Month: August 2015

Breaking the Format

by

A Time for A Change

A few days ago I made the above statement on twitter, because I had reached a point where I was finally frustrated with my original blog theme.  For the last several years I have structured my posts in a way as such to hide the faults of my theme.  For example the whole “heading” construct that I use is largely to keep any images I post from overflowing and acting wonky.  I’ve used the same theme since 2008 and over those years I grafted new appendages onto it like an undead juggernaut until it reached the point where it was simply having trouble staying upright.  My theme believe it or not was originally a super limited World of Warcraft theme, that I have revitalized time and time again trying to keep it current.  When I first started my blog for example, there was no menu editor in WordPress, and the theme was originally designed to have someone actually go into the php pages and edit navigation items.  I hacked in basic nav support, but I have finally decided to get off my ass and apply some structure to the way things are laid out.  After spending an hour and a half the other night reclassifying posts… I came to the sad realization that my theme didn’t actually have suckerfish style menu support and every bit of effort I had just done was essentially in vain.

So quite literally I did nuke my old theme from orbit and replaced it with a brand new one.  For awhile I had considered building my own and I have downloaded Underscores more than a few times to get started on that.  However the end product never really makes me happy, and it always ends up feeling extremely spartan.  So while I COULD build my own theme… I decided not to.  Instead I decided to go with the extremely flexible GeneratePress.  The freebie version has a lot of features, but I ultimately wanted some of the things that their paid addon gives you, and after doing some of this myself for years… that $30 seems like a steal.  Ultimately to have a theme that I can simply patch each time a new version of WordPress comes out and adds more toys to my disposal is worth twice that amount of money to me personally.  Last night I rebuilt the logo from scratch and pestered the hell out of one or two friends as I tweaked this font size or that amount of spacing.  I think I am mostly done for the time being, but I am sure I will be tweaking things over the coming weeks.  I am curious to know what people think, so drop me a line and let me know.

Breaking the Format

Another thing about my blog that frustrates me, is that I have a clearly defined format that I always seem to follow.  In large part every post has three headings, three images, and six paragraphs.  In that format I usually introduce three completely different subjects as I hop around through what I have been doing.  For awhile I have referred to this at least privately as my “swiss army post”, that is everything to everyone and reliable.  I absolutely do not mind reliable, because in truth every single day I have a conversation with my readers… albeit a generally one sided one.  I share lots of details of my life, and my gaming… and that part is awesome.  The problem is that every single day feels formulaic, and I am hoping to begin to change that a bit.  As I was sorting my posts I noticed that I have this way of starting down a path only to quit after a few weeks.  There were so many “series” that I started down and never got very far…  remember Easing Into Eorzea? or Forum Fodder Friday? or even the more recent Storytime Saturday?  All of these are prime examples of why the daily posting routine has become so important to me.  I know that once I get disconnected from my routine… I never really return to it.

Ultimately what I want to do is allow myself to post more spontaneously.  When I make more than one post in a day… it feels like I am stealing material from what could be the next mornings post.  So I hold off on doing it… and then a backlog of ideas happens… and I feel are no longer relevant because I did not post them “in the moment”.  While I started Blaugust as this festival of routine and regularity… I think personally I am going to use it to mix things up a bit.  I already nuked my theme from orbit… maybe it is time for me to nuke my format as well.  Once again I would love to hear some feedback from my readers since I am basically going to be doing some renovations to what you have come to know about this blog.  I am sure I will still create swiss army posts in the future, because at this point I can knock them out while I am sleeping…  literally most mornings I don’t remember writing a post.  However I also want to play with the format a bit and try and find room for smaller and more focused posts.  One of my key problems with advertising my posts on Anook for example, has been that rarely are they actually devoted to a single game.  This also was a huge problem when it came to trying to categorize my posts.. because you might click through to my World of Warcraft posts to find half of them only mention the game in passing.  Essentially I want my Tales of the Aggronaut to be better than it actually is, and I am hoping you are all willing to struggle with me on this new journey.

 

On Revenge

by

Blaugust Post #7

I still don’t take enough screenshots.

FF14 recently added an option where you can go into dungeons as an “undersized party” which is the only way to enter with fewer than the required number of people, and also skips the level sync portion. In all honesty I’m not sure what the intent is, but we’ve used it for two things: Entering level 50 raids at 60 and soloing old content.

Into Darkness

Before I even properly leveled anything, one of the first things I did was go into Dzemael Darkhold on my warrior (at 50) and see if I could solo the thing. DD is a level 44 dungeon, and at the time I needed a relic drop from there and was quite tired of running it at the proper level.Turns out that except for the final boss, not only is it possible, it’s easy. The final boss is also possible, but considerably less easy. I always liked doing similar things in WoW, so I think this got me hooked on trying to solo things here.

On Revenge

Further Endeavors

Fast Forward about a month, and I have a level 60 Paladin, ready to try my hand at some tougher content. Still needing Relic drops, I decided to start with Amdapor Keep, one of the “starting” level 50 dungeons. This took a bit more doing than Dzemael Darkhold, especially because the final boss has a healing debuff. I’ve been working my way down the list since then. I haven’t had any success with Copperbell (Can’t keep up DPS on the boss and do mechanics), or Lost City (The first boss just eats you, which is fatal with no party members). I did manage to solo Wanderer’s Palace and Halatali. I still have quite a few to go, so we’ll see where the brick wall is. I suspect that if I run into issues as a tank, I could always come back as one of the Arcanist classes once I get to 60.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

by

Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.

Fridays Are For… Yelp?

by

Friday has become a weird blogging day for me lately. My habit is generally to write out a post the night before, as the last thing I do before going to bed. Having tried writing posts at different times of day, however, I’ve noticed that the thoughts I have and the kinds of things I write about are very different depending on when I write the post.

icon320x320

As part of this, I started working on trying to seed in posts at different times, so that I’m putting a post up every day, but not always at the exact same time every day (and, more importantly, not writing them at the same time every day). Given that I’ve missed a few Fridays because Friday apparently is a busy-ish day for me most weeks, this hasn’t worked out so well.

On the other hand, writing at 2:30pm rather than 1am means that my mind is on different things. Right now I’m thinking about how difficult it is to find trustworthy reviews of places. I need to get my oil changed, and according to yelp there are about 40 places within a reasonable distance I could go to do this. Yelp reviews have fallen into the problem of public reviews in general– pretty much no one ever gives something an accurate number of stars– it either gets 5 stars (if it was a good experience) or 0/1 (if it wasn’t), and figuring out what kind of place I’m going to based on a bunch of random people’s one-sided reports isn’t terribly useful now that everyone uses Yelp.

STAR-3.5-2

The same is true of apartment hunting, restaurants, glassdoor company reviews… everything. Everything is three to three-and-a-half stars, and often reading into a particularly bad review suggests that the fault miiiiiight not lie with the company in question, although sometimes it does.

What I’ve been mulling over is the idea of a yelp-style concept that plugs into existing social media (yelp may already do this, but it’s poorly advertised), so that what you get is your friends’ and acquaintances’ reviews of things. I feel like, properly done, it would drive more casual and more helpful reviews while also encouraging people to both review more often and at a higher quality. Instead of a star system, it could just say “friends have posted from this location X times in the last Y days” and show you what they’ve had to say over time (and you’re more likely to actually care, because it’s your friends).

Food for thought. Time to make some key lime pie.



Source: Digital Initiative
Fridays Are For… Yelp?