Karen Cravens (Mod) writes:

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.

And I guess they also draw in commentors that won't necessarily read or post to GAMERS, so it cuts both ways.

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?

(1) Not necessarily just GAMERS - In my case I've got a specific subcategory for the Kalyr RPG playtest, which could be fed into that group rather than GAMERS.

(2) Have to think about feeding back the other way. Could possibly be done by pingbacks, which is native functionality in some blogging platforms (MT, and Wordpress, but not LJ or Blogger). My own blog uses Wordpress, and does accept pingbacks, which will then appear in the comment threads.

But I know a lot of other sites don't even if the software supports them; Pingbacks have been badly abused by comment spammers in the past, to the extent that a lot of Moveable Type users have disabled pingbacks because it wasn't worth the hassle.

-- Tim Hall http://www.kalyr.com/weblog