NbN Posts Blogger Participants List

You can now see the list of participants at the 2008 JBloggers conference here. And NbN's own pictures are here.

Yehuda

More on Game Museums

Games and Fun

While some kind readers have picked up on what I said about games and fun, many people commenting on sites where my article was cited haven't. Either I didn't explained what I mean well enough, or I'm fundamentally wrong, or (likely) they never bothered to read the article.

How else, after my statement that games can be an art medium entirely uninterested in whether people buy the game, whether they want to play the game, whether they are entertained by the game, and whether they enjoy the game, am I supposed to interpret comments such as:

"Well, I wouldn't buy a game that isn't fun."
"A designer who doesn't make fun games isn't going to sell many."
"Even is a game isn't fun, it still has to be entertaining in some way. Otherwise no one will play it."
"If I paid money for a game, it better be fun."
"Fun is subjective; you must mean that the game is fun for someone, but not for everyone."
"But if games aren't fun, they won't be enjoyable!"
"Art and fun aren't mutually exclusive."

Well, I mean ... yeah. So? Did ... did you read what I wrote?

As a result, I'm thinking that I'm just going to have to start the world's first games as interactive art museum. (And I don't mean the world's first games museum, as that would be this one.)

Perhaps it would demonstrate a little better what I meant.

I talked already about what an interactive games art museum would look like. Now a little more brass tacks.

To start the museum, I would want at least two experts in games and art to join me as board members.

First step would be to grab a domain and build a site. I figure it would start with:

- Entry page with doors into the museum.
- Pages organized by theme, by subject, or by artist (or all of the above).
- Each game alone on a page, with information about the artist and the work. Space on each page for commenting about the work.
- About the site, about games as an art medium.
- Sponsorship pages.
- Copyright and terms.
- Technical help and FAQs.

Now comes the question of how to acquire games for the site.

I think the museum should be a non-profit. Donations from patrons should be accepted for overall maintenance and for supporting new artist's work. Donaters receive certain gifts, of course, the least of which is a link and a writeup.

I'm tossing around ideas: Works of art an artist submits are evaluated. If accepted, a new artist is paid SUM for displaying the work on the site. This SUM comes from general donations.

Artists who have a work on the site must get commissioned for additional art by patrons who enjoy the artist's first work. The details of IP must be worked out, but at the very least, the artwork is licensed to be displayed on the site.

So what would a patron get for his commission? Name, information and link on the page. Revenues of any money made off the artwork, such as CD sales. License to display the work elsewhere. ... And of course prestige as a patron of the arts.

CDs or static items of particular artists, themes, or topics can be sold for overhead costs or as patron's revenue.

Ads on the site? On the art or artist pages it would seem rather squidgy, even if all the proceeds from those ads went to the artist/patrons. Perhaps on the main page, only, if at all.

What else?

Backlinks on Yehuda

I turned off backlinking on this blog, as spam links have been spiraling out of control. Blogger.com apparently provides no means of dealing with this as they do for spam comments.

Yehuda

I'm sorry for my feed problems

I tried switching my Blogger feed to Feedburner, and it's been reposting the entire feed every day, at least on bloglines.

I just switched back and I'll see if this makes a difference.

Sorry for inundating you with posts.

Yehuda

Five Basic Lessons in Blog Advertising

I am messing around with a number of new methods of advertising. Please excuse the dust as it has not yet settled.

Here are a few lessons from my experiments:

1. Don't Let Ads Take Over Your Site

Nothing is more annoying than a wall full of advertisements when you visit a site. It says: "My content isn't important. I'm just tying to get you to give me money."

Your content has to take up at least half the page. Regardless of how much you want people to see your ads, you want them to see your content first.

2. Hide Ads in Plain Sight

We all want to achieve the plain look of a site like Seth Godin's. It looks like he has no advertisements on his blog, but that's not exactly true.

