T w e n t y S i d e d

Sorry for the lack of content. I’m making small changes to the site here and there, based on feedback. There’s more work to be done. I’m taking cues from a few suggestions, and from the approach James Lileks uses to wrangle his content. (Seriously. He was doing his thing for about six years before I got started, and he’s even more prolific than I am. (Although he’s somewhat held in check by his need to go back and fuss & reformat old stuff. (Not that I have any room to talk.)) There is a huge mountain of content there, and if nostalgia artifacts, retro-curiosities, and loving mockery of the past is your thing, there’s enough there to keep you entertained for months.)

I seem to have ruined the preceding paragraph with parenthetical shenanigans. Let me start again: I’m working on the website. It’s boring. So no content. Sorry. Almost done.

As some have suggested, Spoiler Warning, Comics, and Programming posts will be getting their own index. The Spoiler Warning one is done already. I’ll be adding some kinda promotion for the book, somewhere. We’ll see.

More feedback is welcome. The previous feedback made for some dang fine improvements.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

I’ve been thinking about what I need from this website, what it needs to do, and how I’ve been running it. As I’ve sketched things out, I’ve come to realize why I haven’t been able to make a design that really works. The problem is that this thing is incredibly complicated. It didn’t start out that way. This blog began life as a simple little thing with a minuscule audience, no content, and a very narrow focus. As it expanded, the site design has failed to keep up.

For years I’ve been underestimating the problem because, hey, it’s a WordPress blog, right? How hard can it be? As it turns out, wrangling seven years of mixed-media content into a convenient, readable, and intuitive interface that works on desktops and mobiles, is useful to everyone (newcomers, regulars, and archive surfers) doesn’t overwhelm the reader with too much data, and doesn’t look like complete ass is difficult bordering on the impossible.

Reader Strangeite pointed out that a good website needs these skills, in this order: Good interface design, good graphic design, and good coding. My skillset is the reverse of that, with most of my skill points dumped into “coding”.

In the past, I’ve solicited feedback on this, but I was frustrated because each person told me how to make the site more useful for them, which would almost always result in making it less useful for someone else. This was my fault, because I hadn’t properly defined the problem. So let me try to draw a picture of all the stuff the site needs to do.

For the curious, I’ve outlined everything the site needs to do or show.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “This Dang Website”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

The lack of posting lately is because I’m trying to write all the words. I’ve got more than a few of them together by this point, all lined up next to each other. Many of them are even spelled properly and in correct grammatical order. However, I have to stop writing those words for a few minutes so I can write these ones:

On Thursday 6/28, the Spoiler Warning crew will be doing another “Hangout”. It will start at 9PM on the East Cost. (For people converting to GMT, that means it will actually happen at 1AM on 6/29.) Josh is going to stream a little something or other while we tune in and chat.

I have been informed that people do not like the term “hangout”. This is a shame, since that’s pretty much my go-to word for “unstructured social gathering”. I suppose we can go with Play Date if that’s more your speed. Or perhaps you would prefer a Shin Dig? I’m sorry we’re stuck with the language tools we’ve got, but I’m not going to write posts titled, “Assembly of Internet Friends via Ventrilo While also Streaming a Videogame to Other, More Anonymous Attendees and Communicating via Text Chat, This Thursday”.

The plan for now:

1. Play Dates will move around. Different days. Different times. The idea is that we can hopefully give people in different time zones and with different jobs a chance to participate.
2. I think once a week might be overkill. Maybe twice monthly? Once a month? We’ll see.
3. Not everyone from the cast will attend every Hangout. Everyone else has day jobs and commitments.

Other items:

When I talked about adding forums to the site last week, I wasn’t talking about changing the comment threads or the way we read posts. The main site would remain exactly the same, except there would be a link (somewhere) to the forums, where you could interact with other Twenty-Siders. Maybe even do a little RPG play-by-post. I might also have a section labeled, “Politics, Religion, And Console Platforms”, which will auto-delete everything posted to them. Just kidding. Sort of.

I might keep the forums very tightly regulated at first. Maybe play-by-post will be the only thing available, and I’ll gradually add more sections once I’m sure it won’t mess up the existing comment threads.

The Left 4 Dead Spoiler Warning will (according to Josh) go up tomorrow. Probably. We’ll see.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.