Member Discussions

Does anyone know of a good who's online snippet. I would appreciate a URL but I am willing to look for it. I am running LPC and the Discworld lib.

The Discworld mudlib includes its own http daemon, and a 'who list' using it.

Generate it yourself. Seriously.

Have the who command dump its output to a file when someone logs in, logs out, or changes title. Have the webserver read this file using the alias directive.

If you know a little scripting, it should be easy to output the wholist as CSV or similar and have a web script parse it.

I did this on our mud, took less than an hour.

CSV? What the heck is CSV? :)

XML is The Solution To Every Problem, if you don't want to put out simple text or preformatted HTML.

.)

E

Yeah, no kidding XML would've been nice.

I just recently our help files online and wished they were in XML or similar structured data (is just color codes). As is, had to do jump through hoops to generate proper hyperlinks. It's between 10 and 20 regexps to generate a page, usually towards the low end of that. Was a hassle, but it's worth it, really. Make things easy for the human, hard for the computer. Of course, that generally means also being hard for the coder, but that's another story altogether. :)

Was just looking over your helpfiles, as I'm just about finished working on something similar myself.
I don't understand why you are needing 10 to 20 regexps to generate a page however.. I wrote a smart_link creator, that sans the text of each help for words that may link to another helpfile, and link it accordingly, but other than that scan, it's just a matter of spitting out whats there..
Never used XML, whats the benifit of using it?

>Never used XML, whats the benifit of using it?

XML is self-describing. Essentially, in the context of a MUD, it's easy to create a database system by using XML -example:

...
  <character>
    <name>Ero</name>
    <user>-Undisclosed-</user>
    ...
    <level>2</level>
    ...
  </character>
...

Then you can parse the file, read the data into structures, whatever.

E

I still don't quite follow how XML would be better.
My help pages are currently at http://4.64.86.11/helps/en3hlp.html
how could using XML help me here?

(note - actual contents of helps, and colorcoding is still being worked on - if XML can help with colorcoding, might be interesting too)

(Comment added by DaShiVa on Thu Apr 3 15:50:17 2003)

Anyhows, in my 'idle time' been looking up on XML, it seems like it's the LP of websites..
You define sets of tags, then write 'html' using those tags, and a parser turns it into html based on the rules, tags, etc, that you specified.
This means that it may make it possible to write shorted, more concist XML with the code, but it'd end up just the same in the end-resultant HTML, or possibly worse, as if you go straight to HTML then you're skipping the 'middleman'.
Well, thats my take on XML after a good intensive research period (5 minutes) which is quite likely to be wrong :)