Recently in About the Blog Category

Gameblog turns five this month. Five years! That's almost ancient when it comes to web sites. To celebrate the blog's advanced age, I decided to give it a bit of a makeover - after all, it has looked pretty much the same for the whole five years. Hope you like it, I think it looks a lot more modern than the old look. If you notice something odd going on, missing stuff or so, please let me know.

This new look is courtesy of Movable Type 4, the brand-new version of my favourite blogging platform. The new version is packed with interesting features and free for personal use - if you're looking for a good blogging platform, Movable Type is an excellent choice.

Hooray! Gameblog turns four today! Pretty amazing. Turns out many of my projects have longevity that surpasses what is generally expected from web fads. I suppose Gameblog will be there after next four years (it should get pretty interesting then, as Nooa will be four years old and in a prime age for his gaming education to start).

Feel free to suggest good stuff I've written and should highlight, if there are any.

I installed a new version of Movable Type, which features tags. So, I've started tagging my entries. I think the tags are a good addition: they work a bit like categories, but are a lot more specific and thus can be a lot more useful in some situations.

Clicking the tags will show you all entries tagged with the same tag. That's a not a big list, yet, but I expect to tag all my entries in Autumn, when I'm bored at work... If you click a tag, you'll also notice that you can subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag, so if there's a topic you're particularly interested in - say, TradeResolver - you can grab the feed and get all the new stuff on that topic delivered to you.

I also have a tag cloud (which is the hip thing right now, it seems).

I'm proud to tell you, my dear readers, that Gameblog has won an award! Gone Gaming Board Game Internet Awards jury gave Gameblog the best session report award for my Essen 2005 coverage. That's not all! Gameblog also got an honorable mention for the award of the best game blog (winner was Chris Farrell's blog, so it's indeed honorary to be mentioned by such an excellent blog).

Thanks for those who nominated me, thanks to the jury for choosing me and thanks for all my readers!

By the way, I appreciate the way they chose Gamefest's GameWire as the best board game news service instead of Boardgame News (which won the best new site award anyway). After all, GameWire started the high-quality board game news reporting.

Here's a list of games. Can you guess the order behind this top ten?

1. Go
2. Puerto Rico
3. Carcassonne
4. Die Macher
5. St. Petersburg
6. Age of Steam
7. San Juan
8. Gang of Four
9. Sunda to Sahul
10. Lost Cities

It's a list of games I've mentioned most often in this blog. Go and Puerto Rico really stand out (mentioned in about 70 entries), others are between 30 and 20 entries. The titles are links to the lists of entries where the games are mentioned.

You can find this information from the sidebar from now on: List of games I've mentioned

After meddling with the colours and the looks at Lautapelaaja.net, I kind of realised this blog looks pretty boring. I mean, just one colour and black and white. More colours! EasyRGB Color harmonies tool gave me some blues and purples and I ended up with this. How do you like the new style?

This blog has been categorized in a terrible way. The division between Less about games and More about games is idiotic. No librarian can be proud of a classification like that, no way. Thus, it's time to re-work the categories. Sorry for the trouble! I'm going through my archives, throwing stuff from one bin to another. As a result, the categories should make a lot more sense. When there are over 200 entries in a category, it's usually a good idea to see if it can be split into more manageable parts.

I'm now running Movable Type 3.121 here. Major changes include new, smarter URLs for entries (old files remain, so links are not entirely broken) and new commenting system. I now support TypeKey, which is a global registration service. If you register with TypeKey, you can use that id to comment in several blogs. In Gameblog, comments from non-TypeKey users are welcome, but moderated.

This is a minor annoyance, but I'm not doing it just for fun - the comment spam problem is intolerable and this is a full stop for all that nonsense. Signing up for TypeKey shouldn't be too complicated and if you're an active reader of blogs, chances are you can use the id somewhere else as well. Of course, signing up isn't mandatory - you can always post anonymously, it'll just take a while for your comment to appear.

Movable Type 3 isn't the most popular option, thanks to the new pricing scheme, but I think it's well worth the $70 I had to shell for it. There just aren't any good alternatives to Movable Type. WordPress is popular, but doesn't work for me because it only supports one blog per each installment. I don't want to have half a dozen installments, I want one entry point to all my blogs and for all my bloggers. Nothing else does it, as far as I know, except Movable Type.

I thought I'd entertain you with some statistics. This has nothing to do with games, but my blog, so feel free to skip this one. Anyway, I took everything I had written to Gameblog and wrote a program to count it. According to my counts, I've written about 135 000 words before this entry. That's a good novel, really.

My 533 entries average to 259 words each, with a median of 175. 75% of the entries have under 300 or so words. Most of the entries are, thus, quite small, with some very large ones pushing up the average.

In 2002 the entries had an average of 225 words, in 2003 it was 282 words and this year it's been 249 words. Nothing really emerges here, except a very small growing trend when one adds up ten-day averages. Most of my recent entries are on the low side, though, as I've been writing relatively few session reports and more short news items and other minor things (minor relating to the word count, anyway).

Highest peak is Lahti games weekend, Saturday and Sunday with almost 2000 words. Rest of the gaming weekend is another big one, almost 1600 words. There are few others in the 1000-1500 range. There's Helcon, gaming at Tommy's, Lahti weekends... that kind of entries.

I don't know if this is interesting or anything, but I can certainly imagine more boring ways to kill time while waiting for the telephone to ring and the patrons to bother me. Meddling with numbers is entertaining (and this, I suppose, is quite revealing in relation to my taste in games).

Because I have little to write about games, I'll meddle with blog technology. Iain had one, it was cool, I want one: a RSS feed with comments included.