This week is mostly about my passion project known as SL Colonies, which is a full RPG world building kit within Second Life.

We have a small, but active community within this project that enjoy using our system to create RPG worlds with farming, gathering, hunting, crafting, quest making and more. Enjoy the read! I know it’s been a while!

Discourse Updates

I run a community within Second Life that is known as SL Colonies. With this community comes the need for a place to store all our knowledge, questions, answers and communication.

We also use Discord. But what I have found over the years is that, using this option to rely on for running a community is actually doing the opposite.

I have joined countless discord servers and always just turn off notifications and never look at them - I feel lost. They are too fast paced.

Because I was focused on Discord, I lost a lot of focus and activity on the Forum, which I find is a lot more useful to new players and veteran players alike.

A discord server cannot be used as a knowledge base. And their forum solution is not really indexed by search engines either. Which defeats the purpose of it all.

Refocusing on the forums (we use Discourse, cannot recommend them enough), I’ve been tinkering all week with it and hyper-focused on making them just right.

I created new categories with an RSS feed that posts like this one will show up on for our community, so that they can get to know me on a more personal level instead of the official side of me they always see in-game as a creator.

I also renamed a lot of our categories and re-arranged them to make them make more sense to a new user coming to browse.

One of the new features I am most proud of though is scripting in new CSS and Javascript that will change the top banner image based on season and holiday period automatically. The subheading will also quote different text based on the season and holiday, and, we have special effects on the screen that don’t get in the way. For example, right now over winter in the northern hemisphere, we have snowflakes falling down across the forum!

What I am working on over the next week though is a lot of new documentation and bringing in documentation that was spread over two other websites.

Players can’t be expected to browse multiple sources:

• Youtube
• Github Knowledgeable website
• Main website knowledgebase
• Forums

I decided to bring everything into the one place, and that is within the forums.

I installed a new plugin called Documentation. And basically it allows for topics to be sorted into categories with proper side indexes.

There is so much more to add to the documentation! I am glad I have a passion for SL Colonies and this project of ours, and that I actually enjoy writing and tinkering with forums!

To our community members reading this - enjoy it and look forward to seeing more improvements.

More on SL Colonies

Within Second Life, there are major changes planned from my end as well. I have decided to fork in and purchase our community a homestead that will feature our NEW main store, as well as a new Community HUB where our existing players will be able to land and chat together.

Think of it like a town square. It will have all of your necessities as well as areas where players would be interested in visiting on a regular basis, due to the benefits it would provide the player - such as new titles and achievements as they come to level their characters!

I made a few other posts on our forums about new ideas that I’d like to see implemented into the game:

• Achievements & Player Titles: [forum.slcolonies.com/t/player-…
• Coin Mint Upgrade & Coin Collecting: [forum.slcolonies.com/t/coin-mi…

There is so much I want to do for our game, but it takes so long due to how small our team is. Sometimes I wish I had a lot more disposable income that I could invest into projects like this one.

Lunch with Mum

Took mum out last week to our usual place at Brimbank Park and enjoyed a nice walk around. She is doing so well and appears to be much healthier again and recovered well.

We enjoyed some healthy food for lunch:

I always enjoy going out with my mother. Time is precious and you never get memories back. Take advantage of spending time with your family members and make the most of it.

My Health

I have still been actively doing skipping almost every day of the week. I do a daily 30 minute workout which includes skipping.

I turn hardstyle trance music on due to its fast beat - usually around 160-180bpm and I will skip when the base hits. When the base is gone, I will do pushups and sit-ups in between.

By the end of the 30 minutes, I have done at least 100 pushups and 100 sit-ups.

What I have found as my cardiovascular fitness has been increasing over time, that the total burn of a 30 minute session is half what it use to be. And my heart rate rarely hits above 140bpm.

But, I have been able to get it up, by changing up the way I have been doing my pushups. And that’s by bouncing myself up at the top of a pushup or throwing in a clap in between pushups. Within no time at all, this brings my heart rate up to my peak zone at 170.

I love HIIT based cardio!

Nemo got hurt

Nemo came home during the week with a limp :(

First instinct was she got hit by someone, but after a look, determined something was bugging her paw. As if she stepped on something sharp, or got into a fight with another cat.

I took her to the vet just in case. We determined that she got a small puncture wound to the foot, likely from a cat fight.

Here is a video of her after the visit:

I am pleased to say though, that at the time of writing this weekly recap, that Nemo has made a full recovery and is back to walking normally and playing normally!

Here’s a cute video to cheer up that news:

Werribee Zoo Christmas Party

We went to the zoo again for the Werribee Zoo members party.

Enjoyed a Christmas themed dinner being Turkey and Ham at the restaurant in there.

We enjoyed a moment watching the Christmas Carols and different characters walking around the zoo saying hello to everyone. Including people on larges stilts blowing bubbles and more!

Here are some photos from the evening there:

Conclusion

All in all another amazing week filled with memories. A lot of them on the computer screen, I must admit. But at least on things that bring me joy and help grow a small, though active community!

I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Thank you for taking the time to read.