19th August 2012: I finally have a blog header I am proud of courtesy of Nicole Diacono. She designed the mighty viking hamster image for me. I added the bland text in. My drawing and design skills are lackluster to say the least. Recently I have been thinking about my blog and realizing that I am not always blogging on the things I really want to. This might be caused by the fact that I have an audience now and I find myself wanting to please the readers. It’s not a big readership by any stretch of the imagination, but considering I was not expecting anyone to ever read this, having even a few subscribers and regular commenters is a lot to me. I still don’t think I’ve managed to strike my intended balance between being somber and humorous. In fact I think all my posts are quite serious and lack any humor. I guess I should change the heading to ‘Despite the name there is nothing funny here: Move along’. I have also had a couple of posts which got a heated discussion going. I am learning that when I criticize something which a large chunk the community likes I am bound to get some very strong opinions thrown at me. That’s OK. I can handle that. Just because I am the one writing this blog does not mean my opinion is final. It only means that blog posts are going to reflect what I think, whether I am right or wrong. To anyone who ever took time to post a comment: my sincere thanks.
22nd June 2012: Now that I have a few posts under my belt (reaching 20 posts soon enough), I began to realize what direction the blog is taking. I do not intend to post just for the sake of posting. I reckon two posts a week on average are more than enough. It seems that I gravitate more towards medium sized posts. I cannot describe them as bite sized, but they are far removed from some epic posts I get to read on other blogs. Speaking of which: since starting my blog I realized there are some amazing bloggers out there. I feel I can never aspire to get even close to their writing standards. I do not speak English natively and never studied it past ordinary level. I never studied writing or journalism. My job has zero relevance to writing articles and its not in any way gaming related. I have resigned myself with the inevitability that there will be grammatical mistakes in all the posts I make, but as long as I am satisfied with what I write I’m ok with that.
12th June 2012: Got my first spam comment today subtly advertising a GW2 beta key selling site. On one hand it might be indicative that the blog is slightly more popular than when I started although spam is not something I am too happy with. On a side note: the blog has been going for a month, which is a milestone for me. My other blogs did not get past the first/second post. Still struggling with post titles. I usually value clever over informative. I wish I could put a subtitle to each post but I have not found out how yet without installing a widget or whatever.
2nd June 2012: I often found myself wanting to post ideas about the blog and refrained from doing so. Having a blog post about my the blog feels so meta! For this reason I decided to make a separate page reflecting on some philosophies behind the blog, sharing reasons for any changes I make and giving details regarding my plans going forward. Just more of me talking loudly to myself then. I think of this as my blog’s patch notes. I have been thinking about the homepage layout and the best way to go about it for quite some time now. Initially, when I had just a couple of short posts, it seemed like a good idea to have all posts appear in their entirety on the home page. Now that I have more blog posts (some of them are quite lengthy) my initial decision seems a bit silly. Because of this I decided to truncate the long posts with the ‘Insert More’ tag. I have my reservations about retrofitting this ‘feature’ now. I understand that the first paragraph, the one visible to others before the tag, should give a good idea of what the article is about and I do not think this is the case with my current posts. I will start keeping this in mind from now on.
Smart move! I sometimes want to write about my own blog development as well, but am also afraid I’ll bore people to death. This seems like a good solution.
About your home page: I think it looks really good. I usually get annoyed when I need to ‘click through’ to get to posts, but in your case it looks very inviting!
Thanks for the feedback