Seth advertises his books on the sidebar of his page. They don't scream "advertisements" because they don't look like the familiar product blocks that you get from those random ads by Google and Amazon.

This is a good lesson for how to get your advertisements in plain sight, without making them look like ads.

I have an icon on my sidebar called "Gift Guide". The simple and fixed format looks like it belongs, not like an ad. Actually, it isn't only an ad; it's a helpful guide with good content. Which is the best type of ad.

3. Configure Your Ads

Most advertisers let you configure the colors of the text, borders, links, and so on in your ads. Take advantage of this.

I like to choose a text color that matches the text color of my content's text, and a link color that matches the link color of my content's text. For a border, I either remove it altogether or choose the same as my text color.

Too many colors looks like confetti.

Google's Ad-words aren't doing a very good job on my text right now. I've tried using their code to specify relevant text, to no avail.

On the other hand, Amazon's context ads are extremely good for my site; well, I don't know if they're good for making me money, but they advertise exactly the products that I want to advertise. This is because they let me specify keywords in the advertisement configuration.

4. Try More Than One Ad Technique

Don't just stick Ad-words on your page in three places. There are all sorts of ad services, some more appropriate to your site than others.

In my case, since I talk about games and books and so on, Amazon seems like a good idea. I also have affiliate programs for links to specific products that aren't on Amazon. I am still experimenting with others, of course.

5. Replace Lagging Ads With Something Else

Some advertisers tend, more than others, to have problems with their servers. When this happens, your entire site might not load fast enough to pass the boredom threshold of a reader.

You really need to check your site once in a while, from different browsers and without cookies. If there is lag, check the status bar to see what's causing it. If this site continues to cause errors, take the code out of your template and replace that space with something else: a different ad product, or some content that was further down on your page.

Write to the delaying party and ask what's going on. You'll usually get an answer.

6. Bonus: You Don't See the Ads Your Readers See

Apparently, you can reload your site all day long and not really know what your reader's see on your site. That's because the load time, language, and products advertised vary depending on the location of the reader.


Disclaimer: But what do I know? I still only make about 50 cents a day from advertising. I welcome further suggestions!

Yehuda

Blogger 2.0: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

My blog is now, apparently, stable on Blogger 2.0, and you may be wondering if it's worth the move, or whether you should just abandon Blogger altogether and move to Wordpress.

I can't speak for the latter, but I can tell you about my impressions of the new Blogger, so far.

The Good

• Labels, finally, are a much needed and critical feature. This doesn't really warrant much praise for Blogger, however, as most other sites had this for quite some time. Still.
• Layout. If you allow your template to use the new Blogger Layout markups, dragging and dropping elements around your blog can be much easier. And if you bother to learn the attributes and language of this markup, you can actually do useful things with it. Kudos for allowing people to also directly manipulate their HTML, and for providing good information about the elements and attributes.
• Publishing is by far the best reason to switch to Blogger 2.0. It used to be that every time I made a change in my template, I had to wait about ten minutes or more for the update to publish to all of my pages. As often as not, this would fail and I'd have to do it again.
  Because of this, I would try to save many changes to my template so that I could update all of them at once. Now a template change is quick and painless, which makes me freer to change the template more regularly. Big plus.
• Owing to the quickness of the changes, any small, incidental outages that Blogger may experience no longer affect my ability to publish. This makes even the posting experience better.
• The layout elements also allow you to easily add feeds to your sidebar, as well as allow third parties to create their own sidebar elements which you can them add to your template. Nice.

The Bad

• Labels: I don't know if other tagging software pick them up, such as Technorati. Hopefully they do.
  The labeling is screwed up in dozens of ways; my biggest problem is the label counts that keep old labels at a count of 1 even when they no longer exist, needlessly cluttering my label lists.
• Layouts could include more trivial features, some of which appear to be quite obvious, such as an easy way to limit the length of the label list on a sidebar. I could do it, but I had to go figure out how using the Javascript. There are still too many things that require me to figure out the Javascript.
• There is no easy way to insert text/code between each blog post.
• They still have outages.
• Lots of little bugs in the editing features. For instance, when you try to edit a single item in a list element, the window jumps to the top of the screen. When you mass edit posts, the posts are redisplayed beginning from the first post again, instead of posts 820 to 840 which you were editing. And so on.

