EQWire.com is a single web page with the latest community and developer news for the massive online roleplaying game Everquest. It was designed to offer a single page with all of the latest news from community hotspots both official and unofficial.
EQWire.com is designed off of the same concepts that powers Google News. News is automatically scraped from each registered news site every 30 minutes and compared to the previous 30 minute version. If it was updated, it is pushed to the top of the page. If a site becomes stale, it is moved to the bottom. No human beings decide what news will appear, only the sources are registered. EQLive is not responsible for the content of these sites.
Email admin@eqwire.com with the URL of your site. If the site is appropriate for EQWire, we will add it to the source list and it will appear on our next rebuild. Sites that are specific to a particular server or a particular guild will not be included unless they are determined to be community leaders for the whole of Everquest. This is why guilds like Afterlife and Township Rebellions appear but smaller guilds like my own, Healers United, do not.
No. EQWire will actually increase hits by notifying users of recent updates. EQWire does not publish the entire news article so each user will need to click into the site to read the full article. EQWire helps users find new news and help sites advertise their new content.
EQWire.com works by finding a bit of static text directly before the updated news section of a web page. For example, many dynamic sites have a comment directly before thier news such as "<!-- begin news -->". EQWire.com looks for that text and grabs the first 500 characters of non-HTML text after it. If your site changes its layout often, it may break EQWire's ability to grab news. To better support EQWire.com, place a static comment directly before the news you want pulled to EQWire and email admin@eqwire.com to let us know it's there. To keep EQWire working well, please do not change your page layout.
You flatter me, sir. EQWire was developed by Mike Shea who plays Loral Ciriclight on the Quellious server. Mike's two big passions are Everquest and building the better internet with web scripts.
In order to increase the performance of the page, decrease network traffic, decrease server load, decrease bandwidth costs, and increase the amount of useful page space, no images are used on the page. The content of EQWire should be interesting, not the design. Also, I suck at graphic design so anything I came up with would be far uglier.
EQWire is developed using Perl on Apache. It is hosted with Pair.com. One Perl script reaches out to each source, builds a 500 character summary, matches it against the last saved local copy, and if it's new, we post it to the top of the page. Another perl script runs at the page template, which builds a local HTML version with a cronjob every thirty minutes. The page itself validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict and Cascading Stylesheet web standards. It meets both Section 508 and WAI Level 3 web accessibility guidelines. The page itself is 19 kilobytes of static HTML and is designed for speed, simplicity, and elegance. There are no images on EQWire. This helps speed up the page client load and reduce the server and bandwidth load so we can handle tens of thousands of hits a day.
No donations are required. If you wish to support EQWire, please buy stuff with this Amazon.com link.
Yep. There is an EQWire.com RSS 2.0 feed as well as an XHTML prechewed version. If you want to add EQWire.com headlines to your website and you don't get a lot of traffic, use this code anywhere where you want the feed to appear:
<script src="http://eqwire.com/newsfeed.js"></script>
This will render like this:
If your site gets a lot of hits, please cache the RSS or HTML version locally every 30 minutes. It will reduce the loadtime of your page and save my server from getting beat on every time yours is hit. Read Mike's Newsfeed page for more information on caching locally or email admin@eqwire.com for more help.
Please send an email to admin@eqwire.com with any questions.