Another year down, another decent time to look at how things have been going chez Ziggyny's blogs. This makes daily post number 1024 in a row. I apparently missed thinking about number 1000 but 2^10 is a decent replacement. Woo!
Star Trek has been down for the count for almost a year now and I don't think it'll be coming back in the short term. SNES is still going strong and I'm happy to keep it running. It's going to be 8 months or so before I hit a game I'm really looking forward to but I don't recognize all the names so maybe there's a hidden gem in there!
The Final Fantasy marathon has stalled out and that makes me sad. The HD remakes of Final Fantasy X and X-2 are scheduled for release on March 18th. I _really_ want to play those and I'm only a few games away from FFX so I'm going to kick things into gear to get those knocked out in time for the 18th. I don't have a PS3 or a PS Vita but Byung mentioned a while ago that I could probably borrow his PS3 when the time arose. If I do that I'll want to play X and X-2 one after the other to minimize the time I need the PS3 which means I should consider playing the games between those 2 in the interim... There are only 3 such games. Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XI, and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Wow, coupled with the bookends of FFX and FFX-2 that's a pretty great 5 game lineup! Ok, time to get back to the Chocobo Dungeon...
Top Ten Favourites also fell off the rails a year and a half ago. I think part of the problem there is I started just playing all the SNES games so posting about them felt wrong. But it's going to be a decade before that finishes up... It may well be time to resurrect that too!
Bridge posts are back, and I'm liking the one per week rate in terms of how often I post about it. It feels like not enough bridge though. I played some bridge at Andrew's yesterday and felt super rusty. Oh well. If only there were more time in the day to play games...
Blog stats remain a real annoyance to me. Blogger continues to fail miserably even when I know it has the numbers. It has a nice graph with a month by month comparison of site visitors but it skips around stupidly. Dec 2007, Jan 2008, Feb 2009. Actually, it works exactly like that for every year. It advances the month and year after December and again after January. So I lose basically all of 2008, 2010, and 2012. If only someone at Google could do something about that to fix it... I can't compare 2013 to 2012, but it's about doubled what it was in 2011. Woo! It doesn't even look like it's all spam bots either since my number of spam comments feels like it's gone down.
It's funny, but I actually feel like I've had less to blog about now that I don't work. I didn't really have the option to play games on break or while running scripts at work and I spent about 2 hours per day in transit. That time on the bus and the minor downtimes at the office meant a lot of extra time thinking about games. Thinking about games is how I get a lot of the post ideas, especially ideas about numbers to crunch. Now I'm in the state where I could sit down and crunch damage numbers for League of Legends or I could just play League of Legends. Now the answer is generally to just play the game. But I used to not be able to play the game at work, but I could sure look up stats and formulas and think them over on the bus. More time to game, less time to think? I got to spent more time browsing the internet for Path of Exile builds while out in NB with a bad computer than I seem to get here. Maybe I need to find a job so I can read more gaming websites? Eugh.
So posting every day feels more like a chore than it used to. But not so much that I actually want to stop. I know if I let up even a little it'll all fade away and that's not cool. 1024 posts in a row is not something to give up on lightly!
Anyway... That's how things are around here. Here's to post 1389 in 2015!
Showing posts with label State of the Blog. Show all posts
Showing posts with label State of the Blog. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 01, 2014
Friday, March 15, 2013
State of the Blog 2013
The last time I missed making a daily blog post was March 14, 2011. Every single day since the 15th I've managed to put a new post up here, on my SNES blog, or on my Star Trek blog. 731 straight days. Woo! The initial plan when I split off to those two other blogs was to run them on the weekends. One of them is dealing with 22 year old video games, the other with a 46 year old television show so neither were dealing with particularly time sensitive posts. As such, it should have been easy to build up a nice backlog of posts in order to free up my weekends from needing to worry about putting a post together. Reality worked a little differently. I've almost never had any done in advance, though I have been able to do the posts on Friday if I already had weekend plans. The SNES posts are still coming through but I fell off the Star Trek wagon. I went away for most of the weekend and just didn't feel like spending 2 hours watching Star Trek when I got back. I really wanted to just play League of Legends and Blood Bowl. Since then I've restarted playing Diablo III and the StarCraft II expansion on top of those and have had lots of things I wanted to post about so I haven't really felt the need to go back to Star Trek.
That said, I do still like the idea of building up a backlog of posts. Maybe that will mean Star Trek again, but I actually think I want to start a new Jack bridge series going. In preparation for this post I started way back at the beginning and have been reading all the old posts here. I've only made it up to 2010, but that's partway through the last bridge series. I feel like it took up too much space at the time because I was leaning heavily on it as a source of content but I really liked the discussions that came out of those posts from the people that were interested in them. Most of my posts are either anecdotal or authoritative in nature and neither of those lends themselves very well to an ongoing discussion. But posting about how I played a bridge hand seemed to solicit lots of input on different ways to play the hand, or different conventions, or just ranting about how hard Jack seemed to be trying to screw me. I think a once a week type of schedule would work just fine, so my intention is to start playing a matchpoints series on Jack Bridge and see how it pans out.
