Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Blog updates

I've made some changes to the design, look and feel of the blog. I've got a new logo, a new tagline, and I've played around a bit with what tools or "gadgets" I'm using. At first, I added more gadgets, but decided in the end that I wanted a more stripped down, Spartan, and clean look; I'm no longer showing followers, popular posts, and a number of other gadgets. On the other hand, I added the famous first paragraph from Lovecraft's "Call of Cthulhu" because it's just such a great quote; probably the best paragraph Lovecraft ever wrote, and certainly that story's greatest claim to fame (well, other than the introduction of Cthulhu himself, of course.) And I added those nifty Cthulhu runes at the very bottom of the blog too.

Why am I doing this? Part of it is to refocus the blog a bit. A while ago I split off my musing and ramblings about martial arts fighting video games, paleontology, and synthpop music, but I still feel like this blog is a bit rambly and occasionally lacking in focus. I want to refocus it more on the development of my setting, both with my long-lingering fiction endeavors (one of these days, I will finish that novel!) and as a gaming venue. I'll continue to also write book reviews of what I read (mostly gaming books and "genre" books, but occasionally some mainstream books too, if I think that there's some value to gamers in general. I'm going to not post as many "random" posts as I used to (not that I posted a lot) and will finish up my Dungeoncraft series, and otherwise focus much more on those kinds of posts, along with the new Yog-Sothothery tag; in general, I want to be creating more content and a bit less commentary. Change the balance a bit, so to speak. Today my balance is probably about 95%+ commentary and less than 5% content; I'd like to migrate that eventually to something closer to 50%/50%.

Now, although I've removed my tagline of "Most opinionated guy on the Internet" I don't think that I've become any less opinionated; it's just that that tagline is a more generic one and I want to have one that's more related to the focus of the blog, and the focus of my gaming and fantasy tastes in general.

4 comments:

Pontifex said...

Looks good.

You look a little freaky in the rain. I liked the old pic better.

Desdichado said...

Heh. Thanks. Yeah, the old picture was better. But I was tired of it and ready for a change.

I'm actually standing in the middle of Manoa Falls waterfall on O'ahu. Although it might have rained briefly on that hike.

Shane Mangus said...

I like the new header. The font is very cool. I look forward to the new direction, and am hoping we can build some kind of synergy between our blogs.

Desdichado said...

Thanks. That does sound cool. I've definitely been keeping track of what you're posting, and it has, in part, inspired me to keep a tighter focus.

Still monkeying with slightly more readical changes to the look and feel, but I don't want to get too distracted by working on that, when I've got ideas of stuff that need to get posted.