Great games blog

I logged in today to find my avatar ruthed and yes, he was wearing a purple shirt and red pants but there was something strange about it. My ruthed avatar was tall for a ruthed avatar look.

The surrounding area also looked strange and different. Almost all of the textures didn’t load making everything looks sad and gray. Am I still in Second Life?

Fortunately, I wasn’t in Second Life. The avatar you saw is indeed my avatar but that photo wasn’t taken in-world Second Life. The photo or snapshot was taken in-world OSGrid.

OSGrid is like the Open Source version of Second Life’s grid. It uses OpenSim, an Open Source version of Second Life’s server or simulator code. OSGrid is pretty much like Second Life, what you can do in Second Life you can do it also in OSGrid although many features are still underdevelopment and OSGrid also uses the Second Life client. If you have Second Life installed then you can use that to login into OSGrid.

With Open Source projects like OpenSim and OSGrid, the ability to manage and operate your own region or sim is becoming closer and closer to the public’s reach.

Other Open Source Grids:

• OpenLifeGrid
• DeepGrid

These grids, together with OpenSim, are still work in progress so don’t expect any stability from them but you can try any of them. You don’t need to download any viewer if you are just planning to visit in-world. Second Life’s viewer will work just fine. Instructions are available from their websites.

©2007 Kabalyero. All Rights Reserved.

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I’m always looking for ways to improve my blogs (and other websites) and I’m pretty sure most bloggers do too. During my search, I found 3 cool tools or websites that bloggers or even webmaster can use to improve and/or test their blogs or websites. I’ve added them to my blogroll so that I won’t forget to use them.

• BrowserShots. Different browsers sometimes render websites differently. A website or blog may look good in Firefox but it may look broken in IE and these are only 2 browsers. There are so many browsers out there and checking your site in each one of them may take a lot of time but not anymore. You can use BrowserShots to take screenshots of how your website will look in various browsers. It’s so easy to use too, just enter your URL, select the browsers, hit the button and wait. To see the screenshots of how your site looked in various browsers just hit refresh and it will show it to you. With BrowserShots, you don’t need to install every browser out there.
• Dead Links Checker. During the life of our blog or website, it tends to accumulate a lot of links from almost everywhere in the internet. Now you can check your website or blog for dead links with this Dead Links Checker. Did I mention that it’s FREE!
• Spider Simulator by Summit Media. I’ve always wondered how spiders¹ work, this tool simulates what a spider do on your site or blog. It even gives your site/blog page a grade. I guess getting a high grade is better. Try it!

These are only 3 tools that you can use on your website or blog. There are more of them out there and I think that anything that will improve your site or blog in anyway is good. Don’t you agree?

1. Spiders, those little bots that crawl your website’s or blog’s pages [↩]