The SNES adventure has been a lot of fun, even if I find myself disliking many of the old games. I really like that they're fairly short to put together (though I think I need to block off like a week soon what with A Link to the Past coming up). I'll definitely keep it going for now.
The Final Fantasy marathon is slogging along. Being able to play the last few games on the bus was nice, and I suspect I'm falling behind now because I can't play Ehrgeiz on the bus and really would rather play the new StarCraft II campaign when I'm home instead of completing a mediocre 16 year old game. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually. I am very tempted to skip ahead to the next PSP friendly game, though, and come back to the console one when I get a chance. I really want to play Final Fantasy VIII! But I also know that I'll never actually come back to Ehrgeiz if I skip it.
One change I've recently made to the blog layout is splitting all the post labels down into a few buckets. I have the generic post categories by themselves up at the top of the sidebar. Then I broke out all the board games into a cloud further down, and all the video games into a separate one, and then everything else into a third cloud. On top of that I relabeled all of my old posts (I don't know if labels didn't exist way back then or if I just didn't use them) which bumped up the World of Warcraft numbers a fair bit.
My blog stats have become pretty worthless in the last year. For the longest time my blog was mostly viewed from Canada, then the US, then a little bit all over the place. Lately the most people have come from Sweden. I use the term people there pretty loosely since I'm pretty sure it's just a spam bot. I'm now getting dozens of spam comments every day. They pretty much all get caught by the spam filter but the bots don't seem to care. I tried turning on comment moderation for posts older than 14 days and immediately dinged a couple of legitimate comments on older posts. I've tried going back and turning comments off entirely for the most frequently spammed posts, but it just seems to shift which of the older popular posts get hit. And I'm not even sure those posts are popular. It could just be the same bots hitting them again and again and again. My post about City of Villains going free to play back in June of 2011 was my 4th most popular post last month with 266 hits. I can't fathom that any of those are legit. Especially since my 'top 10' search keywords list actually only has 9 entries with more than 1 hit, and none of them are related to CoV.
I'm not sure what to do about it. Should I turn off anonymous comments? Many of my legitimate comments come from anonymous sources and doing anything to make things harder on people seems like a terrible idea. If there was some way to block Sweden entirely at this point I think I just might. I can't imagine anyone who is running these bots is profiting in any way from their activity here since it all just gets caught in the spam filter. Maybe I need to research SEO optimization more to see if I am actually helping these bots out in some way so I can change it. I just want accurate stats for my own curiosity!
Here's to another 731 days of gaming!
That said, I do still like the idea of building up a backlog of posts. Maybe that will mean Star Trek again, but I actually think I want to start a new Jack bridge series going. In preparation for this post I started way back at the beginning and have been reading all the old posts here. I've only made it up to 2010, but that's partway through the last bridge series. I feel like it took up too much space at the time because I was leaning heavily on it as a source of content but I really liked the discussions that came out of those posts from the people that were interested in them. Most of my posts are either anecdotal or authoritative in nature and neither of those lends themselves very well to an ongoing discussion. But posting about how I played a bridge hand seemed to solicit lots of input on different ways to play the hand, or different conventions, or just ranting about how hard Jack seemed to be trying to screw me. I think a once a week type of schedule would work just fine, so my intention is to start playing a matchpoints series on Jack Bridge and see how it pans out.
The SNES adventure has been a lot of fun, even if I find myself disliking many of the old games. I really like that they're fairly short to put together (though I think I need to block off like a week soon what with A Link to the Past coming up). I'll definitely keep it going for now.
The Final Fantasy marathon is slogging along. Being able to play the last few games on the bus was nice, and I suspect I'm falling behind now because I can't play Ehrgeiz on the bus and really would rather play the new StarCraft II campaign when I'm home instead of completing a mediocre 16 year old game. I'm sure I'll get around to it eventually. I am very tempted to skip ahead to the next PSP friendly game, though, and come back to the console one when I get a chance. I really want to play Final Fantasy VIII! But I also know that I'll never actually come back to Ehrgeiz if I skip it.
One change I've recently made to the blog layout is splitting all the post labels down into a few buckets. I have the generic post categories by themselves up at the top of the sidebar. Then I broke out all the board games into a cloud further down, and all the video games into a separate one, and then everything else into a third cloud. On top of that I relabeled all of my old posts (I don't know if labels didn't exist way back then or if I just didn't use them) which bumped up the World of Warcraft numbers a fair bit.
