Telecanter's Receding Rules: Blogging

Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Milestones

Last Saturday was four years of blogging for me. I just posted my 50th silhouette post. I even managed to reach Pundit level. But there is another milestone coming up. This post is my 973rd. That means, at a rate of a post about every other day, I'll be at 1000 in 2 months.

I know there are folks that have more posts than that or have been around for longer, but for me and my personality it feels like a big achievement.

I've had an idea for a while now that I would make some sort of publication on my 1000th post. I figured I would let you know rather than just spring it out of nowhere (though I hate even announcing it because I can feel the fear welling up inside and the desire to procrastinate this off to some other unspecified time).

I love the blogs as an ongoing conversation and don't like the idea that to be a part of our hobby seriously you have to publish something. That being said, there is a time for looking over all the conversations you've had and trying to build something from the whole. A second level of making. And with 1000 posts I think there should be plenty of meat here to make something larger than a sum of the separate posts that make it up. So, that's what I'm aiming for.

The idea is a book to help DMs get a game going on a Friday night. Tools basically. And probably aimed more at the newer DM (experienced folks have probably already crafted similar tools out of necessity). My current plan is to put it up on Lulu as a free download and a hardcover at cost. Maybe someday I can revise this and get some awesome art and charge for it, but for now I just want to get a solid draft out the door.

There are still a few tools I don't have worked out yet. I hope to address them in the coming months. But whatever the results, I'm putting a book out on the 1000th post. No excuses. I suppose I might start trying to dodge the bullet by delaying posting, but I have to get this done by mid August because that is when my work ramps up again and I'll be out of time.

I feel odd to announce this when everyone is talking about Jack Vance's passing, but what better way to commemorate him, and Harryhausen, by making something fantastic?

Okay, wish me luck.

Wednesday, March 27, 2013

Bloggy Weirdness

Not an important post. Just wondering if anyone has similar experiences.

Spam Comments
Last few weeks I've been getting 4-8 spam comments a day. They seem to be randomly assigned to posts throughout my blog history to try and escape my notice. Because I have the option set that I need to approve any comment older than a week I've been able to catch and burn these. I've had full-free anonymous posting open for, like, months, so it isn't that. I guess I just ended up on a list somewhere?

Don't worry about censorship, I'd never delete even a trollish comment, these are an easy species to detect because they usually have innocuous text that could apply to any blog and then a link to some scummy website for fat burning or sex toys.

Ghost Traffic
In the same time period (I wonder if it is related somehow to the spam) I've received a couple big waves of traffic that I have no clue as to the origin. I've never fooled with Google Analytics or anything, just look at the Stats page in Blogger to see what folks are reading. That way I know if someone has posted a link to Reddit or StumbleUpon. In these cases Blogger would tell me I was getting 400 hits in a day on a three-year-old post but not the origin of those hits. The most recent was for my Beasts of Burden look at encumbrance.

I was wondering if it might be someone sharing a link on G+ and it is hidden in traffic coming from Google (I get a bunch from there already from people looking for silhouettes in image search). But I don't think even all the links from Google on those days adds up to the traffic it's showing. Weird. Either it's telling me I'm getting hits I'm not getting or I'm getting hits and somehow it isn't recording their source.

This isn't a big deal, but knowing who is in your audience and what they are most interested in is useful information.

Unlikes
Can you unlike something? I've never tried. I suppose it would make sense in case you accidentally clicked Like on something you didn't. But my last post, which has the most Likes I've ever got, suddenly dropped by 6. Why would people like something and then change their mind? Weird. Oh well, back to making stuff.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

West Coast Bloggers

I mentioned I might make a list based on your feedback here, so here it is:

Tuesday, March 6, 2012

More Indexing

I've been slowly trying to revise and add to my blog index during boring stretches at work. If you haven't looked in a while you should check out the printable stuff and random charts.

Makes me remember projects I would like to return to. I think I have a one page disease chart more than half done somewhere on my computer at home.

Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Index II

I added a section to the monster index I'm calling "concepts." I figured the names of monsters don't often tell you much, what you as a DM probably want is the spark of the idea. So I tried to reduce each of my creatures to a sentence. Is this useful for you? My plan for now is to try the same thing for the magic items.

The distillation works better for some monsters than others. It also looks a little busy. If you have any suggestions on making it easier to read or more useful I'd appreciate them.

Also I found two other creatures I completely missed.

Index Page Added

I'm kinda burnt but want to keep posting momentum, so I thought I'd finally do something long overdue, an index of my blog content. I've had a lot of ideas but they're scattered through years of blogging, at the end of unrelated posts, and often have odd names that make they hard to find and identify. So, an index. Some of the ideas are better than others, some I've gotten more experience through play, but revision is for later in a compilation pdf. This is just a way to find all the original ideas in their flawed forms.

