Syndication with my.lotro broken by WordPress 2.9

Trap Door Spider Queen of LOTRO
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.

Private Message Notification: It LIVES!

I posted a suggestion in forums.lotro.com about adding private message notification to the my.lotro interface. I’m overjoyed to report that the my.lotro refresh added something close. Unfortunately Add media is a little broken right now, so please enjoy my text rendering:

Logged in as banhorn |  My Profile | [V] 1 unread | My Admin | Logout | Report this site

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:

Logged in as banhorn | Messages (3) | My Profile | My Admin | Logout | Report this site

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 …