My blog stats have become pretty worthless in the last year. For the longest time my blog was mostly viewed from Canada, then the US, then a little bit all over the place. Lately the most people have come from Sweden. I use the term people there pretty loosely since I'm pretty sure it's just a spam bot. I'm now getting dozens of spam comments every day. They pretty much all get caught by the spam filter but the bots don't seem to care. I tried turning on comment moderation for posts older than 14 days and immediately dinged a couple of legitimate comments on older posts. I've tried going back and turning comments off entirely for the most frequently spammed posts, but it just seems to shift which of the older popular posts get hit. And I'm not even sure those posts are popular. It could just be the same bots hitting them again and again and again. My post about City of Villains going free to play back in June of 2011 was my 4th most popular post last month with 266 hits. I can't fathom that any of those are legit. Especially since my 'top 10' search keywords list actually only has 9 entries with more than 1 hit, and none of them are related to CoV.
I'm not sure what to do about it. Should I turn off anonymous comments? Many of my legitimate comments come from anonymous sources and doing anything to make things harder on people seems like a terrible idea. If there was some way to block Sweden entirely at this point I think I just might. I can't imagine anyone who is running these bots is profiting in any way from their activity here since it all just gets caught in the spam filter. Maybe I need to research SEO optimization more to see if I am actually helping these bots out in some way so I can change it. I just want accurate stats for my own curiosity!
Here's to another 731 days of gaming!
Monday, July 02, 2012
State of the Blog 2012
It's been another year so it's time for another review. 2012 was a leap year so there were 366 days from last July until the end of this June. There were 362 posts on this blog, 3 on the SNES blog, and 1 on the Star Trek blog. 1 post per day, every day, for the entire year. Woo! I didn't really solve my problem from last year about finding a way to combine all the posts into one super-blog of sorts. Instead I decided I didn't care. I found a Facebook app which gathers RSS feeds from multiple places and posts them automatically and decided that was good enough. It seems Google has since integrated Blogger into G+ so they're all getting sent there as well.
In the last year there have been 354 comments. Down a little from the 1 per average of last year but still pretty close. I don't believe I had to overrule Google's automated spam filter a single time all year. All the nude celeb links and SEO optimizers ended up in the spam folder never to be seen by anyone. All the real posts made it to the blog in real time. I'm pretty happy with the filter and see no reason to turn on any bot catching passwords or the like for the time being.
Interestingly, to me at least, random people I don't know started posting comments. Mostly in the Galaxy Legion posts but there have been a few elsewhere. Woo! For the most part it's still just people I know who are following along but it's good to know that some other people have stumbled their way here. Most of my posts seem to get in the 10-20 hit range. The Galaxy Legion stuff was getting a couple hundred each. Of course, I was also seeing big traffic spikes from automated crawlers while I was posting about GL so maybe it wasn't real people making it at all. Alas, I stopped playing that game so those posts aren't happening anymore.
The top search results are exclusively from World of Warcraft and Galaxy Legion. The top 6 are still variations on archaeology. I think the stats are starting to fail me here since my options are last month or all-time. My top viewed post remains the archaeology post but it only has 3866 page views. Last year it had 3627 so it's really only picked up 239 hits in the last year. That said, my 7th most viewed post only has 181 hits, so a gain of 239 would almost certainly still make it very high for the year. Snidely seems to have fallen out of interest. (Hey Google! Modify the Blogger stats to show stuff from the last year, will you!)
What games were tagged in posts this year?
video - Final Fantasy II, X-Com, Galaxy Legion, League of Legends, Zelda (Ocarina of Time), Dead Rising 2, Final Fantasy Legend, NHL 12, Dynasty Hockey, Guitar Hero, Mystic Warlords of Ka'a, Glitch, City of Villains, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy Legend II, Zork, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy IV, Star Wars: The Old Republic, StarCraft II, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Civilization V, Torchlight, Band Hero, Final Fantasy I, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Legend III, Virtual Villagers, Diablo III, Minish Cap, TSN Predictor, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy V, F-Zero, Gradius III, Pilotwings
board - Through The Ages, Le Havre, Queen's Gambit, Can't Stop, Football Strategy, Innovation, Paydirt, Vegas Showdown, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, Sudoku Moyo, King of Tokyo, crayon rails, Agricola, Kingdom Builder, Puerto Rico, Roll Through The Ages, A Few Acres of Snow, backgammon, Campaign Manager 2008, Red November, Dungeon Lords, Ricochet Robots, Liar's Dice, Hacienda
other - Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Werewolf, Final Fantasy Trading Card Game
That's quite a few games!
I once again re-read the posts from the last year. I actually skipped most of the Galaxy Legion posts since they were mostly crunching numbers I no longer care about. I cared about them at the time so I'm definitely happy that they exist but I don't really care to read them again. A lot of the anecdote type posts were nice to read again.
It did seem like some of the more commented posts were Magic drafts. I should get back into playing Magic Online again to get a few more such posts up. I also vaguely recall hearing there's going to be a GP in Toronto later this year? I should practice for that!
All told I'm pretty happy with the way things are going. I think the change to posting on SNES and Star Trek blogs on the weekend will be a positive one. The Final Fantasy Marathon continues to churn along at a reasonable rate.
