Well it’s been a while since I made a person post so here goes. Julia is coming over on Thursday. In fact she’s bringing her sister Jaz too. In fact it would be more accurate to say Jaz is bringing Julia since Jaz is coming over to meet a guy (something they apparently have in common is a thing for British guys).

This will lead to a few interesting situations: Firstly they’ll be both be staying in my room on at least one night (two I think). This isn’t actually that interesting inherently (from my point of view it will make Julia’s stay less interesting) but it may look odd to anyone who notices us enter my room.

We’re meeting Piia, one of their friends who lives near London on Friday - the day I have my dance class which they’ve decided they’ll apparently watch. So I turn up to a dance class with an entourage. One that will no doubt be speaking Finnish. Finally there are people around the campus I probably won’t be able to hide them from. It’s not that I’m trying to hide them from these people as such, it’s just I try to avoid these people myself (not for any good reason I just don’t want to talk to them).

I’ve noticed a few odd things about certain sites while I’ve been developing XHTML Friends. I think this is the site with the longest title:

http://www.xhtmlfriends.net/xfn/page/http://www.vikingkarwur.com

http://developers.technorati.com/wiki/hReview

A clever idea for distributed reviews of things. Well I think the reviews at SiteReviews.org (on the main HTML pages) follow the standard. Bits of it confused me though.

Either way it meant I finally made the site XHTML compliant. Although considering how much user-contributed stuff there is on there (like most of it) various pages will undoubtedly fail…

XHTML Friends (or so it seems) now correctly reads “me” links and associates sites by author. It will take a while for it to crawl all the extra info it needs to get this properly up to date though.

Be my guest and have a look though :)

I’ve added the second chapter of my story, Reactions.

The story by the way is my attempt to write a time travel short story with no paradoxes (or should that be paradocies?) in it.

I’ve also added some info about Galaxia Reborn. I must remember, whenever I lose the urge to write Galaxia, just go look at Planetarion and think “I could so do better”.

Almost everything in Galaxia is an object. In hindsight this was a bad choice of name (from a programming standpoint I have objects of type Object), but I’m basically stuck with it. And I still can’t think of a better name.

The most interesting type of objects in the game will be vessels. The reason I chose vessel over ship is because not all vessels will actually be ships. Space stations for instance will be vessels that don’t have engines.

Vessels will have components and the components will add most of the functionality. I can’t tell you exactly what these will be or how they will work since this is the next big feature I need to implement. But basically, each component will allow a vessel to be given certain orders. For example engines allows a vessel to move somewhere, guns allow it to fire on other vessels.

The exact makeup of each vessel can be chosen when you build it. This also answers a question that has been causing me problems ever since the original Galaxia: “Why build multiple shipyards?” Well building some of the more exotic components will require some extra facility (Widget Factory for instance) therefore it would be better not to build one with every shipyard (you won’t have room anyway).

This will hopefully become a nice place for all the info I currently have on Galaxia Reborn.

I realised putting stuff in normal blog posts was silly since the GR info isn’t really supposed to be time sensitive and once it falls off the front page, former Galaxia players who stumble over here won’t be bothered to find it.

The current version is now available: Galaxia Reborn Login with “Q” as your username and “q” as your password.

Well I think I’ve got it sorted so all pages of the same person can be aggregated properly. Unfortunately since my internet access at “home” is down at the moment I haven’t be able to test it properly so I’m not uploading it yet.

Just a couple of notes. The page based info will still be available. At the moment the site trusts everything it finds (so if you link to Google with a ‘me’ attribute it will believe you). I also need to make it follow a site’s internal links to find links pages and so forth (but that will mean resolving relative URLs.. ack).

Wordpress seemed to be not updating my .htaccess properly but not telling me. Which is why none of the permalinks work. It’s funny, I was about to comment that none of the new visitors to XHTML Friends had made their way over here. Of course they probably did and just couldn’t comment…

Thanks to Ryan for pointing out the complete failure of all the internal links on the site…

XHTML friends suddenly had a lot a of traffic… Not sure where from though. But when I checked today the number of sites added jumped from 900 to 1100 and the number of queued sites went from 200 to 1000! I’m making it crawl them all now.