Web 2.0

Begrudgingly, I am being dragged into the 21st century. First it was XML formatted output of various pieces of data; now it's XML RSS feeds.

That's right! Alter Aeon now has its first RSS feed on the changelog page:

Alter Aeon Changes and Updates Page

It just so happens that I have a player that's a web developer for a living, which is really nice - he helps me work through protocol and presentation issues that otherwise would take me quite a while to figure out. He tells me that I've not quite got the right idea for the descriptions in the current feed, but I should have that fixed in the next day or two.

I'm also planning on having the player boards in both XML and RSS formats by tomorrow, now that most of the infrastructure is in place. One of the big showstoppers for doing work on the boards (which are the logical place for an RSS feed anyway) was the lack of unique message IDs. As of yesterday, this is no longer an issue.

Honestly though, I'm not sure how much of this is relevant or useful. How many people will use the feeds? Will anyone other than my resident web guru bother to use the XML output?

Either way, Alter Aeon is rapidly heading into the world of new media, and it's really hard to tell where we're going to make the most gain. An excellent example of this is my recent experiment with Twitter.

A couple of weeks ago, I set up a Twitter just for the hell of it and linked it up to the main web pages. I've been using it to just drop periodic status reports about what I'm working on, and hooked up the game to post reboot notifications there. In virtually no time, I have 8 followers there, while this blog currently has only one, despite being active for months. Additionally, I've received quite a few web hits from new people through Twitter, also more than from here.

You never know what's going to work, and just to make things complicated, things work differently for different numbers of users. As the game grows, I'll have to constantly be adding and reorganizing. At least it'll be fun.