In the last year there have been 354 comments. Down a little from the 1 per average of last year but still pretty close. I don't believe I had to overrule Google's automated spam filter a single time all year. All the nude celeb links and SEO optimizers ended up in the spam folder never to be seen by anyone. All the real posts made it to the blog in real time. I'm pretty happy with the filter and see no reason to turn on any bot catching passwords or the like for the time being.
Interestingly, to me at least, random people I don't know started posting comments. Mostly in the Galaxy Legion posts but there have been a few elsewhere. Woo! For the most part it's still just people I know who are following along but it's good to know that some other people have stumbled their way here. Most of my posts seem to get in the 10-20 hit range. The Galaxy Legion stuff was getting a couple hundred each. Of course, I was also seeing big traffic spikes from automated crawlers while I was posting about GL so maybe it wasn't real people making it at all. Alas, I stopped playing that game so those posts aren't happening anymore.
The top search results are exclusively from World of Warcraft and Galaxy Legion. The top 6 are still variations on archaeology. I think the stats are starting to fail me here since my options are last month or all-time. My top viewed post remains the archaeology post but it only has 3866 page views. Last year it had 3627 so it's really only picked up 239 hits in the last year. That said, my 7th most viewed post only has 181 hits, so a gain of 239 would almost certainly still make it very high for the year. Snidely seems to have fallen out of interest. (Hey Google! Modify the Blogger stats to show stuff from the last year, will you!)
What games were tagged in posts this year?
video - Final Fantasy II, X-Com, Galaxy Legion, League of Legends, Zelda (Ocarina of Time), Dead Rising 2, Final Fantasy Legend, NHL 12, Dynasty Hockey, Guitar Hero, Mystic Warlords of Ka'a, Glitch, City of Villains, Final Fantasy XI, Final Fantasy III, Final Fantasy Legend II, Zork, Romance of the Three Kingdoms III, Theatrhythm Final Fantasy, Final Fantasy Adventure, Final Fantasy IV, Star Wars: The Old Republic, StarCraft II, Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals, Civilization V, Torchlight, Band Hero, Final Fantasy I, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy Legend III, Virtual Villagers, Diablo III, Minish Cap, TSN Predictor, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Final Fantasy Mystic Quest, Final Fantasy V, F-Zero, Gradius III, Pilotwings
board - Through The Ages, Le Havre, Queen's Gambit, Can't Stop, Football Strategy, Innovation, Paydirt, Vegas Showdown, Lord of the Rings: the Confrontation, Sudoku Moyo, King of Tokyo, crayon rails, Agricola, Kingdom Builder, Puerto Rico, Roll Through The Ages, A Few Acres of Snow, backgammon, Campaign Manager 2008, Red November, Dungeon Lords, Ricochet Robots, Liar's Dice, Hacienda
other - Magic the Gathering, Dungeons & Dragons, Werewolf, Final Fantasy Trading Card Game
That's quite a few games!
I once again re-read the posts from the last year. I actually skipped most of the Galaxy Legion posts since they were mostly crunching numbers I no longer care about. I cared about them at the time so I'm definitely happy that they exist but I don't really care to read them again. A lot of the anecdote type posts were nice to read again.
It did seem like some of the more commented posts were Magic drafts. I should get back into playing Magic Online again to get a few more such posts up. I also vaguely recall hearing there's going to be a GP in Toronto later this year? I should practice for that!
All told I'm pretty happy with the way things are going. I think the change to posting on SNES and Star Trek blogs on the weekend will be a positive one. The Final Fantasy Marathon continues to churn along at a reasonable rate.
Friday, July 01, 2011
State of the Blog
It's been a little over a year since I started posting again. At the time my goals were to try to be interesting to people I know now, people I used to know, and people I don't even know at all. Especially to future me. I didn't want to feel obligated to post every day because I worried that doing so would cause missing one day to throw everything off the rails. How have I done? What's worked, and what hasn't?
Well, in the last year I've made 311 posts. From the time I started using bridge hands to post every day I ended up with 300 posts in 319 days. Pretty much the entire missed section came from missing one day due to internet outage and then letting everything get thrown off the rails. So on the one hand, failure there. But on the other, I did come back on the rails eventually and made a pretty good run of it. Clearly I'm not going to change myself and screwing up will cost me. But I have managed to make posting a part of my daily routine which I'm going to call a win.
Before I came back I had a total of 2 comments. Since then I've had 313. 311 of which have been in the last year. So, exactly 1 comment per post on average. This excludes spam which Blogger has done a very good job of filtering out. 266 such spam has been caught. As far as where the comments have come from, almost exclusively from my current friends. A couple from my family. Strangers, not so much. So, I may have managed to become interesting to people I know, but not to people I don't. At least, not enough to convince them to post.
