Pharos Island TOP PICKS by Ravenglass Rentals

I've been running this TOP PICKS stand inworld for more than a year, trying to refresh it every month or so, more if possible -- it's work! But I find it a great antidote to the forced POPULAR PLACES of the inworld user panel which only shows those sex joints that have dance pads these days, and not much else -- and only 20 of them. With the forums closing, we're going to need a lot more guides and recommendations like this, so I'm going to publicize mine more.

I built it on the principle that only a business is going to support something like this which takes TIME AND EFFORT. (Pathfinder only did like 3 of his "finds" before he gave up, and while doing them would do stuff like put in Ulrika Zugzwang twice, meh). People always start things like this with great fanfare, and when I first started nearly two years ago, I even wanted to have a top picks magazine I was so determined. It languishes and it hard to keep up at times, but over the year, I find this stand built in Ross as part of the Pharos Lighthouse complex by Sulumor Romulus has worked great to make it easier to do.

Five of the top ten are tenants of Ravenglass, usually shops, or sometimes some rental community that has just opened, or something from the SL Public Land Preserve which I founded and have obtained a fair amount of support for. People like to see themselves and others rotate in these picks, and while everybody starts out saying they will pick "the best" they always end up picking their friends -- this way you can see that yes, there are emphatically five slots here filled with paying tenants, and we're proud of it -- it's what enables me to have land and create projects like this.

The other five I discover while flying around, or people submit ideas to me, or I stumble on something while looking at blogs and such.

This week's PICKS, with the slurls built in, or, if you prefer, go to the stand and collect the cards to read and the landmarks and study at your leisure:

1. Ordinal Enterprises in Independent State of Caledon -- pick up the free slurlchatter that enables you to make SLURLS effortlessly while flying around.

2. Moth Temple SL Public Land Preserve in Iris Thanks to Clubside Granville and other donors who help to maintain the preserve, there are more than 10,000 m2 of open water to enjoy around the historic Linden build of the Moth Temple, created by an ancient race of moth-worshippers.

3. Nantucket and Cape Cod Sims Awesome new continent developed by Barb Carson with everything from sea shanties to elegant captain's dwellings, Man-o-War Casino, nautical shops, boating, docks to stroll and lots more.

4. Krystalline Creations in Brownlee Everything from bouncy flexi-prim dresses to plasma chambers in this fun store.

5. !~*~ Pe-JI Japan ~*~! New cool Japanese designer in SL. She's got the best tinted eyeglasses we've seen -- we're wearing them! Plus other funky things like pink heart ukeleles that really play songs!

6. Atoll Continent Landing Boutiques We can't get enough of Waved up north in the watery atoll sims by the Moth Temple. You get the whole amazing REZZUST compound with awesome builds by Rez Menoptra and Endira Udal. Then you get some builds like the pirate radio out there that are so fugly, they cross into that zone of high-octane aesthetics that only Second Life can induce. Open your doors of perception! Also, see real moths (ok, virtual moths) come out at night here!

7. Seattle Shirt Company is a great newbie success story, guy comes into Second Life, makes rock Ts, sells them, does great! You can get Philip Linden's favourite open-mouthed wonder T, and many more.

8. Pirate Kitties are fabulous. Get the cute lunchboxes like the choco cat or first aid kit or the animal top hats.

9. Independent State of Caledon Check out this old-world steampunk sim where they have an old-fashioned telehub that forces you to traverse interesting landscape, talk to people, and browse shops Then duck into Dr. Maginot's home and pick up a bottle of Avataric Rejuvenating Tonic, only $25, guaranteed to reduce and reverse the toxic effects of forums!

10. Slatenight A great new Internet magazine at www.slatenight.com -- not a crappy PDF file! -- and tip-top build inworld, with a very cool interactive percussive talk thingie invented by Robbie Dingo.

Comments

[aEoLuS Waves]

Great picks indeed..

