ETA: When I was a late teen I ended up managing a bunch of younger teams for a free mod for an indie PC game called Blockland. I had them code up IRC and RSS capabilities into the mod from scratch in the Torque Game Engine's custom TorcueScript. I couldn't believe what those kids were capable of. They all went into programming, engineering, or founding their own companies out of highschool and college. If one of them told me something was impossible I'd just tell them that I saw that a competing mod already figured it out. Magically my dudes had a solution really quick lol. Sometimes when you have limited resources and/or experience the old and proven ways are just as good.
Was great when they had all that XML experience in a weird scripting language and I asked them to implement Jabber in-game from my Dreamhost shared-hosting plan. Crazy what a bunch of teens can do for an online Lego-like game.
Thanks for letting this older dude wax nostalgic off the rails. Hope it reminds others on HN about early hacking days like OP's project.