Traveller-oriented or specific blogs?

[zacharythefirst]

I'm working on a webpage for my own modest homebrew contributions to Trav, and one of the options I have is creating and maintaining a blog. Now, my thought is, I'd like to have a blog for cool Traveller news, reviews, updates, articles of interest, new pinpointed source material, and the like.

I know it'd wouldn't hurt anything to do it, but would a decently-updated and maintained Traveller blog honestly be of interest to anyone? I'm not interested in a huge readership, I'd just like to know that there'd possibly be someone out there checking into it at some point or another...and I would welcome your honest feedback on the matter.

 

[hunter]

Actually blogs are one of the things I hope to be adding here to the site shortly.

Hunter

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Ummm, don't we already have the same mechanism in these forums? A blog is just a very lonely forum, really. And, if you open it to comments, it turns into a forum where only the blogger has the right to post main articles.

Also, how often (not counting right now, with all the CotI changes) do we really get news about Traveller? Even the newest Traveller - T5 - is taking a couple of years to get done. And, the public announcements on that could be a one page thread here.

Now, if you wanted to blog a campaign, or something, that might work. (It depends on how well y'all game, and how well you write.) But, again, you can always do that in a forum thread....

 

[zacharythefirst]

Ummm, don't we already have the same mechanism in these forums? A blog is just a very lonely forum, really. And, if you open it to comments, it turns into a forum where only the blogger has the right to post main articles.

Also, how often (not counting right now, with all the CotI changes) do we really get news about Traveller? Even the newest Traveller - T5 - is taking a couple of years to get done. And, the public announcements on that could be a one page thread here.

Now, if you wanted to blog a campaign, or something, that might work. (It depends on how well y'all game, and how well you write.) But, again, you can always do that in a forum thread....

Excellent points all. I'm not saying it'd be an everyday update by any means, but I also likely would be doing Actual Play recaps as well. And I know when I used to run RPG Blog, there's definitely a ring of folks who use a feed to read different blogs. I know there are definitely some Traveller fans out there who don't frequent any of the big Trav forms, but still love reading about Trav coolness. But we'll see, I guess--thank you for the open feedback, in any case!


Hunter, blogs on-site sound great! Hope that's something you're able to do!

 

[Fritz_Brown]

Like I said, a blog of a campaign would be good. But, as much as I read blogs, I think it would be redundant here.

 

[zacharythefirst]

Like I said, a blog of a campaign would be good. But, as much as I read blogs, I think it would be redundant here.

Again, thanks for the info! I definitely know I want to do a campaign blog--I guess I'll see on the other stuff--if nothing else, it might prove a vent for rantings no one else wants to hear.

 

[kafka47]

Ladies & Gentlemen, my website is a blog of the adventure that we run here on the CofI. Until, we get the Printer Screen functionality that we had with the previous forum software, it is the best way of reading that. Furthermore, it has collection of Traveller related items on it.

 

[hunter]

Ladies & Gentlemen, my website is a blog of the adventure that we run here on the CofI. Until, we get the Printer Screen functionality that we had with the previous forum software, it is the best way of reading that. Furthermore, it has collection of Traveller related items on it.

Thread Tools -> Show Printable Version


Hunter

 

[Darkhstarr]

My wife & I once thought above doing a blog much like TAS news journals except from a nonImperium point of view. Except we are barely computer literate & that's a lot of work updating.

 

[hunter]

I'll have Blogs available for Moot subscribers here shortly. I have a test Blog up right now. Please make some comments on it so I can be sure all is working properly. Once I know it's in good shape I'll make them available to Moot members.

Blogs are here: http://www.TravellerRPG.com/CotI/Blogs



Hunter

 

[Berg]

Nice feature for subscribers...

If I had one, I'd probably do it for GRiP... would that be off topic (Non-Trav)?

 

[zacharythefirst]

Yeah, that definitely looks like a fun board feature! I wonder how much it'd be used? I can think of a couple of posters I'd definitely be interested in seeing in a regular or semi-regular column...

 

[hunter]

Nice feature for subscribers...

If I had one, I'd probably do it for GRiP... would that be off topic (Non-Trav)?

GRiP would be ok. Probably wouldn't care about other RPGs either. Only thing is there is only one Blog per membership. So choose carefully when I make them available


Hunter

 

[whartung]

My wife & I once thought above doing a blog much like TAS news journals except from a nonImperium point of view. Except we are barely computer literate & that's a lot of work updating.

The modern blogging services are essentially trivial to use.

If you can post to this forum, you can start a blog.

The technology is easy, it's the content that's the trick.

 

[Fritz_Brown]

The technology is easy, it's the content that's the trick.

Well, yeah, that's the problem. Though a blog would have been "nice" when Hunter was going through his travails - we would have been better able to pray for/commiserate/patiently wait, knowing what was going on. That's assuming Hunter would have been able to post at all....

 

[Darkhstarr]

Indeed. Content on my website very fragmentary since most of my game notes are scattered on scrap paper, post-it notes all over the house. Especially since much of the timeline(post-5th Frontier War, pre-5th Frontier back to post-5th Frontier War) shifted back & forth. I currently found enought notes to attempt to bring some coherency(and eliminate contradictions) to the site. Doing the same with a blog might be beyond my atrophied conversation skills.

The modern blogging services are essentially trivial to use.

If you can post to this forum, you can start a blog.

The technology is easy, it's the content that's the trick.

 

[hunter]

Well coincidentally enough Blogs are now available for all Moot subscribers.

 

[whartung]

Indeed. Content on my website very fragmentary since most of my game notes are scattered on scrap paper, post-it notes all over the house. Especially since much of the timeline(post-5th Frontier War, pre-5th Frontier back to post-5th Frontier War) shifted back & forth. I currently found enought notes to attempt to bring some coherency(and eliminate contradictions) to the site. Doing the same with a blog might be beyond my atrophied conversation skills.

Actually, lots of folks use Blogs for Works in Progress that they don't mind sharing.

Simple example is your stash of post-it notes and scrap papers.

If you plan on ever transcribing them into a digital form, then you could easily use blogging software as a crude free form database.

Many blogs have categories or tags, and most have searching. So, when you find a scrap of paper, lets say something from the pre-FFW, you could fire up the blog, type in your entry, and assign it some tags or categories.

The blog becomes a running log, and its stores all of your data. As a side benefit, you can promote your blog to others for flaming^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hkibitzing and new ideas. Or, don't promote the blog, and just use it as a tool.

But what's nice is that someone interested in pre-FFW stuff can simply click on the pre-FFW category, and voila! There it all is in glaring 14pt Times Roman.

Make sure that you can easily download the data, ideally in some structured format [XML, most likely] en masse.

There are no doubt other, perhaps even better, pieces of software out there for this task, but I doubt many are as easy to get started with than modern blog systems. Plus, most are free.

So, the point is, don't worry so much about the coherency. Rather come up with a decent categorization scheme, and then let the data self organize rather than simmer in a stew pot hoping that it will all some how make sense on its own.