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This is only a test. But it’s a test of the very cool blogHUD, a heads-up display attachment devised by Second Life resident Koz Farina, that allows SL residents to post to various blogs from within the world. Its basic functionality allows users t . . .

[. . . and that’s where the trouble began. I’m a huge fan of the blogHUD, but the test was only a qualified success. Still, I’d recommend you pick one up. More after the jump.]

Here’s the text I was originally trying to post from within SL, as the blogHUD allows:

This is only a test. But it’s a test of the very cool blogHUD, a heads-up display attachment devised by Second Life resident Koz Farina, that allows SL residents to post to various blogs from within the world. Its basic functionality allows users to post to a blogHUD blog (here’s mine) where you can easily flag interesting content in the world. But if you plunk down L$900 (about US$3) at the blogHUD store [<-- SL link] for a blogHUD Pro, you can cross-post to a WordPress, Blogger or TypePad blog as well, by simply writing the post in a notecard and then dragging and dropping it onto the HUD. I'll stop here because I know long notecards can choke such systems, but if this works, please note that the entire post was composed within SL, html and all. The virtual world's version of moblogging, or something similar.

 
posted by Walker Spaight on Louise using a blogHUD : [blogHUD permalink]

(The tagline gets appended by the blogHUD.)

Unfortunately, Koz is running into the same kinds of problems I ran into a year or so ago when I was looking at a similar system based on the work of SL residents Strife Onizuka and Brian Livingston: the Linden Scripting Language (indeed, the entire virtual world) doesn’t handle text functions very well in any form. Right now, the system seems to cut off long notes arbitrarily — although mine had just a bit of html in them, even after I stripped out the links, so I’m at least partly to blame. I’m betting Koz finds a solution right quick, though, as the rest of his system seems shipshape, and it’s only a matter of tweaking the cross-post function to account for SL’s funky code environment. In any case, even having the moblogging ability is very nice. SL needs this kind of quick and easy way to push landmarks and similar things out to the Web in an organized fashion, and without having to leave the world. I’m all for it.