Ree’s Blogsome

More posts on MoonBurnt will appear here.

See, now I *know* I’m liking WordPress’ categories way too much. I’m making a category that ought to be personal stuff, just so I can have it in a category. Damn your perfection, WordPress! And damn your lack of backup, Blogsome — though I should hold my tongue on that. It’s been some days since I last checked the support board and there may yet be something. I oughtn’t get my hopes up though — I fully expect them to stiff their users any form of backup. If I have to wrangle something like Liberate for Diaryland and finagle a version for WordPress, I will be so cheesed. There’s myriad “easy backup” plugins for WP and at least one of them should work for Blogsome’s multi-user WP setup, dammit!

Anyway.

A couple years ago I ran a roleplay board. I wasn’t much of a story leader but I loved dorking around the layout and wished I could dirty my hands in the software guts (it was a hosted piece of shite, though it served its purpose until recently).

In the last year I have discovered RSS. I currently read 217 feeds through Bloglines, plus a few more in My Yahoo (if I don’t care to catch absolutely every update, just the current stuff) and Livejournal (so that I read blogs from specific groups of friends together and can sort of follow patterns in their posts).

Logical conclusion (to my mind)? I want to run a forum and I want it to do RSS!

I’ve found two systems for this so far and they both have aspects that leave me biting my lip.

Drupal looks exceedingly capable, though doing feeds with it requires a taxonomy setup or just following user blogs. It’s also hella easy to get lost with a large Drupal site, which puts off new users — including me with an old RP haunt of mine that moved to Drupal. JesusGod that’s big. It appears Drupal’s index does not default to the forum (which makes sense in software that can also run one or more blogs without having a forum at all) — I personally think that would be bad for my setup. I think a site based around forum interaction should have the forum on the main page. However, this may be possible and I just haven’t seen it done.

BBpress, from the makers of WordPress (huzzah!), is tiny where Drupal is fucking huge. It does not have avatars, much less the kerfluffle of many board programs with sigs and detailed profiles and crap. While I like the idea of a stripped-down board, I’m not sure many roleplayers would appreciate having to part with their beloved bigass sigs and weekly-rotated avatars. (It looks like once they get the plugin structure going, there will be a plugin to use Gravatars with BBpress. However, that could be some time from now. Gravatars are only 80x80 pixels, less than the 100px some may be used to from Livejournal and other sites. I wouln’t want to start a pixel mutiny.

There are doubtless other systems out there that can do forum RSS that I just haven’t found yet. I’m particularly drawn to Drupal for the ability to share databases with other Drupal sites — the roleplayers now getting used to setting up their characters on their Drupal site could easily use that login data at another Drupal site. If I set up a Drupal roleplay site, they would be much more likely to come by, I think. They’d have to set up their profiles anew but that seems minor.

Enough babble.