Character Birthdays

Awhile back I had this brilliant idea. I thought, "What if we all considered our characters' creation date to be their birthday? Not, of course, that everyone needed to play a newborn from the moment they arrived, obviously, but we'd just assume that whatever day of the year they arrived would be their annual birthday, regardless of the reported age of the character.

Some of our players already do this. Isme, for example, arrived bright and early on New Years' Eve, so every year around that time we reminisce about the night when I convinced her to give NarniaMUCK a shot for the first time. Those that don't generally don't have any particular attachment to this date or that one, so using their creation date is probably good enough.

That idea first occurred to me something like two years ago, but thus far there's been no pressing reason to pursue it. Now, though, we have this nifty website and a site calendar that looks rather sad with nothing in it, so it's occurred to me that this might be a good time to put that plan into action. Even if we don't have RPs scheduled every day, at least the calendar can serve as a birthday reminder for our players, right?

Anyway, Attribs are still giving me a headache. I need something fast-and-easy that will let me recharge. :/

Still, the thought of running through the database by hand to check everyone's 'Created On' dates seemed pretty daunting. (You can see your created-on date by typing 'ex me' when you're logged in, BTW.) So last night I threw together a command called 'bdl' that lists the MUCK birthdays of anyone who has a usecount of greater than 25 and isn't retired. You can use it too, if you're just curious. The command format is either 'bdl all' or 'bdl <month>'

It's turned out to be an interesting exercise, really. I have discovered, for instance, that January and February seem to be peak times for character requests, while November and December are decidedly less so. It's also amazing to me just how many birthdays we're talking about. Days without birthdays falling on them are the exception, rather than the rule.

Of course, this presumably fast-and-dirty project of mine has proven to be more complex and involved than I expected. That's pretty much always the way of it. As I went to start plugging birthdates into the calendar, I discovered that I pretty much hate the web calendar application we used. I scrapped it and brought up a different, much better one, but the colors on it are all wrong. SO.. I'll be spending today playing with Photoshop and Dreamweaver in an effort to get it to look more like part of the site. Fun, fun.

BUT.. trust me. When I'm done, it'll be pretty cool. I'm determined.