The Ugly

• Google makes Picasa, so you would think that they could provide a way for you to manage your pictures on your blog, such as list them, edit them, remove them, etc. No. Pictures in blogger are still a huge black hole. You can upload them in only one of three sizes, and then you can't do anything with them. And when you upload a picture, the link to the picture is inserted at the top of your post, instead of at the cursor, which is where you would expect.
• There's no easy way to review and edit comments around your site.
• There are no stats.
• There is no way to backup your blog.
• Changing templates destroys the old one.
• Captchas are not the best or only solution to comment moderation.
• Plenty of advertisers and plugins don't work on Blogger.

Anyhoo...

Game News

Destructoid talks about juggling gaming and marriage.

The new Here and Now Australian edition of Monopoly is failing to capture interest from the main Australian cities, the result of which is that most of the properties may end up being places nobody has ever heard of.

Volokh reports on a failed attempt to convince a judge that denying him roleplaying material constitutes a repression of his religious freedoms. (Thanks, Shlomo)

The Institute of Civil Engineers is giving away 10,000 copies of their board game Flushed Away to UK primary school teachers. Just write them and ask for one.

And here's a pretty cake make out to look like a Puerto Rico board.

Yehuda

How Blogger's Labeling Works

It took some many days and hours, but I finally added labels (tags) to my 970 posts (971 including this one). While I may change some of the labels en mass if I discover a better way to organize them, for the moment people who feed this blog are now safe from any more mass updates.

Labeling is not for me, it's for you. I have tried to organize the labels into topics that suit you as the reader. If you don't like the way I've done them, or you want another more general category, or some other more specific ones, shout out.

For what it's worth, the main label is gaming. That encompasses all game posts of any type.

There are also labels for those of you only interested in board games, computer games, online gaming, or war games. Mind you, since many of my posts cover more than one topic, you may still have to skip the irrelevant parts of the post.

I have labels for every board game I've played or commented on on this blog, with a few exceptions. So if you're only interested in the news about chess or puerto rico, feel free to follow the appropriate labels.

Other game labels include gamers (includes people who play, and articles about play), game design, game news, and game industry (includes information about the industry and/or my purchases).

For those of you who follow the non-gaming material, I have labels for philosophy, music, cartoons, humor, movies, personal, israel, judaism, technology, politics, and so on. One more important one is blogging, which covers thoughts on blogging, web sites, and news about this blog. The above labels should cover 99% of the material, I believe, and, of course, there is a lot of overlap between them.

I currently do not have a "non-gaming" label for everything except gaming, but I can add it if you like.

All of these labels are also available as feeds. For instance, the gaming label is available as the gaming feed. Please note the rather strange URL for this feed: "http://jergames.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/gaming" (don't forget the hyphen). If a label has spaces, spaces are represented with a "%20", e.g. "puerto%20rico".


Next up: I will be experimenting with getting labels on the sidebar of the blog (if someone already knows how to do that, please let me know). Done, but now I want to figure out how to limit the list to only display N labels. Done. Google found the solution.

I will then do some redesigning. In process. Note that Blogger does not provide a default template with two sidebars, so I had to create my own. Note also that this sidebar is fully compatible with Blogger's new "sections", so I can drag and drop items between sidebars, etc. Update: I figured it out myself, but here is a good howto.

I will begin a bunch of new ad programs. I especially don't want to annoy anyone with the ad programs, so if they annoy you, say so! I'll work at fixing or replacing them with something better.


Link:

France's government is offering tax credit to companies developing video games, another step in acknowledging video games as potential art forms.