[Clubside Granville]

I forget if we talked about this concept before Prokofy, but I agree we need someway out-world to relay this information. My browsing method at SLHandbook will of course deal with a user's desire and knowledge on a topic to find a parcel of interest. If you get a chance could you check out the topsites implementation I added to SLHomePage (http://topsites.slhomepage.com/)? Perhaps this type of methodolgy could be implemented for parcels. The question is where to do the tracking?

Should I implement it from the Browse Parcels section of SLHandbook? Should their be an alternate parcel submission system for people who desire to have their locations visited? Obviosult the last option doesn't sound great as Linden Locations, which have to be manually tagged as the current "About Land..." data never reveals this setting.

Some great picks, most of which I have checked out personally. Now I just need to finish the manual parcel submission system for SLHandbook to begin better filling the database.

As fo Popular Places, I regret my Sandbox is no longer there. I was perhaps shamefully proud of the fact that I had the location on the list that didn't have "sex", "casino" or both as listed keywords. The only problem is I was in a Mature region that was limited to 30 avatars until recently. I needed to be in Mature given my distaste for draconian limits on spoken (or typed) language, but I'm sure more than a few new residents only found me through my non-mature Classifieds which are now gone as with most of my participation on the Mainland.

[Ida]

I actually have started a tourism blog (Baedeker) for just this sort of thing. My ultimate goal is to have an in-world Baedeker (a book that you attach or rez) that will change color or otherwise indicate that the site has been updated with a new entry. An in-world RSS feed if you will. It seems to me that there is a lot of talent and creativity that gets overlooked simply because there is no way to find it. (I would love to have more contributing writers - one avatar can only cover so much.)

I am off to visit your picks!

PS Long live the SLurlchatter!

[Prokofy Neva]

It's a lot of work to make picks, not because you need to explore, but because making the photos, the landmarks, the descriptions, the SLURLS, and then posting them is a lot of work. If there's a way to have a blog template on a HUD or even without HUD that makes this more quickly, that would help with the Internet side of it, but inworld, I think you still need notecards and landmarks.

I'm not understanding all the issues you raise, Clubside but I find even having a HUD is sort of annoying. It gets in the way of your view, it chats sometimes when changing sims or relogging, and while it can't possibly be the case, you feel as if it is lagging your avatar sometimes, just because it is "there".

Another annoyance right now is that cutting and pasting land descriptions and such is messed up due to that "focus" issue Torley has explained on the blog -- and the workaround is to put your cursor by the text on about land and press select all and ctr v and c -- which ads like 3 extra steps.

How to find stuff?

I find many newbies can't seem to use SEARCH PLACES. This drives me crazy, having to explain it a hundred times a day, when you would think it should be as intuitive as Google. However, it's not, because:

o you have to "just know" that you need to check off "search in Mature regions" too -- it's there in tiny print, but most people never notice it -- and really, the whole PG/M thing, while perhaps justified in the world, is silly in the directory. You can tell them to be sure to check it off -- they can't hear it until they are ready to, which is when they keep getting only 3 things, and get frustrated.

o you have to realize that everything appearing on the left is your search results from the term you put in. I find occasionally people don't get this and become very exasperated (and exasperating) about it -- but possibly it's because, unlike Google, they can't see a percentage like "100 percent" or "60 percent".

o they don't realize they aren't on the right tab, i.e. not on PLACES but PEOPLE.

Clubside, I'd be concerned about data scraping of about-land, just as I raised the issue about Rathe Underthorne's, because it does raise both privacy issues (yes, it's data openly displayed inworld, but the aggregation of it impacts on privacy, just as slstat.scom did). And I think the Lindens are right to make "about land" not capturable.

As for tagging, I find a fundamental idiocy about a system that has me tag various properties like "Parks," but then doesn't have a generic search function that can turn up "everything tagged Park". Perhaps it will do that somewhere else? But inworld, it gets nothing, unless I add to it "preserve and parks" -- and then that kind of defeats the whole purpose of those generic tags.

I looked at the TOP SITES but didn't see how to flag something inworld as top.

