Month: October 2006

MMORPGs people play

Yesterday I was having a look around for different MMORPGs available on the net, especially the free ones. Wikipedia’s got (as expected) a few list and comparisons for different MMORPGs available. So, here they are:

Currently, Second Life seems to be the most MMORPG getting the maximum attention due to it’s vastness, in-game economy and ability to create objects. I was wondering whether there are any other free MMORPGs which have grabbed the attention of people.

I’ve personally played Planeshift, a free MMORPG with a fantasy/mythological setting, currently in the pre-alpha stage, and RuneScape which can be played from within the browser itself. Both the games are pretty good, especially Planeshift which has pretty good graphics.

Daily comics on the net

I had stumbled upon this interesting site (Daily comics by Raghu Angadi) quite a few months ago, which shows you a collection of the daily comic strips from various sources on the net. There are also archives maintained on the site, and so you can catch up on older issues of the strips too. The page is generated using a Perl script, and the author has also included a link to the script source on the page.

I am quite a regular visitor to the site. Yesterday though, when I visited the site, I noticed that all the comic strip images were replaced with links to the actual images. The following is the quote from the author on this: “Well friends, an era comes to end. Uclick.com has asked me not to show images here. I am just providing direct links to the strips. Thanks to all the visitors and to those who took time to write to me.”

However, it is still possible to view the site in its older form, thanks to user scripting which allows you to alter the way a page is displayed in your browser. There are extensions/plugins for various browsers which allow you to create or add small user scripts that alter the way you view a page. For Firefox & Flock, it is the greasemonkey extension, while for IE you have various alternatives like Trixie, Reify Turnabout, GreasemonkIE etc, and Opera has built in support for user scripts. You can find more information on user scripting in the wikipedia entry on greasemonkey.

I have created a greasemonkey script which replaces the links on the mentioned page with the respective images. You can download it from userscripts.org or from here (this one has to be renamed to use .user.js extension in place of .txt – outdated, use the userscripts file). The installation procedure in greasemonkey is quite simple – just drag & drop the script in Firefox (after installing Greasemonkey), & then select install. The script may work in Opera, and with similar plugins for IE, though I’ve not tried it out yet.

Update: Just found a nice post which explains how to use the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox.