No Time To Play

As promised last time, I got around to setting up a new website for Ramus. Right now, it contains the exact same information as the original web page, except this time it has room to grow. And because it’s a wiki, you can suggest additions directly inline! See you there, and thanks.

Remember Ramus? I can’t blame you if you don’t — the last update was half a year ago. But recently, a new user (hi, John!) pointed out some missing stuff in Ramus, such as an example of how to link to multiple fragments at once, or include a fragment inside another. (The latter doesn’t work, by the way. See the F.A.Q.)

I also want to write some documentation, including a getting started guide, but that will require setting up a proper website for Ramus first, instead of a simple homepage. I’ll get around to it, just not right away. Thanks for your patience.

We interrupt our regular program to let you know that Ramus has been updated. The new version has two changes:

• A bug was fixed whereas the the starting fragment was not being parsed for templates when initially displayed.
• Smooth scrolling has been added, based on this ITnewb tutorial.

The latter may still need some fine-tuning, but I cleaned up the most egregious idiocies in the code, and in any event it’s better than without the effect. Enjoy!

I took a break from my world domination plans for a new game in order to hack together a little toy. Ramus is a lightweight system for creating self-contained hypertext documents. In less pompous words, you can have a whole mini-website in a single HTML file, and a small one at that. Ramus runs on less than 15K of Javascript (of which only about 40 lines of code are absolutely essential), and you get to write your story in plain old HTML.

Now, while these qualities are relatively unique, the concept is not. So why make yet another such tool?

(continue reading…)