Yehuda

More Blogger woes, and Ryanair

Blogger Woes

I am more and more amazed that this thing is out of Beta.

Dozens of times yesterday and today I've been getting access errors when trying to access pages on my blog. The latest error page includes a "code":

We're sorry, but we were unable to complete your request.

When reporting this error to Blogger Support or on the Blogger Help Group, please:

* Describe what you were doing when you got this error.
* Provide the following error code and additional information.

[[[code]]]

Additional information
uri: [[[uri]]]
host: jergames.blogspot.com

This information will help us to track down your specific problem and fix it! We apologize for the inconvenience.

How long is this going to go on? Anyone else having these problems?

RyanAir

As long as I'm on the subject of things I can't believe, someone tell me how Ryanair can offer flights from London to Glasgow for 79 pence. Yes, that's right, not pounds, but pence.

OK, I get that they don't pay air ticket printing costs, credit card fees, advertising, and so on. I get that they charge you for luggage and food. I get that it doesn't include all mandatory taxes and so on which run about 35 pounds. I get that they use cheaper and more inconvenient airports.

But they have to pay for airplanes, maintenance, parts, fuel, staff, service, rent, and branding, don't they? Do so many people pay for extras such as luggage, changing ticket times, late booking, or sandwiches that they can make up the difference?

Seems batty to me. Yet their safety record and service is supposed to be as good or better than regular airlines.

Tu B'Shvat

This shabbat is Tu B'Shvat, one of the four "new years" in the Jewish tradition. This one is the new year for trees and produce, so all the supermarkets in Israel have changed their usual displays of cheap cakes and wafers to nuts and dried fruit.

Some people like to do a Tu B'Shvat "seder", sort of like a Passover seder, where they introduce all of these nuts and fruits and carry on about the land overflowing with milk and honey and so on.

I made brownies.

Yehuda
Causing confusion is a goal, not a side-effect.

Still Updating the Blog

Blogging

I hope all of you that feed this blog have settings set to "new posts only" for the time being, as I am going through every single post (over 950 of them) adding Blogger tags. Each time I do this, it reposts the changed post to the feed.

While I'm doing this, it gives me a chance to correct some of the most egregious spelling errors. As to that, I can't believe that I misspelled "praise" twice yesterday in one post as "priase".

As I have experience in technical writing, I have experience in building indexes. This tag-addition work is almost entirely, but not quite, not like building an index.

Building an index is meant to ensure that several entries point to the item in question, and that any particular entry doesn't point to more than a few items. In the case of tagging, I am setting up my blog so that it can be split into feeds. That means a hierarchy of general through specific tags.

General tags, so that those only interested in "gaming" can easily subscribe to that. But if you're interested only in "board games", I have a tag for that, too. Or if you're interested in just "Settler of Catan", I have a tag for that, too. Which means that any post about Settlers of Catan has to receive all three tags.

For the gaming stuff, it's easy. For the non-gaming stuff, it's harder, since they don't all fall into any neat category, yet, other than "non-gaming", which I am hoping to not have to resort to. At the moment, they include "philosophy", "politics", "personal", "humor", "cartoon", "parody", "poems", "movies", and god knows what else.

As I continue to do this, I will try to figure out the best general tag to include all these, and that might mean my going back and re-tagging half of my posts once again.

Are you sure that a few separate blogs wouldn't be easier?

This entire endeavor is further complicated by Blogger's broken tag system. It miscounts the number of posts assigned to tags, making them impossible to delete when I want to get rid of them. If doesn't let you create new tags from the mass editing tool. And the mass post editing tool is screwed up, jumping around and not displaying the list of posts you ask it to. Honestly, I can't believe that this is out of Beta, as it DOESN'T WORK, yet.

Blogger's image facility is also still majorly broken, in that it a) always inserts images you upload to the top of the post you are working on, rather than where your cursor is, and b) still give you no way to reference or manage pictures you have uploaded, which means that if you lose the link you have to upload it again. My god, is that dumb.

