Back and Blogging
As Samwise said at the end of LoTR with equal melancholy: “Well, I’m back”.
I haven’t seen Frodo off to the Grey Havens, but it feels like it. Due to a cosmic level of incompetence at our previous host, we have moved to a hosting provider who knows what they are doing. Apparently the machine hosting us died, and they put us on a new box with “exactly the same setup” as the old one. Only, all our PHP backend stopped working. After trying to convince us it was something we had done, and we responded with “er.. what the?“, they got in some outside tech support which was still unable to resolve the issue. All this time our site was wide open, so we had it password protected - which explains the strange login box that replaced the previous “Do you want to download index.php” message that signified to anyone interested they could jump into our database and change anything they felt inclined to. After several weeks of this, they came back with the message that they couldn’t fix the problem and we should look for other hosts. Well, duh.
As with most things, this particular cloud has a silver lining. We have used the opportunity to do something we’ve been quietly mulling over for a while - BigKid is now officially a blog. We are all too busy within the games and web development industries to put in the necessary 4+ hours a night keeping a traditional news site current (*cough* playing games *cough*). Other sites such as Sumea, GameNews and Ausgamers have picked up where we stopped (we were amongst the first to do the serious Oz news thing) and are doing an excellent job. There’s no need to duplicate their efforts. What we can offer however, is relevant comment from inside the industry. A blog is ideally suited to that. It is casual, personal, and works outside any stylistic restraint imposed by traditional news reporting. We can update less, but provide more that is relevant and topical, and hopefully interesting - for you and us.
Blogging is the new news. The upsurge of online journaling-cum-journalism that has become the blog (Weblog) is an exciting harnessing of the online community, and has the traditional media worried. People are getting their news immediately and in a form they find much more palatable via the unrestricted crosslinking of blogs. Personally, I love the growing ease and sophistication of the web community. Blogs give everyone a voice. It costs nothing over the cost of an ISP. Free blog hosting is available at many sites, and webpage technology is finally reaching the point where all the technical stuff is packaged simply in defacto standards. This opens the medium up to those who aren’t HTML proficient and don’t want to be. They just want to plug into the worldwide community and let others do the tech work. Now they can.
And really, BigKid has always been a blog, even when we tried not to be. We’ve also wanted to keep the site on the bleeding edge technically and content-wise. Joining the growing blog community is a natural, and exciting step for us. It frees us up to report informally (though responsibly) on the games industry from within - something we have been itching to do for a few years now. How that will change what we do, not even we know. But thanks for hanging around long enough to take the journey with us.
PS. All previous content is currently unavailable, but Bruce and I plan to convert as much as is useful to the new format over time. That includes everything from day one, something I’ve wanted to do for ages.
posted by monty · at 7:57 am · filed under Site News
Woohooo !!!