Random Encounters: Sixteen
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Pfhoenix has made a couple 4th edition programs, an initiative tracker and a character sheet which includes text for all the powers!
So I broke my week off and posted on Friday. What’s your opinion on basically requiring a PDF download to see the content? It’s been annoying having to hop through various hoops and give all sorts of instructions and disclaimers about the formatting for RSS readers and fonts and even then I couldn’t be sure that it would look correct, so I figured I’d try bypassing all those formatting concerns and just giving a PDF.
If you’re wondering, the PDFs are made with Firefox and CutePDF. CutePDF creates a virtual printer that “prints” pdf files, which is handy since it’s free and I’m a lot more comfortable formatting HTML than I am doing advanced formatting in a word processor.
I might tweak the formatting a bit (in particular, adding some white space around the text– it’s too close to the pictures right now), but I’ll basically be keeping the same format. One monster per page, landscape, stat block on the right, picture and name on the left. The idea is sort of like the old Monstrous Compendium, so that you can print out the monsters and alphabetize them easily.
I need to go to Staples and check out if they carry landscape binders…
I’m gonna copy them into a pdf file either way. I need a way to store the mobs I find interesting without printing them all the time. As for requiering a PDF reader to read your stuff, that’s a pretty basic requierment. Imo, the best thing would be to make them with your monster maker, upload the XML and use PHP/XSLT to render them on your blog.
I’ve seen an XML template or two but until we see some standardization in the D&D community, I’m gonna stay with printscreens
If you wanna see your XML template become used, you need to use it yourself 
Oh, has anyone seen XMLs or something like it of all the MM monsters. Going from page X to Y all the time is not fun. Besides my computer at the D&D table needs to get used.
PDFs sound good to me, since I usually re-format that stuff for efficient printing anyhow.
Be sure to also include a basic text hook/preview along with the link. PDFs aren’t unwieldy, but it is one more barrier of potential laziness keeping readers from actually reading the content (and that’s speaking from experience…)