Second Life Web on a Prim Hack
Posted Monday, September 25th, 2006, at 6:32 am Eastern by Mark Wallace
I won’t be able to check this out for an hour or two, but wanted to quickly flag the fact (flagged to me by Second Life resident Troy McLuhan) that Amazon.com’s Jeff Barr has hacked up a system whereby he can put a Web page on the surface of a prim (one of the “primitive” objects that are the building blocks of SL objects). It doesn’t appear to have all the functionality Linden Lab plans for Web-on-a-prim (which seems to have an infinite development horizon), but it’s a damn sight better than anything in SL at the moment. I’m not entirely clear on how it works or whether it’s open for anyone to copy and use (more on all this later), but I’m looking forward to checking it out. Jeff did text on a prim last week. Nice job.
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Well, even being ignorant of programming as I am, I asked a question on Jeff’s blog about whether this represented a recreation of the wheel or not. He says he ran up against the same 255-character limitation found with the Xy-writer created originally by an early resident. I’ve seen half a dozen solutions to the problem of writing in SL and saving text on a prim — I think they were all the very same things that Jeff just recreated. Of course, anyone is welcome to relieve me of my ignorance but I do wonder how much collaboration was sought on this effort?
It seem Jeff has done an excellent job in bringing this to the public, which no has step up to the plate as of yet. This was discuss way back 3/05:
http://forums.secondlife.com/showthread.php?t=38190
But I wouldn’t get too excited most residents will not see the text intially unless they click play for their movie parcel controls. Another downside is you can only have one per parcel. (Actually you can have mulitple copies but only the same text or the same web prim on one parcel.)