Where Worlds Collide

Warning! This post contains tech geekery, using TLAs.

Karen Cravens wonders about roleplaying blogs and mailing lists cannibalising each other’s readership, and ponders a possible solution.

In fiddling with the next release of the software that powers the Phoenyx, I’ve been considering how to integrate blogs. A lot of us (including me, on occasion) have roleplaying blogs, and I think to a certain extent that’s drawn conversation that might otherwise go in GAMERS….

What I’m thinking is: if you’ve got a roleplaying blog (or a roleplaying section in a multi-topic blog) that has posts that would be appropriate to post to GAMERS, you register its feed, and when you post to your blog, the Phoenyx magically treats it as though you’ve posted to GAMERS as well. If you provide a comments feed, I might treat that as though the commenters have posted followups, too. (It’s up to you and your software to get the GAMERS replies treated as comments on your version - the Phoenyx can provide the feed, but I don’t know of any blogging software that’s set up to import it. Therein lies one hurdle in my plan)

Thoughts?

My immediate thought was rather than depending on some probably non-existant Wordpress plugin to read an external RSS feed and import the contents as comments, it would be better if the The Phoenyx were to ping this blog using XML-RPC with any followup comments.

I would guess there are serious cans of worms involved in a 100% two way synchronisation between the comments thread in a Wordpress blog, and a discussion thread on a web forum/mailing list hybrid, quite possibly at a social level as well as a technical one.

Anyone in the wider Wordpress world ever tried something like this?

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Games, Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.