Gaming

Another U.S. visitor is scheduled to drop by tonight. He is here visiting on Birthright, and he plays in North Carolina, but he has never heard of BGG. I forgot to ask him how he found out about me, in that case.

If you want to pay the membership fee, you can try to snatch this job on writing rules for a board game.

Chris Farrell sadly hangs up his blogging pen. Hopefully he will continue to write online.

Chris Bateman does a first analysis of the difference between a virtual world and a video game. I may respond to this one.

Misc

Two miscellaneous pictures for you:

1) Amazon offers an incredible deal on a game (.05%!):



2) Microsoft Word offers a "grammar correction" for Rachel's thesis (she's discussing "original sin"):



Apparently the grammar correction tool holds by Christian theology.

Yehuda

The New Blogger Has Some Kinks

One would think that after being in beta for, oh, a year or so, that Blogger would have fixed all the obvious problems. But no.

So far I've encountered:

* Captchas don't necessarily load with the page. You end up looking at "Type in the above letters" without seeing any above letters. Furthermore, captchas don't always work. I damn sure typed in the letters correctly, and it still sends me back to do it again.

* Managing posts is completely screwed up. When I set the number of posts to some number other than 50 and then click "Older posts", it only scrolls 50. Worse, I wanted to manage my labels in bulk, but every time I make any sort of change, I get sent back to the list of most recent posts again. Also, the number of posts indicated for each label if plain incorrect. Argh!

* Nowhere on the site does it explain what the special markup code is for labels, or for groups of labels to put on the sidebar. It only tells you to change your entire template and use their new layout system.

* Every post I add a label to, or update, is marked as changed on today's date. Since most feed readers are set to re-update posts from the last week or so, this results in your feed reader re-displaying every single post of mine as I update them with labels. In the old blogger, when I updated an old post, it remained marked as an old post, and wasn't picked up by the feed readers.

On the up side, it managed to transfer my blog without a hitch, and the labels do seem to work, which is good. And no more updating the entire blog when making changes is also very nice.

Yehuda

Moved to Blogger 2

Lo and behold, a day after I note that I can't move any of my blogs to Blogger 2 if at least one is a group blog, Blogger changes to allow me to move my other blogs overs anyway.

So, here we are on the new Blogger. Now to do some housecleaning and so on.


Sorry, but those of you who subscribe to the feed are going to see my entire blog reposted over the next few days!



The Best Stuff in the World currently lists these as the best board games. Give 'em a shake up.

Queensland University of Technology is regretting advertising their new Bachelor of Games and Interactive Entertainment degree, fearful that the great number of enrollees are going to be disappointed that they won't be getting a degree for playing games fifty hours a week for three or four years, but may actually have to learn something.

What the .... ? Blog Troubles

Wouldn't you know that hours after I worry about something happening to my blog, every single post on my blog has lost its line breaks.

How, I have no idea.

Yehuda

Update: Thank goodness I figured out quickly enough that the "Convert Line Break" setting for my blog had been toggled. I still have no idea how.

Meanwhile, please enjoy this hysterical rendition of Torn by Natalie Imbruglia, as acted out by comedian David Armand ... and Natalie Imbruglia.

Bluh Bluh Blogger

I'm just smart enough to make backups of my longer posts, as well as saving my drafts once in a while, so that when Blogger craps out and loses everything since my last edit, I haven't lost more than a half an hour's worth of work or so.

Still, it's discouraging. I'll redo USC10C57 tomorrow.

Hmmm ... What would happen if Blogger loses the entire site and all my posts? Youch. I think I'll do some major backing up. Anyone know a quick way to do this online?

I'm going back to watching every Pat Benatar and Kate Bush video on YouTube.

You better ruuun
You better hi-ide
You better leave
From my si-yi-ight ...

Just when you think
You've
Got
It
Down ...

