The banner today

The first posts on the ancestor of this site went up ten years ago today. The site was dark blue. It used this newfangled HTML tag called frames, and I added each post by handcoding the HTML and uploading the file to the server.

I feel old.

Some of the oldest things on this site date back before the site itself, to when I was a young punk designer of 25 or 26, cocky and arrogantly sure I knew everything. I turn 37 in a week. I like to think I’m still a young turk tilting at the windmills.

Ten years ago, I started the site to archive some of the things I was telling the UO community and the LegendMUD community, things about the ways in which online communities can self-determine, things about how virtual worlds can serve as bridges, as ways to connect. To talk about how something people see as “mere games” can mean much more. I eagerly read everything I could by people like Randy Farmer & Chip Morningstar, Richard Bartle, and other pioneers. I collected aphorisms from mailing lists and gathered them into a reference source. I tried to share it back, to do my learning in public.

The previous banner, aka "the pixelly look"

In some ways, the site has become a book — most literally, in the way that A Theory of Fun was born from blog posts and snippets from MUD-Dev, but also in the over half a million words I have written here.

"Wood site #2" -- there was a wood site #1 before that one. This is where the knotwork thing came from.

I thought a good way to celebrate might be to turn things around on you. I am pretty sure that there are plenty of folks who haven’t been here that long — given that the site has gained several thousand daily readers in just the last year. So I thought I would ask some questions and use the anniversary as a chance to point people to some of the older material they might not have read.

So I want to turn it around on you! I have questions for you!

I don't seem to have the old art for wood site #1anymore... and there was one design older than this, all dark blue.

• So, how long have you been reading the site?
• How did you get here?
• What’s your favorite post?
• Favorite game essay?
• Favorite Sunday Poem?
• Favorite piece of music?
• Favorite presentation or speech?
• Most outrageously wrong thing I have said?

I have my favorites and am thinking of showcasing some of them over the next week, but I am curious, because I suspect that to some degree I am better known to many of you for what I have said than what I have done. So many of the things I have done aren’t really there to see anymore, but the things I have written and said are still here, for better or worse.

So thanks for coming  on the journey! Here’s to another ten years, another half a million words, and more learning in public.

I am doing an upgrade to Wordpress 2.6, don’t be surprised to see the blog broken for a bit.

Later:

OK, I think it’s done, and there seem to be no adverse effects. During the few minutes that it was defenseless, 7 spams came in.

And my Visual Editor conked out beforehand — the dreaded “visual editor just doesn’t work” bug that apparently plagues many. Sigh. Here’s what fixed it:

• The upgrade, at least on my machine, put everything up with the wrong permissions. I set the wp_includes folder and all files under to 755.
• I also deleted the contents of wp-content/uploads/js_cache

Apparently there are several things that cause this. So here’s some useful threads.

Oh, and you need to add captions to your existing theme if you want them styled right on the images. I found this, though I then started tweaking it. (See below).

Even later:

All my accented characters were broken, and it’s because the wp-config-sample.php file has utf8 for the DB_CHARSET, but my blog is old enough that all its tables were creates many versions ago when the default was latin1_ci_swedish. There’s no easy way to change the DB, so I fixed it by changing the DB_CHARSET in wp-config to just ”.

OK, now that caption stuff:

Read the rest of this entry »

For those who have been reading the blog for a year and remember The Reiser Story post (which I did after reading a Wired article), the end of the story has finally come, as Reiser led police to the grave of his murdered wife.

For those who recall the whole “blog gets hacked” odyssey, and my subsequent request for a plugin that would do security scans, check this out:

WordPress Exploit Scanner 0.1

This WordPress plugin searches the files on your site for a few known strings sometimes used by hackers, and lists them with code fragments taken from the files. It also makes a few checks of the database, looking at the active_plugins blog option, the comments table, and the posts table.

Some academics (including Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, author of the excellent Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means) have been doing analysis of human movements based on where people are making cell phone calls from.

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Mobile phones expose human habits

The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law.

“That was the first surprise,” he told BBC News.

Is it really a surprise anymore when something happens to have a power-law distribution?

In any case, it does seem like we are inching ever closer to Asimov’s psychohistory. Given enough data, why wouldn’t we be able to build predictive algorithms for large-scale human populations and social trends?

Mr Koster, I am wondering if you can help me with a bit of online Mythbusting? I have an interest in statistics with relation to gamers and beta testers. This quote: “Something like 90% of the people playing an MMO never post in the forums.” was recently made here and attributed to you and Rich Vogel here. (please read the thread to see why I am interested) So, I was wondering if you could confirm this? How did you collect this data? And if so, what other data can you share? Do you know of any other sources of this sort of data? And, yes. I would be very happy to see this email posted and commented on in your blog. Thank you for your time and effort.

Regards, Guy Russon

Well, as far as how that stat comes about (and it does vary game to game — don’t take 10% as gospel, becaus eyou are right it’s a “whisper stat” at this point), you simply measure your subscribers, measure your active forum posters, and derive a ratio. In the case of forums where they require a game registration in order to register for the forum, this is pretty easy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back at the end of 2006, I noted that thanks to stat-tracking stuff here on the blog, I could tell that I had written 340,000 words on the blog over the years. That’s just blog posts, not counting anything in the site proper, mind you.

Well, here we are a year and quarter later, and there’s 540,000 words there now.

So I really need everyone to go back and tag them all.

A few years ago, I warned everyone that “the rest of the world is coming.” Well, they’re here now. Check out these stats.

I suggest you go to the SlideShare site and view it full-screen, it’s text-heavy.

| View | Upload your own

A plugin that

• Greps every file in your public web directory, recursively, looking for “base64″ and tells you about them. The default WP install has none of these.
• Warns you on modification date of any file in the install, plus in any themes.
• Checks header and footer for unusual size changes.
• Warns you on any files added to install directories that are not something in the vanilla install — e.g., any new php files in wp-admin that aren’t part of the install.
• Warns you on any .htaccess redirects.
• Pulls out the list of administrators by querying in wp_usermeta for wp_metavalue containing %administrator% — not whatever the dashboard uses, which appears to correlate to other tables and therefore misses hacked accounts.
• Generates a table of everything in wp_options that is not a part of the vanilla WP install, so you can check it. Sure, a whole bunch of plugins will show up, but maybe you can check that manually.

Doing all this by hand is getting old. The saga continues at the other post, which continues to get updates.

Yes, it’s wonky. And it will stay wonky for a little while, there’s clearly some compromised files — spam stuff getting inserted into PHP files wrecking everything.

I have upgraded to 2.5, and everything seems to be working correctly. For now, anyway.