Blogger does track page hits to specific posts, though. Sadly, it only lets me track by day, week, month, or all-time. I'd like a year option, but for today at least the all-time option will work. My number one most viewed post is Archaeology Rare Items which is a list of drops from a World of Warcraft profession that I couldn't find anywhere else. Apparently quite a few other people couldn't find one either, as it's gotten 3627 hits. That number isn't actually very big all things considered but it does show some strangers have found their way here.
The next highest is 10-Man Heroic Chimaeron Timings which is my proudest post. It goes into specific detail about the mechanics of a World of Warcraft fight and explains why a specific strategy makes sense. I've looked in on the stats tab in Blogger every now and then and periodically I'll get a bunch of traffic from a guild's forums. Different guilds each time. Mostly they're private forums so I can't take a look on the discussion but one time it was public. It started as a debate on how to do the fight. Eventually someone linked my post, they tried it, and it worked. If I have one regret about quitting World of Warcraft it's that I can't make posts like this one now.
The third one surprised me a lot. Fan eXpo 2010 Costume. I can't actually explain this one. The 8th most frequent search term to find my blog is Snidely Whiplash so I have to assume those people ended up at my costume page and ended up disappointed with what they found.
The top ten is rounded out by a bunch of posts about earning realm firsts achievements in World of Warcraft, the second archaeology post, the Nintendo 3DS SD card post, a post about playfair ciphers, and by a very recent post about a Galaxy Legion item.
I mentioned search terms above. Along with Snidely is kronyn datacube (the Galaxy Legion item) and 8 different searches related to archaeology.
How about actual content? 131 of the last 300 posts were bridge hands. I had a couple complaints that people didn't find them very interesting. I also had some people who said they liked them, and they got a lot of comments. I recently re-read every post from the last year, except I skipped a lot of the bridge posts. Don't get me wrong, I liked doing them at the time and liked reading some of them recently. There were just too many of them. I think I may try to bring them back in a little easier to read format or maybe just more spread out.
Possibly the solution is to split off and make a sub-blog for bridge posts? There is a bit of a precedent here since I did make a sub-blog for Star Trek which fell apart when my computer died. I want to resurrect that, I want posting there to count as posting once per day, and I really don't think merging it into here makes any sense at all. Maybe there's a way to make a super-blog which would just compile posts from a bunch of different sub-blogs? This is something I need to look into...
Re-reading the last year of posts also brought to my attention some follow-up posts that just never got written. Now at least I have a list of things that fell aside. I also expect to do some M12 drafts in a month or two to prepare for Nationals.
All in all I'm pretty happy with the way things have gone here in the last year. I should try find a way to grow and evolve the site, of course, but if I can just manage to keep up as the last year as gone then I'll be content.
Well, in the last year I've made 311 posts. From the time I started using bridge hands to post every day I ended up with 300 posts in 319 days. Pretty much the entire missed section came from missing one day due to internet outage and then letting everything get thrown off the rails. So on the one hand, failure there. But on the other, I did come back on the rails eventually and made a pretty good run of it. Clearly I'm not going to change myself and screwing up will cost me. But I have managed to make posting a part of my daily routine which I'm going to call a win.
Before I came back I had a total of 2 comments. Since then I've had 313. 311 of which have been in the last year. So, exactly 1 comment per post on average. This excludes spam which Blogger has done a very good job of filtering out. 266 such spam has been caught. As far as where the comments have come from, almost exclusively from my current friends. A couple from my family. Strangers, not so much. So, I may have managed to become interesting to people I know, but not to people I don't. At least, not enough to convince them to post.
Blogger does track page hits to specific posts, though. Sadly, it only lets me track by day, week, month, or all-time. I'd like a year option, but for today at least the all-time option will work. My number one most viewed post is Archaeology Rare Items which is a list of drops from a World of Warcraft profession that I couldn't find anywhere else. Apparently quite a few other people couldn't find one either, as it's gotten 3627 hits. That number isn't actually very big all things considered but it does show some strangers have found their way here.
The next highest is 10-Man Heroic Chimaeron Timings which is my proudest post. It goes into specific detail about the mechanics of a World of Warcraft fight and explains why a specific strategy makes sense. I've looked in on the stats tab in Blogger every now and then and periodically I'll get a bunch of traffic from a guild's forums. Different guilds each time. Mostly they're private forums so I can't take a look on the discussion but one time it was public. It started as a debate on how to do the fight. Eventually someone linked my post, they tried it, and it worked. If I have one regret about quitting World of Warcraft it's that I can't make posts like this one now.
The third one surprised me a lot. Fan eXpo 2010 Costume. I can't actually explain this one. The 8th most frequent search term to find my blog is Snidely Whiplash so I have to assume those people ended up at my costume page and ended up disappointed with what they found.
The top ten is rounded out by a bunch of posts about earning realm firsts achievements in World of Warcraft, the second archaeology post, the Nintendo 3DS SD card post, a post about playfair ciphers, and by a very recent post about a Galaxy Legion item.
