Free Gamer thoughts / plans

Free Gamer thoughts / plans

Postby charlie » 20 Jan 2011, 15:57

So now we are adding pages - good!

Here's some other things I'd really like to do.

An 'articles' page with articles split in to different categories:
* game reviews
* genre reviews
* game development

This would need to be manually managed. The automatic way of managing it is just more trouble than it's worth (I did a lot of investigation into it).

Article summaries. This is possible, and not too difficult either. The advantage is it makes the tags much nicer to work with (you get a list of summaries rather than a giant list of full blog posts). It also is a subtle and non-intrusive way of improving page views. If people want to read the article in more detail, they'll click 'read more'.

Which comes to the slightly trickier, but possible final thought/request.

The front page should be 2 columns. Blog posts* / updates and articles. This can be done with blogger, using tags (i.e. tagging articles with 'article' and posts with 'post') and, combined with the summaries, would be a really great way to highlight** articles and make the content more accessible. The sidebar can be relegated (harsh word) to all other pages (i.e. just not appearing on the front page).

* with this format, we can be more comfortable posting 'game version X' short/simple updates as major articles will be front paged for a lot longer.

** I know we have a list of the last 5 articles in the sidebar. It's inadequate. I want content to target newcomers to the blog, not bullet lists which don't reach the eye that does not inquire into the sidebar.

If we do the above, Free Gamer will win awards.

Oh, and the games list. It's a WIP. I'll get it up soon.
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Re: Free Gamer thoughts / plans

Postby TheAncientGoat » 21 Jan 2011, 10:01

Hmmm... Sounds good; although I'm not quite sure what you mean by genre reviews? What about general articles that don't really fit between Game Reviews / Genre Reviews (e.g the "How to Advertise" post)?

Also, one can arrange a blog as much as you want; post quality in the end is the biggest denominator; I'm rather guilty of it myself, but more standard writing templates and more intensive, critical review is necessary. It would be kind of hard to keep the casual nature of the blog if we really want to shift gear...

I like the idea of having a separate place to post short updates, it really lowers the "post bar", and wouldn't need such rigorous editorial work. I don't think the columns should be equal width, because that could look slightly wierd (at least how I'm envisioning it). Would 140 chars be enough? Doing it via Identi.ca could be pretty cool; even if 140 chars is too little, we could host our own and have as many chars as we want while still being taking advantage of the subscription/redenting/favouriting system that statusnet provides.
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