Saturday, August 23, 2008

Now, New and Improved!

Ok, my old web server still hasn't come back from the dead, but I was able to get into some of the drives and pull the latest database out.  For those wondering, I've spent the last three weeks fighting with a dead motherboard, dealing with a crappy vendor to get me a replacement, dealing with the bad motherboard that they finally did send me, threw up my arms in frustration, and continued to purchase an entirely new server (minus hard drives).  The new server isn't up yet, and probably won't be until next weekend, but I hijacked a friend's machine for a day, dug around, and copied what I desperately needed.  There might be a few outdated files yet, but they will hopefully be corrected once the old/new server is back up and I pull all my CVS files off it.

For now though, all your data should be restored, the domain has been redirected to the new location (http://www.rol-play.com), and I've even taken this time to add a few new features to the general site.

First and foremost, you'll notice on the login screen that you can now log in with OpenID and clickpass (which is basically just OpenID, just simplified).  If you don't know what OpenID is, basically it lets you log into some websites using your username/password from other sites.  For example, you can use your GMail user/password to log into (rol).  No usernames/passwords from those sites are kept in (rol); basically Google just verifies that you are who you say you are.  After you use OpenID for the first time on (rol), you'll still need to log in with your normal (rol) username/password, and we will remember that the OpenID is yours and you won't have to use it again.  To edit your OpenIDs, you can go to the Options->Portal on the left pane after you log in.

Once inside, you'll also notice a few new items in the tree in the side menu.  I went ahead and enabled some of the default Horde apps, such as the calendar, addressbook, comics, wiki, etc.  Still no mail for now though.  Since I had some downtime, I also wrote an import for the addressbook to import your Yahoo! contacts, if you so choose (I'm thinking about giving this to the horde.org project while I'm at it).  

When you try to add friends now within the main GURPS application, I added a nifty ajax lookup from your addressbook as well.  I figured that we have the addressbook, we might as well use it.

Finally, I added links in the side menu to the News Blog (so I'll probably be taking that off the Campaigns page soon), and I added a new forum link.  The forum is phpbb, and I wasn't able to easily figure out a simple way to use your (rol) authentication for the forum, so you'll need to create a new user on the forum page to post anything.  I've opened almost all the restrictions on the forum though, so once you have an account there you should be able to do pretty much anything.

Well, I think this post is long enough (long enough for the DNS redirect to spread?), so I'll let you get at it!  As always, let me know if you find any issues!

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Woo! This could be neat for online GURPS games. Bookmarked!

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