Ordinal has a voting thingie that enables you to vote on a sim. Perhaps eventually that can be refinded to be about voting on a specific parcel on a sim. Right now, I see her page has just a lot of 1,2 entries except for Svarga. It follows the favourite long tail beloved by tekkies who of course ensure that a long tail has its longness lol.

I'm sorry your sandbox is gone too, Clubside. It was a great achievement to get something on Popular Places that wasn't related to sex, clubs, and camp chairs. Truly remarkable. Haven't really seen it done in SL ever.

That reminds me of my longstanding request to the Lindens which they acknowledge but never do, which is to have "popular places" return 100 or for that matter 1000 or even "all" as it did in The Sims Online.

People actually care about their place on the list even if it is 752 vs. 757. And to open up that list beyond 20 to 100 or more would mean that more sites like New Citizens would start to show up on it.

[Clubside Granville]

Sorry about that Prokofy, I pointed to the Topsites as merely a method, not a solution. The concept of how it works, where people who have blogs or other related sites (such as this one) add them and the software adjusts the list based on click-throughs. To adapt this to Second Life and avoid scraping people would list places they are offering others to freely explore and the same software dynamic would be applied. This remains, of-course, and out-world option, until we get some in-world browser (or HTML-on-a-prim), though I guess maybe I'm one of the people who doesn't have a problem toggling between my browser and the client. I understand how this breaks immersion, but I too am not a fan of HUDs particularly given the limited text rendering options given to the client. The question I ask is if this sort of out-world directory is acceptable, what information do I ask? Beyond name, description, avatar name and image, should anything be required? Should anything else be optional?

[Prokofy Neva]

I don't mind toggling between SL and a browser and it doesn't break immersion, but accessing pages, logging in, cutting and pasting is a chore. If there was a way to click just as you click on SLURL chatter, but on a hud, and that connected to a template where it would just post for you, that would be ideal.

What else would there be to ask besides name of parcel, region, avatar name, and description? I think trying to cue all these categories like Parks now might be too messy.

[Kyrah Abattoir]

poor baby. after the "how to fly in sl" you need a "ctrl+c ctrl+v advanced training" ?

[Talon Lardner]

Woo, something positive from Prokofy! I don't mean anything bad by that, of course, I'm just saying a few positive posts really help accentuate the negative (Though constructive) posts, making your journal much more well-rounded and easier to read. As for your links, I haven't been to a single one of those save Caledon, so it is a VERY nice breath of fresh air to be able to swing by those places instead of the same old haunts everyone else reccomends.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Thank you for putting me up there!

I am still doing some work with various mapping and landmarking concepts, though I have paused for the moment as I'm not entirely sure that the SL web map is actually going to be supported any more. (It hasn't been updated for a long time now and the fact that it has been taken off the front page of secondlife.com does make me a little concerned.)

It should be possible to enhance the slurlchatter HUD so that it is easier to use it with blogs. It could, for instance, make a list of the locations you had marked, perhaps with comments that you'd made via chat, then put the whole thing together as HTML and email it to you, allowing you to just cut and paste the whole thing into a blog entry. The course-plotting HUD that I use for the balloons and trams does a similar thing. (It would be possible to actually have a HUD that autoposted to blogs, at least for some systems, but there are so many different blogging systems that it might be easier, or at least more within my attention span, to just have it send an email.)

The problem with a HUD that marks or works with parcels, however, is that LSL doesn't actually allow one to detect the *name* of a parcel, just its owner's key and a few other pieces of data, which is *extremely annoying*.

We did talk about a "notetaker" application which allowed one to save notes about locations, and have it read them back to you when you came close to that position again. I did actually make one in the end, and it strikes me that it would be a suitable base for a device such as the above.

[Prokofy Neva]

m just saying a few positive posts really help accentuate the negative (Though constructive) posts, making your journal much more well-rounded and easier to read.

Many people wish to remake me, mould me, bend me, have me be something else than I am. They wish I'd "have something positive once in awhile," or suggest that "your writing would be much improved if you'd be less negative/shorten it/stay away from X topic.

