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August 16, 2005
Legends of Alyria, the Blog
I just found out that Seth Ben-Ezra's game Legends of Alyria is online as a blog. You can read the rules (which are the posts), and comment on it. This is very neat experiment in presentation, and has rather dramatically increased the likelihood that I'm going to run it.
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Okay, online is good, but the blog format is not suitable for anything but, well, a blog.
If he were to pull all this stuff out into crossindexed pages it would be much more useful. More and more the blog is the lazyman's way to publish stuff on the web. I guess that's good in that more is published, but it's not published very well. This one is slightly saved by the contents pane on the right.
A game I'm in has switched from a web-page scheme of publishing to a livejournal one... this is good because the livejournal gets updated (the GM couldn't keep the web page method running) but bad because it's very hard to find old stuff and there's no episode index page and so on.
Reading large works online is not easy, and attention has to be paid to format.
Posted by: Andrew Shultz at Aug 20, 2005 11:39:31 AM
Andrew,
Drop me a line, if you have a moment, and fill out your comment here. What sort of cross-indexing would you like to see? What could be done to improve useability? If I'm reading you right, it seems as though you think that it's possible that this approach could work, but you think that more navigation aids need to be in place. I'm open to making adjustments. What would make the site easier for you to use?
Seth
Posted by: Seth Ben-Ezra at Aug 21, 2005 12:53:48 AM
It needs a linear path through everything - now when I click on one entry I don't get any way to go to the next or back up.
The table of contents is very helpful, but I lose it when I go into some entries - it should always be available. Also, I have to scroll down to get it - the major section headings should be instantly available to the right... one of those hidden tree menus might be ideal, so that you can have a small table of contents with expanding sections.
On the main page, the picture at the top is a big part of the problem here - on my browser it takes up almost all the height on main page load.
The pages with black left border are considerably easier to read than those without, but you do have the problem that the text gets so squeezed in them. No idea what the solution is here.
I don't know if you can set these things on blogger. Scrolling is fundamentally a pain as far as usability goes, but blogger is all about long pages which scroll down.
Posted by: Andrew Shultz at Aug 22, 2005 12:16:13 PM
Can you put a little Google search bar on your site, like Bryant has set up for 20x20? That solves a lot of 'finding stuff' issues....
Posted by: Neel Krishnaswami at Aug 24, 2005 11:38:32 AM
Sorry for taking so long to get back to this. It's been an eventful couple of weeks at my house.
Andrew, Neel, thank you both for your feedback. All very good ideas and things that I will look into.
Posted by: Seth Ben-Ezra at Aug 29, 2005 6:02:07 PM
