Gordon’s Place

I’ve got a backpack account. If you haven’t seen backpack, it’s kind of an easy to use, friendly wiki. Actually, I’m not going to try and describe it, there are plenty of sample pages and quicktime videos on the site if you want to grok what it’s all about. But one of the neat things about it is the way you can setup shared pages with 2 or more users. When you do this, you can subsribe to an RSS feed of the changes made to the pages by any of the other users.

My mate Ian and I have a shared page. We use it to point each other to cool things to check out and make notes about stuff we want to chew the fat about the next time we meet up in the pub. When I discovered that the Xbox Media Centre software would allow you to add an RSS feed to the dashboard, the one that I configured it for was the feed to our shared backpack page. So, tonight, I swictched on my TV only to receive an invitation to a pint or two later in the week. You can see it in the screenshot at the top of this post. That bottom section scrolls, ticker like, across the bottom of the screen. Since I was in the living room, which is not where the PC is, I got out my smart phone and used the mobile version of backpack to reply.

Now, I know this is pretty geeky and I know that there are much, much easier ways to sort out a pint. But the geek in me is impressed that this is the first time I’ve arranged a social event via RSS.