I plan to add at least two other sections, one for DM aids and one for Design ruminations.

I don't like the way adding one static page makes a whole tab bar across the blog, but I figure a link in the sidebar would be easily missed. And maybe I could add other static pages. Ideas?

I turned off comments to try and keep the index more indexy. I'm hoping if people find something new they want to talk about they'll comment on the original post. I have old comments requiring moderation so I'll see all of them.

Friday, December 16, 2011

Blog Archiving

A quick question. As far as I know the export blog feature on Blogger just saves the text and links to the pics, right? It must, because my xml file is only 10megs. Are there any good tools you know of that will archive posts pics and all? Maybe even slurp down linked files?

Here's a little silo for your time:

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

A Surfeit of OSR

Oh my, there are just too many interesting ideas lately. I'm having trouble absorbing them all. Heck, a lot of times I'll read something intriguing, post a comment, and then forget where I posted the comment because there are too many freaking good blogs.

I want to just go up to the mountains and digest it all for a bit, but I can't yet. I thought I was going to do that when I was housesitting last week, but alas I have a smart phone and I was reading your blogs anyway, just on a smaller screen.

Here, I'll volley a few ideas back at you all. Sometimes I worry people are thinking "what the heck do all these silhouettes have to do with D&D?"

I showed one possible use of them to try and clarify the transmission of information. Here are two more possibilities:

Towards a Heist Map

The Knights of the Order of the Holy Rood take all heretics that worship St Cecily back to the church that legend says she was burned to death in. Your players want to save one of these heretics. She will be held there a week to pray and reflect on her sins, then burned at the stake. Your players have watched from afar. They know where the guards tend to be.

Towards a Wilderness Map with Iconic Monsters

This springs off of Roger's cool work here. This is nothing new, war games had those little, iconic chits long ago, just a matter of finding unencumbered and iconic images that everyone in the community can use. Imagine if Hexographer let you plop these down. (I cut out too much of Roger's info, but if we made the hexes a little larger I think we could add some back while keeping it clean.)

Okay, everyone stop blogging for a while, you're going to melt down my brain. :)

Thursday, September 16, 2010

Blog Issues

Looks like my blog is not updating in peoples' blog rolls. I have no idea why. The only thing I've done differently recently was switch over to the new Blogger post editor. It looks like there may be some issue with the FeedBurner feed. I tried pinging that through their troubleshooting page, no luck.

I'd appreciate it if you could drop a comment if:

you can see my last two posts in your feed reader
you can see this post at all
you have any idea how to fix this issue

Thanks.

Update 9/17: Thought I'd fixed it but apparently not. I'm going to do some experiments but it seems my posts are consistently being delayed by about four hours before showing up in blogrolls.

Saturday, July 10, 2010

Timed Posts

I got invited on a camping trip and so I'll be heading into a different part of the mountains for a few days. I'm going to try to write up some blog posts and time them to publish while I'm far away.

Hopefully it works well. It means I won't be able to respond to your comments until I get back though. Have a great weekend!

p.s., hey to good friend "J" who I just found out has been reading this blog for weeks

Tuesday, July 6, 2010

Mountain D&D

I'm posting from King's Canyon National Park! Up here working on a family cabin. I excited about getting it into shape because I want to invite a bunch of people up here to game and BBQ this month. I'm a little conflicted about taking the hike to the lodge here just to connect to the net, though. Seems kind of wrong somehow, to not just be up here. But, I want to keep my blog rollin'. So on to my next post.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

The Oddness of Blogging & Poetry

I know people have been doing this for years, but this is an entirely new genre for me. I also realise that much of the stuff I'm writing about has probably been hashed out long ago by grognards. So why blog? Well, for one it isn't so much I'm trying to communicate wisdom to you as to synthesise and understand for me. It is writing as discovery.

And why do this in public? This I can't quite articulate, but audience is essential for writing as discovery to happen. I have a long-planned-but-never-written-essay I call "Why Put a Love Poem in a Book?" which is about this very thing, something about audience makes even poems more "true." Because, that if any type of writing should just work privately, but our greatest loves poems were published, were written with larger audiences in mind than just the beloved.

Well, that's for the long-winded house rule posts, I also have a great desire to contribute and belong to a community and that's one of the reasons for the monster posts-- maybe something new that you can use, that will keep you coming back and tolerating the blah blah blah.

Oh, and on your blogs, I don't read them, I obsessively read them. I currently have 59 feeds I check about twice every day.

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