I wanted to try something new this week and give an end-of-week status report. No idea if this is something I’ll keep doing, but the best way to figure out if it’s useful (to me or anyone else) is to give it a try.
The majority of this week has been spent working on the website for WizardHQ, a project that all my friends know about, but if you don’t know me personally this is the first time you’re hearing about it. I don’t intend to try to advertise it at this exact moment, please excuse me being vague for now. More to come on that in the next few weeks, but for right now it’s eating up a considerable amount of time.
Last week I crawled the TTRPG thought space and that gave me the idea that maybe I could build a small search engine to do this. “Small” is doing a lot of lifting there. But I think it might be a useful community service to crawl the TTRPG blogosphere and make that easy for people to search. It’s a win-win. Discoverability for small creators, ease of finding for players and GMs.
I spent time during one of my lunch breaks and got the bones of a crawler written. None of the “crawl more links” parts, but I can point it at a single page and get all the needfuls from it. Tested against my own blog, not sure how much further it’d need to go to work against other sites.
Not sure if that project will go further, I’ve been dithering. I think to do anything with it implies setting aside one or two of my other TTRPG projects, which didn’t get any progress this week because WizardHQ exploded all over my original plan.
Current active project list:
- WizardHQ
- Kill Team - Hierotek Circle
- The search engine?
- LimeTools1
- Project Ashenreach2
- The ORB3
- Potential blog theme updates
- Move to [REDACTED]4