http://my.lotro.com/_tags/feed

This RSS feed is like the new “Player News” widget on the my.lotro homepage but much more powerful. Finding great blogs–especially new ones not yet featured by Turbine–isn’t just luck anymore. Making it easy to discover blogs is a huge missing piece to making my.lotro a vital online community, and that just got easier.

Not sure what RSS is or how to use it? It’s a way for websites to publish a list of what’s new, and it allows special programs called RSS readers to bring what’s new directly to you. Some browsers and email programs support it, but the Google Reader website is my favorite tool by far. It works everywhere, including on my iStone iPhone.  Check out this video for the best jargon-free explanation on the web:

RSS in Plain English

I wouldn’t know about this feed if not for the Blogmoot–despite being an RSS junkie and vocal advocate of the technology. That’s why our Blogger Manifesto includes publicizing and enhancing features like this. Want to help shape the my.lotro blogging community? Blog about it: I’ll be watching the feed for you!

For more on the Blogmoot:

• The Great Blogmoot!
• Minutes of the Spring Blogger Gathering 2010
• Blogger Manifesto: What we want from Turbine

A mighty big bug, and colourful too!

The otherwise excellent WordPress 2.9 release has caused some problems in the FeedWordPress plugin I use to syndicate content from my My LOTRO blog. The plugin developer’s been quiet since July, and the latest beta build of WP 2.9.1 hasn’t fixed the problem–yet.

Game-related blogs exacerbate problems with managing your content across many sites and trying to provide a one-stop-shop for those who are interested. In the case of my.lotro, their blogging software is often a version behind and the mods they make quirky; I noticed in the latest release that tags and categories in quick edit pick lists are white-on-white for instance.  However, they have some nice game-related features like achievement logs and character details. My knee-jerk response is that they should provide better RSS widgets and become more an aggregator than a host for non-game content, but there are the usual issues of allowing uncontrolled content on their site and the visual train-wreck of content created for wildly-different CSS schemes that make it a dice roll.

What’s a gamer-blogger to do? Wait. I’m tempted to put my programmer hat on and see if I can fix this, and maybe submit it to FeedWordPress’s developer. Then again, my holiday LOTRO marathon really shouldn’t be interrupted, especially with STO so, so close.

The [V] is actually an envelope icon. You may not have noticed this since it only shows up if you have unread messages. Most people don’t check or don’t even know about the functionality, so it’s not very likely you’ve got any unread messages to be notified about.

Was my suggestion responsible? I’ll admit to squealing like a schoolgirl at the possibility. However, it must have been an often-requested feature, and–I don’t mean to sound ungrateful–the implementation falls a little short of my suggested design:

My design had a permanent link to messages that would highlight and display the unread message count as needed. People could discover the private messages functionality without requiring the serendipity of somebody sending them a private message first. The original problem of being a concealed function is unchanged if you don’t have unread messages but you want to send a message.

And now for a moment of design OCD: My design had the notification coming after the “logged in” item. I can’t say why, but putting the inbox notification between ‘My Profile’ and ‘My Admin’ feels wrong. It may be as much about workflow as grammatical parallelism with the unread indicator splitting up the two “My …” links.

These are minor improvements that I’m sure will appear soon. (Hint, hint.) Having the same messaging system in my.lotro and forums.lotro.com would be really nice but a little harder to implement I’m sure. Still, one can hope!

Off to the forums to report the Add media bug …