. If that second one makes it through, you’re considered a “proven” GC and your account sub is reimbursed. Okay, fair enough. So I submitted an article titled “PotBS: One Year Later” which was accepted and published as “Pirates of the Burning Sea: 2008 Recap” which was also a featured article in a recent MMORPG.com “Daily Digest” e-mail. Yay me!

I submitted the second article and received this in reply:

Hi Ernest,

Really like the article and will be submitting it for coming week. What’s the next topic idea you may have?

Thanks,

While it’s not the same thing as a link to my published article, it’s enough for me to write a blog entry about! My hope is that I’ll have a fun, educational run as a GC for MMORPG.com, writing informative and entertaining articles about PotBS and at the same time build a catalogue of writing samples that I can later point to when looking into similar but more official (and paying) freelance writing gigs. Right now, all I’ve really got is my blog – and it’s great (I think), but it’s not exactly ‘resume’ material whereas an established, well-known site like MMORPG.com is. A “foot in the door” of the writing world, hopefully. And if not, at least I’m sure I’ll have fun doing it.

In addition to that good news, I was treated to a chat with one of the FLS devs over IRC recently which, provided nothing changes, should lead to something else very cool for me to blog about. But, I don’t want to ruin the surprise (or jinx it!) so I’m going to refrain from naming that particular developer or saying exactly what this very cool thing might be. ;)

I’ve also contacted Wikia about taking over the PotBS wiki they host, as it seems to have been abandoned by its former administrator. It needs a LOT of work, so if/when I get the go-ahead from Wikia, I’ll be asking around among folks I trust to treat it well and have an eye for detail and thoroughness for some help with that. WoW has a great wiki run on the same wiki software (MediaWiki) that Wikia uses for their stuff and I hope to draw cues from WoWWiki for organization. I’ve requested that some info from the upcoming economy changes be put together in a test file to make changing all of those entries easier, and was given a very positive “I’ll pass that along and see what we can do.” Hopefully they’ll be able to, but I have no idea how much time/effort it would take.

Tonight, I finally managed to get in-game for more than 20 minutes. I lost my captured HH in a very fun and educational fight, and a dura on a Raa MC (but I stole the Raa MC deed, so it was free anyway). After I lost the HH, our society leader, who had a surplus of Marks of Trade he didn’t plan on doing anything with, very generously gave me 90 MoTs to get an Archelon. For the uninitiated, the Archelon is a very heavily armored (but slow) frigate, well suited to heavy group PvP. I look forward to fighting with it!

Supreme High Lord and Potentate of Software Development

Havohej — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 20:45:30 +0000

I love it how so many people in the MMO gaming community seem to think that they know the magic solution that every game should have in its design to make it the omgbestestevar game on the internet.

Sure, we all have our preferences. Each of us likes some aspects of every game and dislikes others; each of us has our opinions (for example, I’m not thrilled about the Skirmish system and I believe it will have detrimental effects on existing PvP in Pirates of the Burning Sea). But, the next time you should find yourself getting ready to say something about how stupid the developers of [insert game title here] are for doing or not doing [insert change implementation here], ask yourself this question:

Where is the MMO that YOU developed, got published and are supporting with personal investments bolstered by contributions from other investors and subscription fees. Don’t have one? Okay, well how about the one you have in BETA? No? Oh…

Not Much Happening Right Now…

Havohej — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 09:09:06 +0000

With the birth of the new Defiant server, the end of the Invincible server, and the opening of server transfers coinciding with said server actions, Antigua has seen an influx of new blood from multiple servers which has led to Nine Winds growing to the point where our leader, Haven Iomane, saw fit to promote two of our most helpful captains to the Leader rank.

Meanwhile, I’ve been experimenting more in-depth with a Privateer and Freetrader in the French nation on the Blackbeard server. Nothing exciting there, and I haven’t been playing Stephen MacKenna to engage in any fun piratical acts.

In other news, I’m kind of ‘in the air’ as to how I feel about tonight’s Series Finale of FX’s “The Shield.” I was really, really hoping that Mackie would’ve found some way to get Ronnie out of the gutter without screwing himself over. I did expect Shane to eat his gun, but I didn’t expect him to kill his wife, son and unborn daughter…