General

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

UberGeekGames — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 19:25:31 GMT

Yup, all better now. Very strange bug.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 14:11:07 GMT

It's all good now. I have no idea what happened, but the entire server went down yesterday followed by it coming back online with month or two old files (and therefore broken). Then this morning the files came back but the DB wasn't quite right.

I've now taken two backups of the server and everything looks like it's working right. :)

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

UberGeekGames — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 10:42:38 GMT

Uh, Nick, your site is fubar'd! I can't access any games - all I'm getting is this line:

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/nickgravelyn/xboxindies.com/index.php on line 46

No games are showing up on the Games or Random Game tabs. Box art collages gives the error:

This page is a collage of 0 thumbnails representing every game on Xbox LIVE Indie Games.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:51:20 GMT

Matthew Doucette:
Just curious if the user activity (voting) has dropped since the Windows LIVE ID to Wordpress switch? I have found myself to be off the grid, and it's intriguing how a little thing like this can matter. Wondering how far this extends beyond just me.

I'm not really sure. We had more voting before total, but I have no idea what frequency of that voting was. In the just over a week that we've been live, we have had 73 people register for the site, we have 57 followers of xboxindies on Twitter, and we've had 52 comments on games. I don't think that's too bad considering we haven't gotten really any press that I'm aware of (and I tried by emailing Kotaku, Destructoid, and others).

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Matthew Doucette — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 16:31:53 GMT

Just curious if the user activity (voting) has dropped since the Windows LIVE ID to Wordpress switch? I have found myself to be off the grid, and it's intriguing how a little thing like this can matter. Wondering how far this extends beyond just me.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 08:32:11 GMT

Hotwave Games:
In the game information site, it will be great if there are links of news, press, reviews, rating about the game. For example, add a section on each game's page for members to type in a title and a link for that relevant information. Developers and share their press, interviews and reviews on other site and readers can get all information in one site(XboxIndies.com).

The problem is then verifying that data as correct. People are free to put links in the comments where it is clear that it is user generated. But data in the main sections needs to be validated since it is provided as "official" data. At this point, none of us working on the site want to invest the time to moderate and validate those links because we all have jobs, other projects, and personal lives.

malfunct:
I'm hoping that the links that used to point to http://xblcg.info/ work in http://xboxindies.com/ or else maybe you can work with me to set up a bit better method.

I had already set this up by modifying xblcg.info. It would simply take anything after the / and put it at the end of xboxindies.com. Since we've kept the same structure and URL support, all those links being forwarded should work perfectly.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

malfunct — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:13:37 GMT

To complete the switchover http://xblcg.info/ now redirects to http://xboxindies.com

I'm hoping that the links that used to point to http://xblcg.info/ work in http://xboxindies.com/ or else maybe you can work with me to set up a bit better method.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Hotwave Games — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 02:57:27 GMT

Nice work Nick! The random screenshot is our favourite part and it brings us to refresh the page to find out more screenshots.
We cannot find the method to contact Xbox Indies in the site. We suggest to add some contact information for developers/readers to contact the web master.

In the game information site, it will be great if there are links of news, press, reviews, rating about the game. For example, add a section on each game's page for members to type in a title and a link for that relevant information. Developers and share their press, interviews and reviews on other site and readers can get all information in one site(XboxIndies.com).

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 01:48:14 GMT

And here's something for the developers. :)

I've added the start of developer pages to the site. Right now they just list your games with two screenshots each. I've also added support to xblig.info to support short links as well. So for example:

http://xboxindies.com/dev/halfbrick
or
http://xblig.info/halfbrick

Now even if you don't have a website... you do. This is a great way to show people all of your games at once, as well as putting them in place to recommend and comment on them. I've gone ahead and made links to these developer pages from each game specific page as well as within all game boxes in the main games list. Hopefully this helps consumers find more games from developers they like.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 00:20:06 GMT

AzBat360:
Site looks great! As for the WordPress login, don't care either way. But one feature I want is new tweets for new Indie games. I'm getting tweets from following XBLA XNA Ratings, but I like XboxIndies.com better.

