During my time off, I have been devoting a fair amount of my time and energy to rescuing my old blog content – a couple of years ago, I had an incident with my hosting that resulted in me needing to start over with a clean state, which put about 8 years of content in limbo. I’ve spent the last few weeks in my spare time rescuing that content from purgatory. Of particular note:
- Rescued old blog content. Went back to old content back to 2002, and imported most of that old content into the new WordPress build. Fixed a lot of links that went bad (many remain unfixed). For blog posts that had lively comments threads, I added a link to the old post on archive.org to that comment thread.
- Updated breaking in page. In particular, it seemed pertinent to warn people to not do stupid shit in their social media accounts, such as join in virtual lynch mobs of female developers in the name of ethics in games journalism.
- Added a presentations and talks page. This includes PDFs and PPTs for every talk that I’ve given for a publicly accessible games conference I’ve ever done.
- Added a published articles page. I wrote for Game Developer magazine for 5 years – that magazine has been shut down. However, I put up drafts of my old articles as blog posts so they could be easily accessed.
- Added an MMDQ page. I used to have posts that were devoted to getting the community to share ideas about various game design topics, especially MMO design topics. This page links to the archive.org pages of these posts so you can read the community threads.
- Added a zen lexicon page. This is a page of commonly used terms and concepts on this blog. It’s actually a pretty good place for newcomers to start.
All of this brings the blog to a state of completeness that it hasn’t been at for quite some time, and now my relative OCD can rest in peace for a while. In related news, I’m never letting my hosting lapse again.
Thanks for putting in the effort. I was sad when it went away; I tried to send you an RSS dump but it looks like you had better options. In particular, I’ll miss some of the comments.
I wonder how much of the value of the internet, is actually in the comments? I’d imagine a lot. But, buried in a general trend of bad comments outside of small communities. Has anyone tackled the problem of searching for useful but initially unknown conversations?
Thanks for taking the time to reformat the old blog content and additional material. Plenty of browsing to go over during the festive season while I digest vast quantities of turkey and cake. Hope you have a good holiday an d all the best for th e New year 🙂