1 2 3 4
Daaaaaaaaark

Heathcliffe
It's me, it's Cathy
I've come ho-ome now
So co-o-o-old
Let me enter your
Win-do-o-o-ohhh ...

Yehuda

Linkety Link: "Google news Edit-Me Edit-Me"

The phrase in the subject probably looks familiar to many of you. It is the default set of three links on the sidebar of any newly created Blogger blog with a default template.

Searching for this phrase on Google, Blogger's parent, yields 673 results. On Yahoo it's 8,700, a tenfold increase. On MSN it is 19,533,985, an additional 2,000-fold increase.

Gosh. What does this mean? Is Google too embarrassed to show these results? Or is MSN just stupid? Or both? Just how many Blogger blog sites have been created by incompetent people, lazy people, or spammers?


Meanwhile, Susan Sarandon has joined forces with Cindy Sheehan to protest the war in Iraq by sending the board game Risk to Laura Bush. Which makes sen... some se... a little s... um, I don't get it. (It might be this edition.)

Yehuda

"If you can read this page it means that the Apache HTTP server installed at this site is working properly."

Technorati tags: board game, board games, Google, Blogger

Ads and Blogger

I'm biting the hand that feeds me, but is there anything that Blogger does well that other free blog sites don't do?

So far, all I can see are the deficiencies: no tags, lots of outages, no scripting other than JavaScript, no easy access to pictures, unformatted comment pages, limited captcha, ... I opened a Wordpress account just to see what I was missing, and boy did it look better.

To add insult to injury, I was finally approached by an ad company willing to pay me to put some ads on my site (baby steps, but steps!), but the ads only work if I have access to: PHP, ASP, Perl, Coldfusion, Wordpress plugin, vBulletin, Movable Type, Drupal, or Postnuke. In other words, on any site other than Blogger.

Blogger is a Google company and works just fine with Google Adsense, but that seems to be about it.

Yehuda

Articles I'm working on: Web 3.0, and Games that are Art

Technorati tags: Blogger

Google, again

Well, I restored Google's Adsense to my site, despite the fact that I ranted about it on numerous occasions. Why? Because I have no principles.

No, it's because I blog on Blogger, which is a Google site, and I use Gmail, and I search with Google; what's one more Google product? Furthermore, although they have been dropping balls, they are still not (yet) as bad as many other companies. And I think I had misread the agreement changes that I needed to agree to in order to continue using their services. They do not require me to release my financial information to them to use as they please, as I had thought, only to use my financial information on their financial statements. Which is not exactly the same thing.

And I haven't found any other advertising programs that work, nor received any sponsorship advertisement. And despite the fact that blogging, like every other easy rags-to-riches idea, only benefits the very few at the top, I would still like to make a go at this blogging thingie.

Of course, it remains to be seen if I will yield more than $1.39 during the next three months.

Yehuda

Ahhh

Not only was Blogger inaccessible yesterday, all Google services other than Gmail were also inaccessible for several hours. So were a whole slew of other sites. Yahoo I could reach. Technorati I couldn't.

My ISP said that there were general problems. Usually when a link is down to the States, all sites are down, not only a cross-section of IP numbers. It was spooky.

This week is TV turn off week. Grab a board game.

Last night I played Anagrams with myself while Tal finished her homework and Rachel was too tired to play Scrabble. Anagrams with yourself is still a challenge, but you just know that you are missing words that a competent opponent would be finding. It's those words that you missed but should have found that can make a real game of Anagrams most interesting.

Afterwards, Tal and I played Oh Hell which once again came down to the last round. She won when I was forced to bid 1 and lost.

Apparently, her classmates now play card games during recess, and Tal has them all playing Oh Hell. What card game should I teach her next?

Yehuda

Sigh. Good post, down the tubes ...

I had a great post, I was just reviewing it for spelling errors, and the electricity went out in my house. And Blogger's autosave doesn't.

Oh well.

Nadine and Brendan from the game group are among my guests tonight for dinner.

Shabbat shalom.

Yehuda