Acid for Blood

Featured on Blogs.com: My List of 10 Great Game Blogs

Blogs.com is a relatively new site created by Six Apart that wants to help readers find the best blogs around. They also feature Top 10 Lists from "celebrity bloggers and influencers" to help readers find new blogs. They have a section under Entertainment that collects lists of gaming blogs, too.

I was recently invited to be a guest author there to contribute a list of 10 game blogs that I enjoy. My Guest Top 10 List is right here. I couldn't include absolutely every one of my favourite game blogs, but this list in general reflects the kind of content that I enjoy reading.

Pardon My Dust

I've decided to move to paid, managed blog hosting. Part of the reason I haven't been writing as much, apart from generally being busy in my personal life, is because I wanted to do some heavy maintenance on my blog, but other things just kept taking priority. Last week I tried to upgrade my WordPress installation. It went awry. I'm not incredibly knowledgable about PHP databases and sorting out what happened was frustrating. More recently, my web hosting service has informed me that I am dangerously close to reaching my disk space usage limit. If I stick with self-hosting, I will have to upgrade my plan, either with my current host or a new one. My current plan is very modest, but my blog is outgrowing it.

I considered moving everything over to WordPress.com because I think they have the best free blog hosting service. However, they randomly show adverts to your readers, and I have no control over this. They don't seem to have an option to exclude ads for a fee. I decided against WordPress.com in the end. I first hosted my blog on Blogger, but was not entirely satisfied with that service, which is why I moved to self-hosting in the first place.

I've been checking out TypePad's 14-day trial, and I like what I see. I've submitted support tickets and requests for help, and their customer service technicians seem on the ball, which is to be expected from a monthly paid service. In the coming weeks, I will be moving everything over to TypePad. As such, the blog may experience some hiccups here and there during the transition.

PAX Coverage

I should put coverage in quotes, because my small l readership can certainly go elsewhere for in-depth and extensive coverage from Penny Arcade Expo (PAX). I hope to provide a different angle from those big game blogs. I also hope that non-life-threatening hijinks and shenanigans with minimal financial impact will ensue so that I can write about them.

I don't know what kind of wireless access there will be in the convention centre. If there is wireless access, no doubt the pipes will be choked with nerds feverishly trying to access the intertubes. I'm not entirely sure I want to lug my laptop around all day, either. The convention centre will be full of geeks; one must be nimble and quick.

My plan is to post full blog entries at the end of the day or possibly take blogging breaks during the day, if I'm able. I am not exactly sure how far the hotel is from the convention centre. "Eight blocks" could mean almost anything. I will make short (140 characters or less!) updates on Twitter via mobile phone. Tune into Twitter for the minutiae of my con experiences. I also plan to do daily photo uploads to my Flickr photostream.

I'm all packed and I will be getting up bright and early tomorrow morning to set out with my con buddies on our glorious trip to Seattle, Washington for a weekend full of videogaming goodness. Hope you can join me!

TGC Re-roll

The Game Chair has announced a change in direction, due to the busy schedule and shift in priorities of the site owner and editor, Seth. I started writing on The Game Chair two years ago, when Seth stumbled across my games blog. He contacted me and invited me to become a contributor to the site. At the time, I was also blogging at another game site, which is now defunct (I honestly don't know how I had time to write on three game blogs!). I agreed because The Game Chair's writing guidelines held me to more structured standard than the other place, which I loved for giving me a lot of freedom to blog whatever random game-related fluff and fun that I came across. I wrote a few "progressive reviews" for The Game Chair and some other pieces. I wasn't as active a contributor as the other writers, but it was a great experience, regardless. I look forward to see how Seth evolves the site and I'm grateful to him for giving me the opportunity to write there.

Seth writes:

One of the big changes is that the site no longer has the review feature we once did and that I removed those elements that tried to categorize the site by content types. This is the significant re-roll move. The idea is from a content perspective I wanted to start fresh. My hope is to use this space more openly and more flexibly to share some thoughts about games when the mood hits me. I don’t think this precludes The Game Chair from having other writers contribute, but I think removing the guise of being a game review site and attempting to find ways to generate viewers and traffic to grow is a great relief to me right now.

Since I no longer have a gig writing on another blog, I'm going to explore what sort of spare time game writing I can put my keyboard to. Should I look for a blogging gig that pays (even just a little)? Should I instead be more serious and structured about writing on this blog? I was offered an unpaid writing (game reviews) position at a small and growing gaming site over the weekend, but I turned it down for various reasons. What are your opinions, readers?

Shiny New Theme

I have a new WordPress theme for my blog.

For the people reading from RSS, the new theme looks like this:

The header graphic is customisable. The current header displays concept art from Guild Wars Nightfall.

