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Dynamic Tool-Tips

Friday, April 17, 2009

The community, particularly around the LOTRO Blogosphere, has wanted to see mouse-over tooltips for some time that we could incorporate into our blogs. At last we have that. MMeOw and Under the Banner offer some nice thoughts and overviews of this feature so I won't duplicate that here.

However, I do want to mention that while I'm fairly computer savvy, the one area that I have no familiarity with or even the slightist hint how to accomplish is the coding involved in this. Now, it seems that Turbine is making it pretty easy, but pretty easy is still confusing to me at times. Give me code and my eyes glaze over. I think that might be a hold-over emotional response to being disenchanted with programming when I took some classes in high school. Oh well, it is what it is.

The last time I tried to change up the layout in Blogger by inserting new html code, I totally screwed things up. I still can't get the by-line for this blog to show up under the title even though I have one set in the settings. I don't even want to touch the html code again, in all honesty, so if that is required for this tool-tip thing, then unless I have very specific, fool-proof instructions, I'll still resort to simple hyperlinks.

The other item I wanted to bring up is something UtB mentioned in their post about this tool-tip - and that's the lorebook data is out of date/incorrect. The problem being that the tool tips use the lorebook for their source. There has to be a way of automatically keeping this data updated when a change is made to the live game. I would guess that something would be accessing the database and using that to change the database the lorebook calls on. But of course, as I've said above, don't ask me to program that. I don't have a clue what would be involved. I'm just an ideas guy.

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