Monday, January 30, 2006

BGIA's are up

A broad range of picks, although not much in the way of war gaming, to my disappointment. Next year we may split the categories into Euro/Wargaming to facilitate this, or perhaps just promote the awards to more war gaming sites.

While most of the awards make sense to me, a few I feel are a little odd; I won't say which ones, because I don't want to reveal who voted for whom.

For me, the hard part wasn't picking my votes but preparing the final posting. Blogger has four views of a post:

Edit HTML, which is what I usually work in.

Compose, which is supposed to be a featured composer, with WYSIWYG formatting, only the formatting still isn't the same as the real post.

Preview, which is supposed to mirror the real post, but it doesn't, because it doesn't apply any of your css.

The real post, with full css.

None of these look remotely the same. That's fine if you're dealing with text, or a single image. But when you're dealing with multiple images, and aligning text around them, it is a nightmare.

My initial formatting had a nice alternating series of images on the left and right, with paragraphs flowing around them. Unfortunately, each of the three preparatory views looked different. When I fixed it for one view, it broke the other views. Fearing a huge mess as the end result, I opted for the linear look you see in its final form. There may be too much whitespace, but it's better than strange breaks between paragraphs, links askew, and overlapping pictures.

I need some real blogging software. Maybe it's time to download Wordpress or something. What's free and easy?

Anyhoo, I hope the game world is broadened and enriched by this experiment and I look forward to being part of it again next year. Expect some changes. As I always say duing someone's first game: the first play is a learning experience.

Yehuda

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