Spontaneous Monotony

I’m now using the new semi-official ‘Widgets’ plugin for Wordpress. To be short, it allows me to add mini-mods to my sidebar, and arrange it in any way I like.

That’s why the normal site search has been replaced with the more customisable Google Search. Use any modifier you would normally use with Google, with the exception of site:, which is already defined by the search box (to enable it to search this site only).

I’ve also added a translator, and a Recent Comments section (which is done using the RSS Widget and my Feedburner’d RSS Comments Feed). There aren’t very many other Widgets of any consequences at the moment (sure, there’s pointless ones like displaying my Battlefield 2 stats, or displaying my MSN status without allowing you to see my address or other non-blog related stuff) but I will add any that I think could be of value (and won’t result in a 10m-long sidebar!).

EDIT: I removed the Translator box, didn’t realise Altavista was owned by Yahoo.

I don’t anticipate any of my rantings making it onto Digg or Slashdot, but just in case I’ve installed the Digg Defender plugin, which redirects any visitors from such high-traffic sites to the Coral Cache system to reduce the chance of the server crashing. It shouldn’t (really!) affect people who haven’t come from a link on such a site, and even if you have, you get the same content anyway.

EDIT: I’ve removed the plugin as it seemed to be slowing the site down even for non-Digg users

Guild Wars has been a huge success since its release – with the lack of monthly fee and great gameplay. The one thing that people were not pleased with was the limit on character slots; sure, the limit was necessary to make the game profitable, but many people stated that, if there was a way to buy extra character slots they would take advantage of it. I think you know where I’m going with this.

Beginning ‘this summer’ (no word on a specific date yet), players will be able to add extra slots to their account for £5.99 (or €8.99, $9.99) each – up to a maximum of 32 characters per account. This is in addition to any extra slots players get from purchasing the add-on campaigns (for example, people who combine a Factions key with their existing account get an additional two).

See also

• gamesindustry.biz – NCsoft to charge for extra Guild Wars character slots

I bet most of you who have Gmail accounts are probably using Gmail Drive or GmailFS to utilise the immense storage space as file storage. The minor catch with that is it violates Gmail’s Terms of Service, and Google would be within its rights to delete your account, emails and files included. A new, suitably flashy alternative to that is Box.net – sign up and you’ll get 1Gb of free storage (you can upgrade, but the prices are currently in US Dollars only so that option isn’t open to me). No ads (that I’ve seen), and you can organise your files in the traditional way (folders) and ‘the Web 2.0 way’ (ie tags).

There is a desktop application that can ‘sync’ a folder on your computer with a folder on your Box.net account, which could be very useful for backup purposes if it actually worked (lots of people, myself included, are getting an http module error that I can’t remember the name of). Still promising though – and it can even be used as a file host as you can activate public sharing of files (subject to the 10Mb maximum filesize limit, you ain’t gonna get any videos on this thing), with the obligatory but rather pointless RSS feed capability.

Sure, it has its (rather annoying) flaws, but it’s the only decent service of this type that I’m aware of, and the lack of ads (they make money by selling the premium accounts I mentioned) is refreshing. So long as it doesn’t sell itself to Yahoo it should be very good indeed once these flaws are ironed out.

All Wikimedia sites – Wikipedia, Wiktionary and so on – are completely unavailable. Wikia (which is run by the same people, but is a for-profit corporation separate from the Wikimedia Foundation) is also screwed, which suggests that there may be a hardware problem/power outage at their server farm (it was all working this morning!).

To top it all off, OpenFacts (a completely separate third-party site that provides an offsite status page for Wikipedia) is returning a database error.