Firef.ly
Firef.ly is a new service currently in beta created by Betaworks that turns any of your sites into a chat room. Before you say that you’ve seen this before listen here: There is no downloads. That’s right, two lines of code thrown into the footer of my coding (totally painless) and my site has now become it’s own chat room.
If you have a look at the bottom right of your screen, you should see a floating box with # Here, # Chatting, Start Chatting. Click start and the screen gets sort of an ‘overlay’ thing going. You can still scroll and look at whatever is on the site, but you can also move your mouse around and start typing. Where ever you type, it will create a little chat bubble that anybody else on the site can see.
Some of the extra features that look to be put in are the choice of pre-loaded cursors (because arrows are boring) and what looks to be the option to use an image of your own choosing (that doesn’t seem to work yet or I can’t figure out). There is also a twitter option to have certain parts of the convo go to twitter (again can’t get it to work). What IS working though is the time line feature. this allows you to scroll along the site’s time line and check out conversations from the past, which are conveniently marked with little white lines, turning the chat room into a nice form of bulletin board as well.
I really hope this service lasts, it seems to hold a lot of promise. What they really need now is to get a forum/blog going so we have some way to help them perfect this. They do have a blog, and it’s even listed at the bottom of the main page, I’m a tard. Thanks Andy. Anyway, check it out because it’s awesome. Remember to leave a message there when you check it out, I’ll be sure to see it. 
Mix Turtle
Mix Turtle is everything I want in a music site: Music. You can search for a song, artist or album and it will bring up a list and let you listen to them without any need to download. It also supports playlists. Oh, and it has a big turtle smoking an undefined substance with green smoke coming off it. Need I say more?
I <3 Mix Turtle
RSSHugger
While working on some of the syncing stuff I’ve got going I came across a HUGE list of sites of RSS feed readers. One of which is RSSHugger. At first glance, it has a nice, ad-free layout that is easy to navigate so it’s friendly to look at. Because of this, I have no hesitation to sign up.
The catch here is though that they are holding a gun to my head to write a review about it before they’ll throw my blog into the list of sites they search. This logic seems a little bit backwards to me. That’s like asking me to review a movie based on how cool the poster looks. Until They actually put me in and let me get a feel for it, I’m not going to lie and say they’re SUPER AWESOME. I’ll write good (hopefully) info once they actually let me try it.
Technorati update
*feel free to ignore this*
I’ve had irblogging for a few months now, figure it’s about time I go around the net and update some of the trackers. First on the list: Technorati.
Technorati Profile
Lively? Hardly
The other day I decided to play around with Google’s new play thing Lively and to be brutally honest with you it was pathetic. This comes as something really hard for me to say, given that I have a history of spouting off at every given opportunity about how great google is but Lively is just unbearably bad. For those of you just tuning into what Lively is (or at least trying to be) it’s an avatar based 3D char room. Players are able to ‘create’ and ‘customize’ a series of avatars and chat it locations similar to the real world. This is hardly a new concept, but given that it’s being backed by one of the most powerful forces online the expectations are fairly high.
The first issue I have with this is the idea of it being browser based but requiring a download. A download for something is normal these days, especially for virtual worlds/mmo; Having browser based with no download are no problem either. However, the expected quality between the two is going to variry a great deal. If a user is required to download something it should be far superior to something thrown together in java or shockwave. This isn’t the case with Lively which is a big turn off right from the get-go.
Next lets tackle what is actually in this world and how it’s presented. Avatar selection is very slim. Users have a choice of 8 (I belive it was 8, might be 6 come to think of it) different avatars ranging from an anime styled character to a cat-like creature. For each of these avatars, you have a very limited appearal options which includes mostly different colored hats. There is no skin tone option or clothing layering option which most other servies offer making uniqueness very limited among users.
As we’ve now established that all the avatars will be clones, lets look at the functionality of this system. In an attempt to ‘create a room’ (which is common in many virtual world to allow to to customize a small space to call their own) I managed to put down a sofa, a table and a poster to float in the middle of my room. This would have been easier if the viewing screen is not cropped so small and the camera angles were not horrid.
The last things I can possibly think of at this time which irritate me about this poorly designed website is that the characters use chat bubbles (which is ok if the whole environment is viewable, but quite obviously is not due to poor camera controls) but does not support a chat log feature that I was aware of in my time using it. On top of the chat bubbles, character movement is completely done with the mouse by clicking and dragging a character to place which becomes very annoying, very fast when the cameras try to keep up with the mouse location.