Well...no. I'm not going to be doing that. I'm not trying to craft a writing career here, please the public, find myself a gig writing a commercial blog like Aimee or do any of a 100 things that people want to do with blogs. My blog is mainly here to THINK with.

If I were to follow some formula like "oh, let's sprinkle some positive happy little trees among these dark trees," that wouldn't be THINKING that would merely be writing a schedule to produce happy little trees

There are all kinds of happy blogs out there. In fact, I would say by and large most of them are ecstatic and filled with more WOOTs and WOWZERAMAS than you can shake a stick at. So go over to them if you want the pleasant and anodyne experience of "accentuating the positive". I'm not here to do that for you.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ordinal, is the notetaker HUD something that only I can read when I take my own notes? Or could someone make a kind of Baedecker's, as someone has mentioned somewhere (gah, reading too many forums now and can't remember where I saw stuff -- or was it here lol?). That is, could I get your HUD with your annotation and don it to have your tour?

I hear you about the e-mail. The thing is, this blog typepad.com is like all for-dummy blogs -- either you go into as a dummy and just use their pre-fabs and pre-made widgets, or you drop all that and have HTML. But you can't have both. You can't say, well, this part of my site will have HTML and that won't. Because then you'd disrupt the HTML of the widgets each time you did the raaw HTML pages. So unless the typepad people make a widget to keep the HTML sequestered in one little box somewhere (tripod does that) it can't happen. However, maybe there will be some site that could be used in this fashion.

I don't even need HTML of course, if it produced text of any kind in an email to me I'd be happy.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

At the moment, when the device changes owners it resets the note list, but I could certainly change that, or have it do a tour based on a notecard, say.

I am currently working on a "slurlblogger" which allows one to make notes then emails the entire HTML code for the list of notes. I shall post about it when it works properly (I just spent a while doing a tour of Caledon and it failed on me, damn thing). I can send you the note-taker that it is based on though, if you are interested.

[Prokofy Neva]

Ordinal, I'm happy to try the notetaker. Even just a notetaker that goes nowhere is hugely useful. I usually try to take notes on my own profile of all my tenant to-do lists and that fails me because 9 out of 10 tries, when I put text on it, it simply doesn't "take" and requires reposting over and over again until the system finally does keep it.

Notecards are just too hard to keep going and half the time when I write something on those I close it without saving it by accident.

There's no question that the annoyances around writing, saving, and displaying text in SL are among the greatest of all its annoyances, of which there are many these days.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

I will drop you a copy.

To be honest, though, the restrictions on the amount of data that can be held in a script are stupidly small enough that you won't be able to hold many notes, at least not with this version - 20 or so and you're approaching full. This isn't my fault. A note-taker which talked to a web database would be possible, but of course you then need a web database system that distinguishes between users.

Myself, when I want to take notes about a location I alt-tab to a note-taking program and type the details into a text document.

[Clubside Granville]

Ordinal, I am happy to provide you web and database access if you would like to explore those capabilities. You can have your pick of scripting languages and databases. For SLHandbook I created a link usng llHTTP for user creation from in-world to a SQL Server database and it works great. I have three domains, all of which support MySQL, and two of whic support SQL Server, so let me know if you'd like a login to do some exploration.

As for me, the big problem with these solutions is they leave no room for images. Except for snapshots sent through e-mail, we have no one-stop way to create such a landmark tracking system that cues our need for "purdy pic-a-tures". It's easy enough with SLHandbook to have a user log in, save a snapshot to disk, and then add that image along with notes about a location from a single page, creating a thumbnail image on the fly. This was the metho I used to populate my Parcel directory.

[Ordinal Malaprop]

Thank you for the offer... I do actually have server space which I can use for this sort of thing, as I did for the sim voting tool. I suspect the real reason is that I'm just lazy :)

Having said that I've thought of a few methods which I might try out.

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Hello
this way you can see that yes, there are emphatically five slots here filled with paying tenants, and we're proud of it -- it's what enables me to have land and create projects like this
John B. Barnhart