Projects that Keep Spinning, and Spinning, and Spinning

One of the things you learn when you're climbing into a closet with a pretty girl for the first time is that you have to prioritize your time so that you're not just fumbling your way through a stuttering conversation with fidgety hands and wasted time. You got to remember that she raced you into the closest and with that smile that made your knees go weak

Priorities, kids.

Projects Currently in Works

Americas Campaign: Currently bogged down in map hell so I'm going to skip the map for a bit and do some additional work on setting up the campaign that should see the light of day soon.

Artisan Toolkits: Currently working on the Cartography kit but got a bit distracted by the Royal Geographer's Society. The article should be up by Wednesday-ish.

Great Blog Roll Call 2015: Working on the banner, cover plate, and button. Also working on a list for a side portion that I'm hoping to launch with the GBRC this year. Too much to do here.

Let's Forget the World & Be Friends: Well into the planning stages for a June release. +Jens D. of The Disoriented Ranger, +Sean Bircher of Wine and Savages, and +Stelios V. Perdios of The Word of Stelios are all back for this project and we've also added +Alasdair Cunningham of Iron Rations, +Travis Milam of The Rambling Roleplayer, +Mark Van Vlack of Dust_Pan_Games, and +Mike Bridges of Greyhawkery!

[EDIT 3/30/2015 3:56 PM] AND we just added +Kevin Smith of Melvin Smif's Geekery! This is looking like a really great series!

I got to tell you that one of the best things about doing projects like Dungeons & Drunkards and now Let's Forget the World & Be Friends is that you end up working with a lot of creative people that you really like. The first project was with three guys that I love reading and I was really lucky that they decided to come along with me for the ride. And watching them talk about what they wanted to do, and then seeing it take shape was really fascinating. The new group has doubled our project group size and so far it's really going well as these guys are coming up with good ideas and I can't wait to show everyone what we're working on! 

More later.

Abandoned Blogs

Working on the Great Blog Roll Call this year has lead me to change a definition on the list in a big way. Previously I had always determined that a blog was considered abandoned after it had been left without an update for two full years (730 days). I think that's too long to keep a blog in my active list for reading or for the active list of blogs that update regularly (or even semi-regularly). So I'm moving any blog that hasn't updated in the last 365 days into the abandoned blog list. I'm not sure how much of a negative impact this will have on the overall list, but I would rather have the list be something that people can use effectively than have it filled with a hundred or so blogs that the authors don't even cares about enough to update on a regular basis. 

Once a blog has been moved onto this list it will be out of contention for the Weekly Best Reads column, the Monthly Best Reads column, or the Yearly Best Reads Column. It will be checked once for the following year's Great Blog Roll Call and if it has not been updated it will not be checked again until the following year. 

Reading, and Writing, and Building.

Source.

Working on the Great Blog Roll Call (GBRC) 2015 can be a bit overwhelming at times. The first GBRC only had 278 blogs included once everything was said and done. The 2014 GBRC had and additional 87 blogs for 365. The current GBRC 2015 has broken the 400 mark and I'm only on the Ls - which isn't to say that I've got everyone's blog descriptions updated as I'm only in the As for the updates. That sounds weird considering that I'm further on the list and yet not. Let me put this a different way. In order to make the GBRC 2015 accurate I have to develop a thorough understanding of each blog so that everything doesn't read like a repetition (something that I think tends to happen with all the news blogs that get added after the list initially posts each year). So I try to read between three and six months worth of posts on each blog. To put that into perspective for the month of January I read over 2,000 blog posts just to do the Best Reads of the Week series and that didn't have all the blogs I'm adding to the GBRC 2015 involved. 

Moving on. This year I'm trying a few different things to make the list better than last years. First I'm adding an Abandoned and Retired Blogs section that will feature all the blogs that you can still find but are no longer maintained. I'm not sure how much of an impact this will have on the GBRC 2015's final number of active blogs but having a substantial number of blogs that never update on the list feels like I'm just padding the number rather than actively tending to the list. Hopefully this will make it easier for people to prune their lists. 

I'm building a list of all the blog authors who use Google+ and will be creating a post with that contact information. This way if you're looking for people who are writing blog post you can curate your Google circles to include all your favorite authors in one place. I'll also be including authors on the GBRC 2015 with each post to further ground the blogs with actual people. It seems like the more that happens the better relationships that we're all able to build with each other.

Council of Geronimo and Soldiers

I'll also be adding new descriptions to nearly every blog that will be reflective of their 2014 focus and output. My idea is to make each entry as helpful as is humanly possible so that people coming on the list won't stumble into blogs that are completely against what they're looking for. After all if you're looking for a blog that has lots of really well done fluff pieces you're not going to want to pick up a design blog that focuses exclusively on the crunch of mechanical rules. Which brings me to the poll you'll find in the upper right hand side of the screen. I've put a bunch of things that I'm willing to do for this year's GBRC but I kind of wanted to see what you cats wanted. 

Another thing I need to do is develop a new banner and button to use for people to link back to the list. That may be a bit of a bear as I'm not real sure how to do it but I'll figure it out, I think . . . Anyway if you'd like to be included in the GBRC 2015 shoot me an e-mail with the title, "Please add my blog to the Great Blog Roll Call 2015," add I'll put you on! Oh, and before I go, I wanted to thank everyone who has been reading me, sharing my posts, dropping plus ones, and clicking on the ads (every little bit helps). I really appreciate you guys!

Working on the Blog.

I was looking through the blog this afternoon trying to figure out if there were ways to help make it easier to navigate. Long time readers, I'm sure, will recognize this as a sure sign that I'm knee deep in the Great Blog Roll Call slog as every year I do this seems to be coupled with posts like this. It's such a weird thing because I know that there aren't a lot of people out there combing through my archives (though apparently someone is sharing a lot of my stuff on facebook lately, so thank you for that). All the same I know from having read through so many blogs that if I really want to give people the opportunity to do so that I have to make things easy for them. 

Like if you want them to go through your archive you have to make it something they can actually find and use in a meaningful way. That's basic sense right there. But if you want them to be able to find your posts when they start searching on Google then you have to do other things. Accurate titles that reflect the content within is a good one - and I'm not fucking doing that one because it bores the hell out of me - although I am trying to fix the series so that it's easier to spot them by linking their titles with a button at the front. 

Then there are the labels that I'm using on the posts. I know from having read a bunch of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) reports that this is on the low end of the spectrum for drawing new traffic to the blog. With those labels I'm not so much worried about drawing new traffic as much as I am at making it easier for people to find things that they actually want to read. Don't get me wrong; using pages like BEST READS OF THE WEEK and SHORT STORIES AND UNFINISHED TALES makes things easier, but those don't help when people run across me absent mindedly working on my problems with Time or the Americas Campaign that I'm working on. So for me the labels are something that I decidedly need to do better on. 

I also need to update and release the the FRIDAY ART FEST page so that it reflects all of the artists that have been featured on the blog and which works that I've shown. By far this is the least popular series on the blog as most people don't really give a shit about it, but I like it so I keep doing it.

Fuck, I also need to finish this week's BEST READS OF THE WEEK before Wednesday when I want to have it published. I may be late on it though. A lot of people updating and I've added 35 more blogs to the list so far. Which reminds me, I'll be posting a poll later in the week about the type of descriptions that I'll be using for the GBRC 2015. Look for that sometime in the Tuesday to Thursday range. 

Other than that, how's you're weekend going kids?