March 2009 Archives
Follow Planbeast on Twitter! Every time someone schedules a public Xbox Live event, it shows up as a tweet, with a link to the event's page here on planbeast.com. We hope that it's a fun way to keep track of what people are playing, and an easy route to jump into games that interest you!
We'll also use it make short posts on other stuff of interest around the Planbeast-o-sphere. See you there...!
I am in the process of sprinkling pretty little RSS icons around the site, attached to pages and page-sections that have their own feeds. The ability to subscribe to notifications about upcoming game events is one of Planbeast's key features, and I've been concerned that it just hasn't been obvious enough.
Got ideas for other kinds of feeds we should support? Let us know...
As described in the previous post, Planbeast cards are graphics you can post and share which contain information about the next public Planbeast-planned game you're playing. Here's what mine looks like right now (relative to the time you're reading this, versus the time of my writing it):
You can get one for yourself by logging into planbeast.com, clicking "Account", and then following the link to the card page under the "Other Stuff" header. Or, if you're already logged in, just go here.
What do you think?
Tip of the hat to MyGamerCard.net, whose approach to turning Xbox Live Gamercards into sharable images I used for inspiration, here.
Two cool features we're working on right now:
Planbeast cards. That's my working title for it, anyway. This will be, essentially, a little blob of HTML you can paste into blogs or forum signatures and the like, resulting in a nifty dynamic image that will let people across the web know which online games you've got coming up, by way of Planbeast.
We have a working design, but I made it myself, and so it's pretty ugly. Rather than foist them upon y'all as-is, I'm talking to Rob, the fellow responsible for the beautiful punched-out look that this site's miniviews sport. I hope to get some solid advice from him, and then turn this feature on next week.
Facebook integration. Through Facebook's new Connect API, websites can rig themselves up to allow users to log in and even create new accounts using their Facebook credentials. This can lead to a lot of cool stuff, such as having Planbeast stamp a notification on your Facebook wall whenever you create or join a game event, letting your friends know about your online plans.
We'd been talking about doing something with Facebook from way back when we were first plotting out Planbeast, so I was happy to discover the Connect API earlier this month; it really looks like the best way for us to hook into it. This is a more involved project, but I hope to see it happen before summer.
In other news, I totally just picked up Left 4 Dead, mostly due to peterb's review of it, which spoke directly to my totally-not-into-the-whole-zombie-meme self. (As well as my desire to go blow 50 bucks at Amazon, I guess.) Anyway, so long as I'm pretty much the only person making public events on this thing, I've made a few of those. Want to come shoot zombies with me?
How did we manage to get this far and not realize that we were lacking a basic password-recovery feature? How embarrassing. Well, it's a moot point now, because I just added it. Sorry about that! If you forgot your Planbeast password, and for some reason are reading this blog anyway, please visit the login page again and enjoy this friendly new feature.
Also fixed a bug where users' XBL online-status in event miniviews were getting pulled from the wrong cache, which often resulted in these miniviews claiming that online users were offline.
Took a break from bug-fixing to attend to something friendly we should have done before we launched. Added a section to the bottom of our About page which credits the services that supply Planbeast with its data, the people who helped build the site, and the software projects that the site runs on.
If I cannot also resist making an egregious plug for my day job, well, so be it.
