Just a quick explanation for anyone wondering why a games console appears to have hacked into this site 🙂
The short version is that my Xbox 360 posts details of games I have played recently, and any achievements attained. Whenever you see the nickname AntiSceptic, you can swap that for Chris, in your head 🙂 SilentlyScreaming is pretty much the only other alias I tend to use online. That was too long for Xbox live though 🙁 So I had to use my second choice, the one I ‘borrowed’ from Gavin all those years ago.
The slightly long winded version is this… IF my console is connected to the internet (not possible right now, as I have no xBox WiFi adaptor, and there is no network socket in the in-law’s living room), then every time I play a game, the Xbox Live service is informed of any relevant data. From Microsoft’s servers, the people over at 360voice & GamerDNA extract enough data to create blog posts. (See the last link in this post to see the original version). From here, my blog grabs the RSS feed for that page (see here), and posts the information up, under a different user account (it was simpler than trying to form lots of regex expressions to swap AntiSceptic for Chris or ‘I’, and I didn’t like making it look like I was actually talking about myself in the 3rd person), using the WP-o-matic plugin.
As mentioned, the Xbox 360 is currently offline, so the posts so far have all been my console ‘complaining’ that I’m not giving it enough attention. I’m not sure what will happen when I reconnect it when we move back to our flat – whether it’ll ignore games played and achievements…. …. achieved, or amend the older posts, or simply provide a summary of what has been missed.
Anyway, why do all this? Because I wanted to see what was possible. Am I claiming any sort of originality here? No, Narcogen has been doing this for a couple of years, I only just got around to viewing his site’s source to get a clue how he achieved this. Ha, upon checking I had got the right URL for his blog, I now see that each Xbox post actually has a link in it to 360voice. Hey ho.
You can see my official profile over here, and the 360voice/GamerDNA pages here.