I mentioned search terms above. Along with Snidely is kronyn datacube (the Galaxy Legion item) and 8 different searches related to archaeology.
How about actual content? 131 of the last 300 posts were bridge hands. I had a couple complaints that people didn't find them very interesting. I also had some people who said they liked them, and they got a lot of comments. I recently re-read every post from the last year, except I skipped a lot of the bridge posts. Don't get me wrong, I liked doing them at the time and liked reading some of them recently. There were just too many of them. I think I may try to bring them back in a little easier to read format or maybe just more spread out.
Possibly the solution is to split off and make a sub-blog for bridge posts? There is a bit of a precedent here since I did make a sub-blog for Star Trek which fell apart when my computer died. I want to resurrect that, I want posting there to count as posting once per day, and I really don't think merging it into here makes any sense at all. Maybe there's a way to make a super-blog which would just compile posts from a bunch of different sub-blogs? This is something I need to look into...
Re-reading the last year of posts also brought to my attention some follow-up posts that just never got written. Now at least I have a list of things that fell aside. I also expect to do some M12 drafts in a month or two to prepare for Nationals.
All in all I'm pretty happy with the way things have gone here in the last year. I should try find a way to grow and evolve the site, of course, but if I can just manage to keep up as the last year as gone then I'll be content.
Friday, June 18, 2010
Welcome Back, Kotter!
Hi Everybody! {Hi Doctor Nick!}
In the past month I've been reading some blogs. One from my friend Sky who I talk to several times a week, another from someone I went to high school with but have had no subsequent contact and one from a random dude who grows moustaches. I really got lost in their worlds while I was reading them. Now Sky's makes sense; he writes about a lot of things we do together (WoW and board games mostly) and since a bunch of people I know comment on his blog it's a lot like we're just hanging out only it's on a blog instead of in a lounge. The second one kinda makes sense; it's like getting postcards from someone I knew 13 years ago. That's almost a normal thing to have happen I would think. But the last guy, well, there's really no rational explanation for why I cared about when his baby takes naps. Read the post about moustaches and then move on is what should have happened. Vicariously live a house husbands life by reading blog posts for several hours when I probably should have been sleeping? Not a lot of sense there, I don't think.
I reread all my old posts (ok, I skimmed the outdated stuff about WoW quest chains) and don't feel like what I had was really good enough to have someone from any of those three camps read it and enjoy it. However, I think it could get to that point if I actually work at it. I want people I hang out with now to leave comments and have discussions on random things I may post. I want old friends who may randomly stumble across the blog to think "Hey, I knew that guy! What has he been up to?". And I even think I want random strangers to stumble in and find my ramblings interesting enough to waste an evening reading them.
I think I'm a cyber-voyeur. And I want to be a cyber-exhibitionist. Man, I'm really screwed up...
One thing I noticed is this site is butt ugly. I'm sure I had a good reason for picking this heinous colour scheme in the first place but I'm going to have to mess around with the templates at some point and fix it. This blog has been up for four and a half years (though not active for most of that time) and it's only gotten two comments. I'm pretty sure being painful to look at probably caused some of that.
Another is that I made too many typoes in the first place. I know the initial scope was to try to curb my anal retentive perfectionism and not edit anything at all but that's just not good enough. I intend to at least use spell check this time around! Huzzah!
I'm not sure what the focus is really going to be at this point but I'm going to see what I can do to spruce the place up and get actual posts running. I can probably cobble together a WBC 2009 recap, though with the long delay (again) it'll be just as mediocre as the last two! Maybe this year I'll still be posting come August so I'll get it done in a timely manner. One can only hope...
In the past month I've been reading some blogs. One from my friend Sky who I talk to several times a week, another from someone I went to high school with but have had no subsequent contact and one from a random dude who grows moustaches. I really got lost in their worlds while I was reading them. Now Sky's makes sense; he writes about a lot of things we do together (WoW and board games mostly) and since a bunch of people I know comment on his blog it's a lot like we're just hanging out only it's on a blog instead of in a lounge. The second one kinda makes sense; it's like getting postcards from someone I knew 13 years ago. That's almost a normal thing to have happen I would think. But the last guy, well, there's really no rational explanation for why I cared about when his baby takes naps. Read the post about moustaches and then move on is what should have happened. Vicariously live a house husbands life by reading blog posts for several hours when I probably should have been sleeping? Not a lot of sense there, I don't think.
I reread all my old posts (ok, I skimmed the outdated stuff about WoW quest chains) and don't feel like what I had was really good enough to have someone from any of those three camps read it and enjoy it. However, I think it could get to that point if I actually work at it. I want people I hang out with now to leave comments and have discussions on random things I may post. I want old friends who may randomly stumble across the blog to think "Hey, I knew that guy! What has he been up to?". And I even think I want random strangers to stumble in and find my ramblings interesting enough to waste an evening reading them.
I think I'm a cyber-voyeur. And I want to be a cyber-exhibitionist. Man, I'm really screwed up...
