Fwurg

[Veolian Commonwealth]

Since the previous thread was both killed by serious cat and ignored due to my test-spam at the time, I'll do a short repost:

Check out the development version of the news page! It is still a work in progress, but the basic functionality is all there.

My main concern is the lack of news in a time period shorter than 1 month. The current news page uses the RSS feeds from the forum and the wiki as data sources, but if these are filtered for actual relevant news (such as rules changes, and new IC threads) very little actual news is left over.

Now I have some questions that I can't immediately answer:

1. What does a wiki edit of the ic namespace mean in a news context? Is this an IC or OOC thing?
2. Is it nice to have the full news message, or do we show only summaries (of up to 250 characters), and link to the actual item?
3. It has been said that some descriptive text should go with the page. What did you have in mind?

[Veolian Commonwealth]

It took a little longer than I'd hoped, but there it goes: I'm happy to announce the first version of the news page!

This version does some light filtering to keep out uninteresting things:

• Anything from the 'Administrative Actions' forum is ignored -- boring turn reports are not news.
• Any semi-private messages are ignored. Whether a something is a private message is detected by checking if the message title contains a 'To some name here: ' pattern (for the technically interested, this is regex'ed as follows: /To [^:]+?:/).
• All wiki edits are ignored, unless they contain a #news somewhere in the edit message.

The normal page offers both IC and OOC columns. You can select a single column by appending a /ic or /ooc. You can even switch the order of the columns with /ooc+ic.

The page detects messages with a <something> tag, and displays those with a dark-blue highlight containing the text between the < and >. This works well with <Vote> or <Senator Only> posts.

The site menu is updated as well to reflect this update. (The site root is not accesible from the menu anymore though. I think this would be a swell place to put the introduction page, it's where everyone starts out anyway)

I have closed the news todo for now.