Fair enough….
The notes are over in the games pages
Me: Hello blog.
Blog: F*ck off
Me: Whazza matter blog?
Blog: BARSTARD. You abandoned me after all those promises of keeping me company
Me: Oh grow up blog, your nothing more than a series of files hosted on a server. You have no emotions or feeling to be hurt
Blog: Fair point. Where have you been anyway?
Me: Well blog, glad you asked. I’ve been working on a couple of little things. Firstly my new day job running a group of website, second is helping out with setting up a rather interesting venture involving tshirts and I am also a father with a family to try and keep in order.
Blog: Don’t forget me!
Me: See my previous answer to that you scruffy collection of files. Although you do make a fair point, I have been learning some HTML5 lovin’. I even bought a copy of Introducing HTML5 By Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp. In many ways its very boring as noone dies, there are no sword fights and even though I looked really, really hard, I didn’t see any spaceships in the pictures. On the other hand its about HTML5 so its rather useful to do the learning thing with.
Blog: Huh, I guess that means your tarting up that flouncy HTML crud next door
Me: Actually I am. Well guessed. Kirkd.co.uk is getting a make over at the moment but I am also looking at converting the HTML into a wordpress theme. Fancy a fresh coat yourself?
Blog: Well it would be nice but I know you, you never finish anything
Me: I can dream can’t I? So I should tell you about Castle Ravenloft, thats what I came to tell you about. Its a funky boardgame which has only just come out from Wizards of the coast who currently hold the D&D licence
Blog: BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA You geek! Your back to RPG’s now is it? Need more multisided dice? Got your +3 anorak of spoddyness handy? FREAK
Me: Shhh Blog, I can’t hear you over the sound of how awesome the game is. Its so quick to play that you can pick it up and play in a matter of minutes. Theres the typical characters of fighter, thief, cleric, ranger and wizard and one of the character is even called Immeril* which made me laugh. Anyway we kicked of a game tonight which had a cleric, rogue and fighter enter the Castle looking for the Icon of Ravenloft. The game works well because there are few stats to know and only a few dice rolls to make. No DM is needed and all random events, monsters and exploration is done via card decks and a stack of jigsaw-like board pieces which you reveal as you stumble around in the dark. So far we have run into a few Kobolds, wolves, spiders and a single, rather sorry for himself skeleton. There are loads of minis which come with the game including a f*ckin’ HUGE zombie dragon. Sadly they are soft vinyl so I doubt I will be painting them but they are well detailed and I’m very impressed. One of the adventures can be run sigle player
Blog: Just right for a friendless saddo like you
Me: Hohoho Blog, anyway this is a cracking game that could easily lead into a few game nights
Blog: So your giving up computers now? I doubt that
Me: Yeah its thats happening but I haven’t been online a lot during the last few days for feeling like death warmed over with a cold
Blog: Got a virus! Bwahaha. Should have got better anti-virus protection
Me: F.U. Blog and your geeky jokes toooo, your on a Windows server. I cocked up remember, and didn’t go Apache
Blog: Shit…
*This is only funny if you know my daughters name.
The writeups have also been a test of a plugin I stumbled across the other week called ‘Inventory manager’ and can be downloaded from alphachannelgroup.com
While trying to come up with the pages I was looking for something to help list items without having to:
a) use a shoping cart plugin
b) write loads of html to sort them into neat tables/rows/columns/items/etc….
What Inventory manager does is allow you to create a database list of items and fill in the details via a simple, yet very customisable, form. There are a few little bits to tweak in the controls such as names of categories, display options, labels and the css which help to give a huge degree of control over the look of the items. As I was listing Items which I am not selling I was able to disable the ‘reserve’ feature after I had spent some tinkering to change the default from $ into £. I thought of originally listing prices that I paid for the games but realised that some of the items had been bought over 20 years ago so price was a bit pointless.
My initial installation of the plugin met with a little bit of frustration as I was unable to add new items and eventually contacted the plugin writer via the site. Cale (the creator) was fab in helping sort the issue and and even pointed out a few things I hadn’t thought of when I was playing with the plugin. All in all, this is a nice plugin for an ecommerce site with or without the commerce. I can really see a good use for this on sites with a big list of products but only one or two of each item such as bespoke crafted items, antiques or secondhand dealers.