Final summation: If Google wants to make it completely browser based they have to remove the inital download and install of the modules and make control a bit easier. They did a fantastic job with Google Docs and not having to require any downloads so there is no reason why they can’t do it with this. If they choose to go with the download route make it a true virtual world download and up the quality of the product (which honesly has to be done even if you stick with a browser based envirtonment) to allow more customizable feature and some sort of user interface would be a huge help. Until then, I’d stick with Second Life.
Avatar: Legends of Arena
09/20/08 Update: I’m seeing a lot of hits from people looking for the update on this after getting the “Can not connect to database,..recent version update blah blah”. Well I’ve been getting it too, doesn’t really seem to be telling the right error.
Solution: Reinstalled mine in the default directory (C:\Program Files). After starting the game (clicking on the shortcut to start the game), do not switch to another window. Do not click on any other programs or Alt-Tab to another program anytime after trying to start this game. Once it is started, it needs your full attention.
So Do not Go IM your friend while it’s loading. Do not continue to surf the internet. Do not change songs on your music player. Do not write up something in notepad. After clicking to load the game, just sit and wait for it to load, don’t do anything at all until it does. (this doesn’t mean close them all down, it just means don’t touch them anymore)
I find that if you switch to another program while this is running (at the start of the game, or anytime during) the next time it tries to load a screen it will display the ‘recent version’ error.
After the icon at the bottom of the screen spins for a minute (or 5) the yellow bar will blink green and the next screen will load. Again, just be sure you are always on the Avatar program’s window and it should be ok…most of the time.
This seems to work 9/10 times for me. So just keep trying, you’ll be able to connect eventually. It’s not you, it’s them.
Let me know if this works for you guys, thanks
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First off, I’m not sure why I like Avatar: The last Airbender. I guess it just hit me as “that could be cool” so I watched all of them. Don’t judge me.
Now to continue on, I just got watched the last 4 episodes of Book 3 yesterday and thought when he went into avatar form again he was totally badass. The whole dragon-turtle thing was kind of weird though. That’s not why I’m writing this though. I just saw a post talking about an MMO for Avatar titled Avatar: Legends of the Arena coming out in September and my mind just went into ‘yay’ mode.
Unfortunately, however, I then start thinking about the previous Avatar games they released and my hopes are dashed. I’ll be trying this out since it sounds to be mostly PVP which can prove for a bit of fun, but if they start charging for it my chips are off the table. Guess we’ll see in two months when it’s released.
I found a video of it (below) which could be interesting. Skip to about 2m30s to see some actual action.
Thank F###
After reading through all of the Day of Blogs participants posts (well, at least the last 5 of each) there was a total of 4 people who ended the last post with the words “It’s over. Thank Fuck”. I’m not even kidding. Now I’m not sure who exactly Fuck is, but he didn’t donate to me so I’m not going to thank him.
However, we did get another donation from JL which brings us up to a total of $32! Thanks JL.
EDIT: OMG, I missed a donation that Jen made. Sorry Jen, the notification went to my spam for some reason. That brings us to $42, woot and thanks!
Back to Current news!
Some of you may just be waking up but we’ve still got some amazing ladies truckin’ away. Let’s give them all some encouragement, they’re doing great!
Hilary for Amnesty International : Powering through prompts
Miss Raye for Wild Horse Rescue : Showing off her excellent writing talents with some fic
Linda for Christian Children’s Fund : Talking about the great outdoors
Twyla for Not for Sale : Teaching us about Zimbabwa
This is it.
We’re done. It’s over. There isn’t anymore.
We raised a total of $22 this year. I’d like to thank my sponsors Jennifer and Amie, you two rock.
Thanks also to Jen for organizing Day of Blogs and of course Lindsey for being such an excellent monitor.
Hope everybody has a great sleep!
Almost last post
With one more post left, Day of Blogs is almost over. That means I have one more chance to show you how great of a blogger I may (or may not) be but also only one more chance to convince you that you should donate to the Tim Horton Children’s Foundation. They’re a great group of people who take kids camping and let them be kids in a world where they wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Link is on the side ->
One hour
Almost done. 2 posts left after this one. I don’t have any juice left in me, kinda glad it’s coming to an end. My animal-loving monitories did a fantastic job this year. I’m proud of all of you so here’s a shoutout.