The Mine Shaft Gap

I admit it. I like gimmicks.
I’ve recently been drawn into several with the view to ‘enhancing the user experience’ of this site. Arguably many of changes of I’ve made over the past few months or so (eg., changed look-and-feel, search enhancements, BGG widget, ads, etc.) simply position the Gap as yet another feature-rich, content-poor site! But I don’t care - this is a first and foremost a convenient place to record the gaming experiences of our group, pictorally where possible. But it’s also become a playground for my secondary hobby of web stuff.

One of the newer things I’ve been exploring for the past few weeks or months is the feed - an increasingly popular mechanism for people to gather and filter various pieces of news according to their personal preferences. Feeds (RSS, atom, RDF) are one facet of the burgeoning ‘web 2.0′ movement, which you’ll be pleased to know I’m not going to discuss here - there are plenty of more informed sources that you can just Google for if you’re so inclined. Probably all blogs, and many modern-day web sites provide feeds related to their content, which vary in type and richness, but without exception include a brief headline and link to the source. When you subscribe to a feed (using any of a gazillion different easy-to-use mechanisms), you get to see the latest headlines in a flash, and if any catch your eye you then click through to get the whole story behind the headline.
Perhaps feeds, and other web 2.0 thingos, are just a fad that will be superceded by something richer and more powerful within the next few years. But in the here-and-now they provide some interesting possibilities. I was keen to incorporate somewhere in the Gap current headlines from other sources in the world of boardgames, and to that end I started studying various feed-reader plugins for Wordpress (the software running this site). It would be good to have a place that listed the latest happenings around the world, from a variety of commentators most active and widely-read in the boardgames hobby. I put this together under a new page (see site menu) called ‘Games Chatter’. I thought I had found a good feed-reader plugin to put all of these headlines next to each other, but then discovered there were certain feed types (there are different technical flavours) that didn’t work.
Around the same time, I discovered Yahoo! Pipes. This is a really funky on-line gadget that lets you combine, annotate, manipulate and filter feeds from just about any source, then re-serve them up as brand new feeds. Rather than collecting and reproducing an enormous and growing list of list of feed providers and their headlines, I could now select numerous sources, annotate them with the name of the provider and date, cut the number of headlines to just the most recent few, and sort them in order of freshness (ie., with the latest appearing first). The feed reader plugin I had started using just completely failed with Yahoo Pipes, so I had to seek another, and soon found a great one by John Ha called Khanh’s Quick Feeds. Apart from (so far) supporting all feed types it has some really nice features, in particular the single item fade/cut ticker with a configurable wait time. So I’ve sliced and diced all the relevant board game related feeds I’ve been able to find so far and combined then into one, labelled at the top of the Games Chatter page as ‘On the Boardgames Wire’. I also made a short-text version of the same to show in the sidebar, if nothing else than to add an extra gamey ambience. And for those that want to browse all feeds without having to wait for each item to appear in the ticker, all are listed under separate headings below the ticker.
I’ve already found this an interesting time-waster, watching and browsing feeds from various game sites. I hope others find some interest with this too. If not, ignore. If you want to see my collection of Yahoo Pipes feeds that you can even subscribe to directly using your favourite feed reader, look here.

The second feature I’ve just installed is a gadget (plugin) that lets me add little charts into posts. I thought it would be cool to have little horizontal bar charts alongside each game report to give a quick visual indication of the result. I thought that finding a plugin to do this would be easy, but I was disappointed. The closest thing I could find was this thing called Simple Sparklines by Graeme Peters, which unfortunately doesn’t do horizontal bar charts, but does do line and vertical bar charts. Apparently Graeme lives and/or works in the finance world, so his brief chart examples were from this domain and his bar charts only supported black bars (for positive numbers) and red (for negative). So I cracked the knuckles and had a go at hacking the code to see if I could get the chart output with choosable colours. Success! (However, I won’t be trying the horizontal bars hack…)

Anyway, this feature is a completely whimsical indulgence with no real usefulness. All it does is add another little splash of colour to posts. I’ve retro-fitted this the post a few weeks ago on Conquest of the Empire. Enjoy. Or don’t.