Merging Technology and Geekdom

I worked out something very interesting for Randy Trimmer’s cry havoc :: amber drpg game. I’ll explain it here, and you can go see the application of it at the link above.

Randy had hit upon the idea of using a blog tool (blogger, in his original conception) as a sort of posting board for player diaries and whatnot. While I applaud the use of the technology (especially when it’s one of my less-techie friends), I’m no longer much of a friend of Blogger.

So, while we played last night, I set up a blog using Movable Type, and as it came into being, I found myself incorporating some features from some of my other blogs in such as way as to make a “one-stop campaign site”.

The trick? Categories. I use them on this page (on the left, under the dated archives), and on Cry Havoc I inserted them automatically — it makes sense to categorize all the entries that could be made — background, NPCs, logs, quotes, journals, etc.

Well, look what I suddently realized — by giving all the players and the GM appropriate access, setting up the categories correctly, and letting them type away, we’ve got a single blog page whose archives will automatically grow, via categories, into a clean, slick campaign source-site of the type I built for TiHE, complete with authorship tracking and date stamps.

Bonus: I don’t have to get email, copy/paste, htmlize, ftp, save, edit and maintain. Neither does anyone else.

Once the templates are in there, ‘maintenance’ is done and we’re ready to go. A great way to build a dynamic, group-grown campaign page.

(Of course, you have to use something like Movable Type, but that’s the price you pay. :)