One thing I noticed is this site is butt ugly. I'm sure I had a good reason for picking this heinous colour scheme in the first place but I'm going to have to mess around with the templates at some point and fix it. This blog has been up for four and a half years (though not active for most of that time) and it's only gotten two comments. I'm pretty sure being painful to look at probably caused some of that.
Another is that I made too many typoes in the first place. I know the initial scope was to try to curb my anal retentive perfectionism and not edit anything at all but that's just not good enough. I intend to at least use spell check this time around! Huzzah!
I'm not sure what the focus is really going to be at this point but I'm going to see what I can do to spruce the place up and get actual posts running. I can probably cobble together a WBC 2009 recap, though with the long delay (again) it'll be just as mediocre as the last two! Maybe this year I'll still be posting come August so I'll get it done in a timely manner. One can only hope...
Tuesday, March 31, 2009
Don't Call It A Comeback!
It's almost Easter which means one thing... Lounge Day! A gathering of former and current Waterlooites at the Comfy Lounge at the University of Waterloo where we will pretty much play a lot of games. It's good times. Now, last year I meant to heavily recruit for WBC at Lounge Day but didn't quite get around to it. I mean to do the same thing this year (without the not getting around to it part) but I don't even have a recap of last year's WBC up yet. So, I need to get that done, and soon.
I reread last year's recap last night and while it somewhat got across the feeling of the event it really felt lacking. Reading it didn't make me want to look into going. So, my goal this year is to frame my recap in a better light, to make it seem more appealing. (Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that it needs to be dressed up. It is an incredible time. I mean I need to liven up my writing.)
About writing: I don't do enough of it. I created this site ostensibly to post on every day to get better at writing and never did. Maybe this time around I will! That was certainly my New Year's Resolution again this year... I'm just starting in on it 3 months late!
At any rate, if anyone is even reading this, expect to see a WBC recap up soon along with an actual conclusion to the Notre Dame series and much more. (Oddly enough, the Notre Dame conclusion was written the night I posted the cube post, I just fell off the posting wagon that night and never got back on it seems!)
Welcome Back Me!
I reread last year's recap last night and while it somewhat got across the feeling of the event it really felt lacking. Reading it didn't make me want to look into going. So, my goal this year is to frame my recap in a better light, to make it seem more appealing. (Don't get me wrong, I don't mean that it needs to be dressed up. It is an incredible time. I mean I need to liven up my writing.)
About writing: I don't do enough of it. I created this site ostensibly to post on every day to get better at writing and never did. Maybe this time around I will! That was certainly my New Year's Resolution again this year... I'm just starting in on it 3 months late!
At any rate, if anyone is even reading this, expect to see a WBC recap up soon along with an actual conclusion to the Notre Dame series and much more. (Oddly enough, the Notre Dame conclusion was written the night I posted the cube post, I just fell off the posting wagon that night and never got back on it seems!)
Welcome Back Me!
Monday, December 31, 2007
A New Year, An Old Resolution
Once upon a time, almost exactly 2 years ago, I decided to start up a blog about gaming and gambling. It was a New Year's resolution to see how long I could go blogging every day. Turns out, the answer was 5 days, which is not exactly awe inspiring. Even worse I stopped updating even sporadically in a couple months. The only posts I ended up making were quest chains for horde dungeons for my World of Warcraft group to use to prepare for playing once a week.
I reread the few posts I did make earlier today and they actually brought back memories. I'd never have remembered colluding with Byung to try to kill 25 zombies if I hadn't written it down, and it made me chuckle. Most of the posts were duds, but the occasional good post makes me want to start things up again. Couple that with a desire to inspire some friends to go to the World Boardgaming Championships next year and a wish to try out this new Gleemax thing and restarting a blog seems like a great resolution for this new year.
I haven't read much about Gleemax, so maybe this won't be permanent, or searchable, or readable, so I'm going to start out double-posting things on my old blog which appears to be timeless.
Similar to two years ago I also intend to take up only gambling, only this time I'm mostly interested in backgammon, though I have been reading up on poker and playing some freerolls to stretch those gaming muscles again.
Well, enough intro babble for today. I'll work something up to post in the new year before I go to sweet sweet sleep. After a game of DotA, anyway!
I reread the few posts I did make earlier today and they actually brought back memories. I'd never have remembered colluding with Byung to try to kill 25 zombies if I hadn't written it down, and it made me chuckle. Most of the posts were duds, but the occasional good post makes me want to start things up again. Couple that with a desire to inspire some friends to go to the World Boardgaming Championships next year and a wish to try out this new Gleemax thing and restarting a blog seems like a great resolution for this new year.
I haven't read much about Gleemax, so maybe this won't be permanent, or searchable, or readable, so I'm going to start out double-posting things on my old blog which appears to be timeless.
Similar to two years ago I also intend to take up only gambling, only this time I'm mostly interested in backgammon, though I have been reading up on poker and playing some freerolls to stretch those gaming muscles again.