The default header graphic is shown in this screenshot:

This is the previous theme, which was up from January 2006 to May 2007:

This is the last theme I used when this blog was hosted on Blogger (roughly from 4th Quarter 2005 to January 2006):

If you are curious about the themes, you will find further details if you go to the screenshot's Flickr page.

Unfortunately, I don't have any screenshots of the themes I used prior to that last one.

Yes, You Can Comment on Kotaku

Unbeknownst to me, as a non-regular reader of Kotaku (though this probably has to change because reading game news is now a part of my job, and because Josh says they've been getting better lately), they fixed their commenting policy so that the unwashed masses are allowed to make a comment. I was unable to understand how Kotaku could have so many asinine commenters on the site if the only way you could obtain the privilege was to be invited. Maybe the jerks who post on the site only had other jerks as their friends? Full of bright-eyed optimism, I thought, "Surely not!" I did some looking around and discovered that Kotaku had opened commenting to everyone (though you still need approval). However, this ability is not publicised on an easily accessible page on the site. No, it's buried in a post which was made last September.

EDIT: I've been given the seal of approval, and I have a shiny new Kotaku commenter profile. Shall I use my powers for good or for eeevil?

Acid for Blood in Wikipedia

My blog is listed in the Wikipedia entry for Luminoth Temple, the now defunct, exclusive Metroid Prime 2: Echoes fan forum. Scroll down to the bottom. The blog post I made about the offensive discussion of booth babes by forum members in the Luminoth Temple is cited as an "Example of leaked information." Also, a screenshot of the page I encountered when I discovered that I was banned is also on Wikipedia.

Hehehe. Awesome. I think?

Kotaku Authors Named

It's about time that the bloggers at Kotaku started putting their own names to their writings. It's been incredibly irritating to read a multi-author blog, in which an author will sometimes refer to himself or herself in the first person -- and you have no fucking clue which author has posted!

Did they used to think of themselves as gamer Borg hive, therefore they didn't actually need to identify themselves as individuals? I have no idea. Even the Borg had numbers to identify individual units within the Collective. Did they have numbers? If so, they didn't share them with their readers. Now they all have names, and names are much catchier than numbers. It's nice that I can now direct my ire towards a particular author the next time Kotaku sensationalises something.

WordPress.com

I was bored and curious, so I made a blog on WordPress.com. WordPress.com is another free blog hosting site, using WordPress (multi-user version) as the blog software/publishing platform.

The advantage of hosting one's blog on WordPress.com is obviously that it uses WordPress. WordPress.com is great for newbie bloggers and for anyone who doesn't want to deal with code. WordPress is quite user-friendly, it is easy to get to work with for the uninitiated, it has a lot of features, and there are loads of nice-looking templates available.

It has a host of standard features that Blogger lacks. The ability to categorise posts and blogroll links is one. Another is a basic, integrated blog stats counter. Another feature that Blogger doesn't have is the ability to make stand alone pages which are not part of the continuity of your blog entries.

The version of WordPress that WordPress.com provides is less feature-filled than if you downloaded WordPress for use on your own web server, but it is still powerful.

The major missing feature is the inability to alter the blog's template code. I am accustomed to tweaking the Blogger template to suit my needs. Granted, I don't do anything too fancy, and creating a template from scratch is beyond me, however I like the flexibility to edit the code.

Another point against WordPress.com is that they do not allow JavaScript, so Flickr badges, StatCounter code, or anything else that uses JavaScript is out.

WordPress.com does not allow you to associate more than one blog with one author, which is something that Blogger allows. I don't have the need to author multiple public blogs at this point, however it would have been nice if WordPress.com offered the option.

One thing to note is that the WordPress.com hosting site just went public just last Autumn, after a period of being invitation-only. They are still making improvements and developing features. I'm going to keep an eye on them. If they offer an automatic import/export feature, I may take another look. WordPress offers enough features as standard that I would consider moving from Blogger (though I would miss my Bloglines blogroll).

On a related note, from time to time I consider paying for hosting services, getting my own domain, installing WordPress, and blogging from my own site. Learning the ins and outs of the backend would be something to look forward to, kind of. I am not schooled in the ways of programming or the technicalities of web site management, but surely it isn't too difficult, is it? Having said that, it's not as if I have a large audience or that I make any money from doing this, so I dont know if I can justify the recurring expense. It would be a nice project, though.

For the elites in the audience, do you have recommendations or warnings about specific web hosting services?

A Reviewer as Well

I shall soon be writing game reviews for The Game Chair. I've never written game reviews for a website before, so this will be challenging and interesting. W00t. At least having to write game reviews will give me a good excuse to hammer away at my massive games backlog.

Between blogging for Playgressive and writing reviews for The Game Chair, my schedule is pretty full.

I'm nervous. I hope I do okay. I hope it works out.