Tommy McClain

Just posting back to say we've hooked up twitter.com/xboxindies to send out tweets whenever a game is added or updated. If an update includes a price drop, we make mention of that as well (we don't mention price raises, instead simply tweeting that the game was updated).

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

AlMra — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:51:43 GMT

Nick Gravelyn:
AlMra:
There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

That's because the RSS feed for the published games isn't updated all the time, and my RSS parsing only runs hourly. It usually takes a half a day or a day before games start showing up. I'm also doing a bit of work on the RSS reader so that it pumps out Twitter status updates, so that's potentially going to delay some of the games from showing up for an additional hour or two.

All in all, expect it to take 24 hours for a game to show up on my site, even when I'm not working on things, because of the time it takes for the XNA RSS feed to update and then for my site to actually get those changes.

Ok... Thanks for the info.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:15:59 GMT

AlMra:
There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

That's because the RSS feed for the published games isn't updated all the time, and my RSS parsing only runs hourly. It usually takes a half a day or a day before games start showing up. I'm also doing a bit of work on the RSS reader so that it pumps out Twitter status updates, so that's potentially going to delay some of the games from showing up for an additional hour or two.

All in all, expect it to take 24 hours for a game to show up on my site, even when I'm not working on things, because of the time it takes for the XNA RSS feed to update and then for my site to actually get those changes.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

AlMra — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:03:04 GMT

There were games released today which aren't on the site: http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/games/default.htm. The weird thing is, they were there earlier today. 8|

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

Nick Gravelyn — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:53:45 GMT

Harald Maassen:
I'd like some sort of way to display some of the dynamic information from your site on mine. Specifically: "X out of Y users recommended this game on xblcg.info. Click here to recommend it!". I tried some PHP scraping but didn't get too far ;)

Why don't I just go ahead and find a nice way to expose that for you rather than you scraping the site. :)

AlMra:
But now the recent arrivals aren't so recent...

How so? The ones on the front page match exactly what's in the main list when you sort by release and they're all the most recent ones.

AzBat360:
But one feature I want is new tweets for new Indie games. I'm getting tweets from following XBLA XNA Ratings, but I like XboxIndies.com better.

Thanks! I'm going to work on this one. I already have a Twitter account set up (@XboxIndies), so I just need to figure out how the site can tweet out the announcements.

Re: Everyone about LIVE. Here's what brought me to not support LIVE:

1) I wanted a newsblog and Wordpress (as far as I can find) doesn't have a LIVE plugin. I am most familiar with Wordpress and since I needed to do a lot of integration with it (supporting game comments, adding plugins to make editing things such as game videos easier) I wanted to stick with Wordpress. I will keep searching or start working on one soon. I do want to support it, but I didn't consider it necessary to launch.
2) The existing user data wouldn't transfer since LIVE gives unique login tokens based on user AND domain; so any benefit from association of users and recommendations was immediately lost anyway. I know that's not the only reason to support LIVE, but it is something that people don't always realize.

Wordpress isn't a global system (so you need a login for my site regardless of whether you've signed up on other Wordpress sites), but I don't think it'll be that big of a deterrent. I know some people were turned off by the LIVE sign in because they have a lot of personal data attached to their accounts and some didn't know how much I had access to or whether they could trust the site. I'm going to be adding support for OpenID logins today (there's a plugin already for that) and hopefully LIVE at some point. I know LIVE is a good sign in for the user base (which is why xblcg.info used that instead of a custom system), but I just don't have the pieces in place to support it yet.

Re: XboxIndies.com - the next rev of xblcg.info

AlMra — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:07:51 GMT

Nice site, but there's currently an error on the game screenshots zone...

EDIT: Not anymore. :) But now the recent arrivals aren't so recent...