Well, enough intro babble for today. I'll work something up to post in the new year before I go to sweet sweet sleep. After a game of DotA, anyway!
Sunday, January 01, 2006
At the beginning with you
My New Year's resolution for this year, sadly enough, is to start a blog and see how long I can go updating it every day. I'm going to start today by laying out my rationale and ground rules I'm setting for myself. Who knows how it may evolve though.
First, a bit about me. My name is Nick Page, I'm 25 years old, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, and I am a semi-recent graduate of the University of Waterloo (B. Math, honours Computer Science, minor in Combinatorics and Optimization). I'm working a tech supportish job currently and am half-heartedly looking for a programming type job. You can pretty much sum up my life with three statements... Play games - Eat meat - Sleep.
My main goal is to write about the games that I play. I intend to write freeform, not going back over each line to correct spelling or grammar or to make sure it comes out just perfect. The reason for this is that I often spend hours and hours trying to think of the perfect way to phrase an email or a message board post or whatnot. I am going to allow myself to correct typoes in the last word/punctuation though, so while it may be a little incoherent at times it shouldn't be illegible as well.
The primary reason for doing this is so that I can reread my thoughts on things (especially games) years down the road, but there are lots of secondary reasons as well.
- I have an interest in doing serious testing, and it was recommended that working on your communication skills, for example by writing a blog, would be a big asset. I'd like all the assets I can get.
- To learn a bit about website, or at least blog, design.
- I used to be roommates with a couple people who wrote Magic:The Gathering articles for http://www.starcitygames.com/ back when I was a student. I always got a thrill out of reading about the exploits of people I knew in person, especially if I was somehow involved. I expect I will often know the people I write about, and I will likely find myself involved a fair bit. And hey, maybe someone I know will stumble across this at some point and get a kick out of reading about themselves.
- I am starting to give serious consideration to trying to make money (or at least break even and have fun) playing online poker. I've seen it recommended to keep track of each session so you can more objectively approach your game. Makes sense to me, and what better way to track progress than by writing about it every day. I also figure I can do the same sort of thing with Magic Online tournaments. Up to now I've just had a vague sense that I'm winning more often than losing but I have no real concrete proof. This will at least give me some stats to (poorly) analyze.
- To attract all the cute gamer girls out there. Ok... Not all. One would be quite sufficient. The cute part is just an added frill. The girl part, on the other hand, is non-negotiable.
- Who knows, maybe some random people out there will read a post and be entertained, or learn something about something random. That would be great!
At any rate, questions and comments, now or in the future, are always welcomed. I especially welcome criticism, constructive prefered but I can learn from even the meanest of complaints.
First, a bit about me. My name is Nick Page, I'm 25 years old, I live in Waterloo, Ontario, and I am a semi-recent graduate of the University of Waterloo (B. Math, honours Computer Science, minor in Combinatorics and Optimization). I'm working a tech supportish job currently and am half-heartedly looking for a programming type job. You can pretty much sum up my life with three statements... Play games - Eat meat - Sleep.
My main goal is to write about the games that I play. I intend to write freeform, not going back over each line to correct spelling or grammar or to make sure it comes out just perfect. The reason for this is that I often spend hours and hours trying to think of the perfect way to phrase an email or a message board post or whatnot. I am going to allow myself to correct typoes in the last word/punctuation though, so while it may be a little incoherent at times it shouldn't be illegible as well.
The primary reason for doing this is so that I can reread my thoughts on things (especially games) years down the road, but there are lots of secondary reasons as well.
- I have an interest in doing serious testing, and it was recommended that working on your communication skills, for example by writing a blog, would be a big asset. I'd like all the assets I can get.
- To learn a bit about website, or at least blog, design.
- I used to be roommates with a couple people who wrote Magic:The Gathering articles for http://www.starcitygames.com/ back when I was a student. I always got a thrill out of reading about the exploits of people I knew in person, especially if I was somehow involved. I expect I will often know the people I write about, and I will likely find myself involved a fair bit. And hey, maybe someone I know will stumble across this at some point and get a kick out of reading about themselves.
- I am starting to give serious consideration to trying to make money (or at least break even and have fun) playing online poker. I've seen it recommended to keep track of each session so you can more objectively approach your game. Makes sense to me, and what better way to track progress than by writing about it every day. I also figure I can do the same sort of thing with Magic Online tournaments. Up to now I've just had a vague sense that I'm winning more often than losing but I have no real concrete proof. This will at least give me some stats to (poorly) analyze.
- To attract all the cute gamer girls out there. Ok... Not all. One would be quite sufficient. The cute part is just an added frill. The girl part, on the other hand, is non-negotiable.
- Who knows, maybe some random people out there will read a post and be entertained, or learn something about something random. That would be great!
At any rate, questions and comments, now or in the future, are always welcomed. I especially welcome criticism, constructive prefered but I can learn from even the meanest of complaints.
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