Planet IF

Is this still being maintained does anyone know? I’ve sent a couple of emails to Christopher Armstrong for additions, and haven’t heard anything back.

I think there was a recent addition to the planet (Jim Aikin’s blog?) but I could be wrong about that. Just keep trying I guess. It seems like it would be better if there wasn’t a single point of approval for something like that too.

I’ve heard from Christopher recently. He’s still in charge and paying attention.

David C.

How much does the non-IF stuff annoy other people? I was thinking of collecting the urls for more specific subsets of the blogs, so that it won’t get filled up with other stuff (most blogs allow you to get the feed of only a certain tag). Good idea?

Getting the relevant feeds by tag definitely would be an improvement IMO.

Maybe we could collect a list here of the particularly obnoxious ones.

I like it, actually, but that’s probably just me being idiosyncratic.

Depends on how far off-topic the material is, to be honest. If it’s still about gaming or traditional literary theory, then I don’t mind at all. If it’s about a new stray cat someone has adopted, then that’s perhaps inappropriate. Cute, but inappropriate.

I agree totally. I’m fascinated by gaming and literary theory, so that stuff’s fine as well as the more obviously IF stuff. Usually what I see on there is fine with me.

What do people think about each of the following?

eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/09/making … gets-yall/
corvus.zakelro.com/2010/09/honey … he-design/
nickm.com/post/2010/09/an-electr … omparison/
eis-blog.ucsc.edu/2010/09/infini … ive-mario/
corvus.zakelro.com/2010/09/post-pax-processing/
tiltfactor.org/?p=1810

I would keep nickm.com in the Planet (many of his posts are, if not IF-related, at least on elit), but since probably 95% of the posts from the other sites have very little to do with IF, I think their feed should be changed to an IF/elit tag, or if that’s not possible they should be removed; after all, people can always subscribe individually to those blogs. If the authors aren’t tagging posts we could contact them and ask, too.

I’m generally fine with them, as I don’t mind a little e-lit, paper RPG, and academic fooferall just to stay well-rounded, and we don’t have a whole lot coming through the planet as-is. The only real objection I have is Ben Weber’s posts at eis-blog.ucsc.edu/ though. Corvus’s posts are frequently vague or so what-i-had-for-lunch-today they’re not worth the bother, and we’re only seeing the relevant parts of the thing! Every once in a while he’ll write something halfway interesting though.

I’d rather we have more of our community authors and player’s blogs on there, even if it’s just “got 500 words today”.

::shrug:: Not all of my own posts are IF or even narrative-related, so I can’t complain too much. Gamasutra doesn’t allow me to tag posts.

What bothers me is brasslantern’s twitter feed. I don’t need to know that Quantumnauts has been released, or if I do, a twitter entry won’t tell me why.

The Sherol Chen entry is definitely of interest, and I think the connections to IF are pretty clear, but I do resent her trying to get that Nuggets theme into my ear. I’ve only just figured out what Corvus is doing, but his awesome name and mustache alone make him worthy of inclusion, and on a more serious note corvus.zakelro.com/2010/08/ludow … -what-now/ was pretty great. Tiltfactor… OK, I don’t see what tiltfactor has to do with anything.

It doesn’t look like we’re getting any consensus here…

Another possibility would be to start up another planet for pure IF feeds. This is quite easy to do with yahoo pipes, and I could manage it if others were interested. Using pipes would also let us implement custom filters for the blogs without tags (or those that don’t use them in a useful way!) Who’d be interested in that?

Very interesting idea, I’d appreciate something like that.

eta: can we just pipe the Planet, so everything is synced as far as new blogs added and so on?

I don’t think that would work well because then we’d have even less way to filter stuff out. I’ll probably respond quicker than Chris though.

Okay, I’ve started one here: pipes.yahoo.com/dannii/ifdwarfplanet

I’ve added a few pure IF blogs (or close to it… do we like Emily’s non-IF posts?) and have shown how we can filter the Brass Lantern twitter. It can be tweaked with other keywords, if you have suggestions.

Obviously there is a whole lot more to add.

It looks like most of the posts at emshort.wordpress are categorized well enough that we could filter on that category (‘interactive fiction’). Is this pipe publically editable btw? When I view the source it gives the impression it is.

eta: nm, I see you can clone pipes, maybe that was it.

Frankly, I don’t see the point of creating a “pure-if” aggregator. Isn’t Planet IF supposed to be one already? Wouldn’t it be better to “fix” Planet IF than to create a new one? I’m sure that the non-IF blogs aren’t included on purpose and that Christopher is open for discussion on what blogs should be added to or removed from the feed.

Personally, I don’t mind skipping over any posts if they don’t interest me, but I do appreciate all of the information that’s currently being presented. I don’t think it’s far enough off-topic that we need to start busting out axes.

I wouldn’t mind seeing a function on Planet IF to go back to older posts, though, or maybe a search function. That way if something gets pushed out of the feed, I don’t have to flail at my feeble memory to remember what it was and where it came from.