Chatter #32 - August 15, 2001

12/14/2001 — I started the Chatter section on July 27, 2000 when I noticed that the rest of my site was sometimes getting cluttered with lots of text. I'm a talkative guy, after all! So now I talk about my life here, instead of all over the place. Originally this was one huge section, but in December of 2001 it simply became too large to remain as one page, and I broke it into dated sections, as you can see. —>PM

Adventures in HTML

I had an interesting challenge last night; somebody who has put up a good bit of new stuff in the Chaos Project recently, oh, heck, it's Tony Den—hope you don't mind, Tony, but since your stuff is posted under your name in the CP it's sort of silly of me to try to disguise your identity—anyway, Tony sent me a really neat large item in Word that he wanted to post to the Chaos Project. The problem was that the tables simply wouldn't post properly; he'd tried converting into HTML with Word, but the results came out all bizarre.

I tried the same thing, and got the same result: a useless mess. Tried editing the HTML in various ways, making the table width a percentage rather than a straight size. Still no good. Alxnet just doesn't handle tables well. Finally I had what seemed a stroke of genius: I took a screen capture of the tables (had to do it in three sections and then paste it together), and turned them into a transparent GIF. Then I posted the GIF to my site and simply IMG SRCed to the GIF in the Chaos Project entry. I think it's pretty seamless!

Anyway, I really enjoyed the challenge. So if anyone else out there has some bizarre HTML thing they'd like to post, please don't hesitate to let me know!

More Updates In History...

...the History of RuneQuest, that is. I've updated and expanded it several times in the past couple of days, in response to the suggestions of several readers. Thanks, guys! If anyone has more suggestions, drop me a line.

Voting Continues

Since I posted the additional voting links we've continued to do well. The site has climbed to #15 on the Die-Roller's Top 50 list, and is #1 in Pen & Paper. To my amazement it's #8 overall in GameScanner, which is bizarre because they cover computer games far more than traditional RPGs. Something funny: I started the Tabletop RPG section at GameScanner on Monday. There are already 10 sites listed in that category, and they were all submitted since then!