For those of you who like to do their searching through toolbars rather than visiting search engines directly, here at Digiplay we've added  a small plugin so that searches of the Digiplay site are even easier than before.

Those of you using compatible browsers (including Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer & (pictured here) will find the Digiplay Initiative search option on their pull down search menu when visiting our site.

Simply add and use.

Here at The Digiplay Initiative we're trying out a new way a searching the games research bibliography.

Registered users can now use something quite handy called a 'Faceted Search' which allows you to navigate around entries in the bibliography by browsing key terms.

As many of you will realise, the Digiplay site is run on a wonderful piece of open source software called Drupal - www.drupal.org.

We've just caught up on a number of updates to the Drupal core on the Digiplay site and updated several of the modules upon which the site relies.

These updates are mostly about security rather than adding new functions and so, all being well, you should notice no difference whatsoever to the site.

However, if you do come across any glitches, please let us know.

To make searching the Digiplay Games Research Bibliography a little easier, registered users can now use a simple form which will just return pages from the bibliography.

If you are currently logged on you will be able to see a form towards the top of the right hand column of this page - conveniently labelled 'Biblio Search'. Just enter your search term and press 'Search Bibliography'. This works for names, titles and abstracts.

We've been spending quite a bit of time tweaking the website here at the Digiplay Initiative recently.

Ironically, if the job has been done well most people won't notice the changes but we've been updating modules, tweaking user permissions and playing around with glitches in the style sheets.

Visible changes include...

After a brief honeymoon period when we first opened up the web site for non-registered members to post comments, the tidal wave of spam to the site started. You know the stuff, adverts for casinos, viagra, doctoral degrees and such like.

Most of it was caught before being published on the site with the nifty little spam filtering software we run here at Digiplay but even so, deleting 100+ spam messages a day rapidly got a little tiresome. But a solution is at hand...

Not content with letting you know which references are read the most Digiplay know lets you know which references from the Digiplay Games Research Bibliography are the most popular. We've got a new voting system where you can rate a publication using a five star scale.

Here at the Digiplay Inititative we're constantly on the lookout for new ways to spread the new about digital games research. So when we found a way to integrate Google's translation service into the site we thought we'd give it a go.

Here at Digiplay we're trying out allowing users who aren't registered on the Digiplay site to post comments online.

We've not done this previously in an attempt to avoid having the site filled with automated spam about online casinos, Viagra and the like. However, we've now installed a small widget which asks you for the answer to a simple question in an attempt to try and sort the people from the robots.

It's not entirely spam proof, but hopefully it will allow us to open things up a bit and we'll keep an eye on how things develop.

Here's a little curio which might be more interesting than useful...

The Digiplay games research bibliography contains a broad collection of keywords from journal and other papers relating to digital games. What we've started to do here at Digiplay is copy all those keywords into a database and look at what a tag cloud made from them might look like.