Muckbeast – New and Improved
Those of you who visit Muckbeast via entrecard or its main domain name (http://www.muckbeast.com) have already noticed that things look very different. I am now self hosting the blog. At a later date, I will go into more detail as to WHY I made this decision, and what the upsides are for the blog. For now, this means you will need to update your bookmarks and possible your RSS subscription as well.
I have a lot more control over the blog now, which means a lot more layout, widget, and plugin selection. Please feel free to make suggestions. I am not 100% sure what I think of this theme yet. It seems to be pretty solid, but there are a few color choices I am not totally thrilled with. Again, your feedback is greatly appreciated.
Sorry there have not been any new content posts in February. I will remedy that shortly!
Please spread the word about Muckbeast. I am more motivated now than ever to try and make it a well known blog for issues related to game design and the gaming industry.
Thanks for reading and commenting!
OK, just to stay in touch with the MMO-roots:
Traditional style: Hail thee!
Post-WoW style: FIRST!
Nice date to start the blog, Friday 13th. Greetings from Jacques de Molay and the Knights Templar!
2009 has three Friday 13th’s, the maximum possible number in a year.
I am not sure if it is an evil omen or a good sign that TIGOLE officially left the WoW team to work on Blizzard’s “NEXT GENERATION MMO”. Exciting news for sure.
Good luck with the new selfhosted blog. Very nice that you imported your old articles as well.
Hmm… are you going to try to salvage the comments?
The new site looks good.
Who did the header?
Salvaging the comments seems like a relatively herculean/impossible task.
If anyone wants to repost a comment, I’d love for them too. But I don’t know of any reason to export them and then import them here.
I had to manually repost the topics (and I left a few of less interesting ones off entirely).
Any feedback on the blog theme, colors, widgets, plugins, etc?
Thanks all!
The design is perfect. Black text and white background is always good, very good readability.
I am not convinced of the colors somehow. I do not like the purple, but failed to come up with something better so far. But I tried in Photoshop.
I turnedthe header purple, but it does not look better that way. I also experimented with different colors for the links.
Anyways, this is how your blog looks on my laptop (1440×900) – plus some text color experiments:
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/6655/muckbeastchromemylaptopnd3.jpg
purple header:
http://img4.imageshack.us/img4/8636/desolatepurplern5.jpg
You know, that purple version of the header graphic actually pulls the colors of the site together better in my opinion.
I’m going to experiment with that, if you don’t mind Longasc.
I’m very much a person who believes in the 3 color rule for almost everything I do. You want to have three prominent colors on anything you do and leave it at that. So far, I’ve counted seven on yours. (Ours?) Want me to take a stab at it?
@Muckbeast: Sure, feel free to modify and do whatever you want. It is not like it was ME who created the eerie header graphic, actually.
BTW, my first comment here has a white background. But then the colors of the comments change light grey – light blue – light grey – light blue … so why is the first comment’s background the only WHITE one.
Have fun fiddling around with the blog design!
P.S.: My necromancer dress doll in Guild Wars goes by the 4 color rule Black-intense Red-White-a bit light grey…
BTW, Sony Online Entertainment starts some kind of browser MMO aimed for <18 players and families that requires no installation, lowest hardware requirements but a broadband connection. It also has alternative payment methods, mini subscription plus buying extra content and so on. Maybe something for Test, regarding the payment model, not sure about the content. Just google “SOE Free Realms”.
The default background color for comments alternates between white and light grey. But my comments are always light blue, as an editor/administrator. Do you think the alternating colors for user comments is not a good feature? It is mainly there for distinguishing between comments.
# of colors: Too many colors, eh? Lets see. For things in a white or grey background, text is black, purple is the main link color, blue when you mouse over it. For things that have a black background, white is the text color, and yellow for links. Then the side bars have grey text for links – something I do not like and want to change to purple like the other links as soon as I can find where to change that.
Too much?
Think about ditching the 4 shades of gray (pick one?) and the yellow, I think. You’ll still be kicking around with gray, white, black, blue, and purple. That’s 5. Oops. I found some green, too.
How is it looking now? Better?
I also updated the way permalinks are created for the specific posts. For example, the direct URL to this page is now:
http://www.frogdice.com/muckbeast/meta/muckbeast-new-and-improved.html
How were you able to move all your entries to this new site?
I had to do it all by hand.
Since the time I signed up with Today.com, they have radically changed the terms of the agreement without my consent. The forced theme change was one thing. The dramatic increase of ad placement in the MIDDLE of content was another. But the last straw was when they informed me they would no longer pay for posts that had links to articles I had written on Bright Hub.
That is just asinine imho. One of the most common formats for a blog posts goes something like this:
The fact that I wrote the article should make no difference at all. My author hub at Bright Hub has a feed back to my blog, which means any time someone reads one of my articles on Bright Hub it drives (well, drove) traffic back to Today.com. During the month I started using my Bright Hub articles to get discussions going, my unique visitors total increased by 500%.
Why they would take issue with that is asinine. The practice generates traffic for them as well, so they should stop being so selfish.
This is part of an overall internet trend I am planning to write an article about later this month: the AOLization of the internet. Almost every site out there wants to be a walled garden that jealously guards the eyeballs of their readers and wants to pretend there are no other web sites on the internet. The idea of traffic/link exchanges is totally foreign to the current Web 2.0 crowd. It is really a negative force overall.
Anyway, that’s my mini-rant. I’ll write a full rant at some point regarding Today.com and why I had to leave. Thanks for visiting, Kelly!
Thanks for the explanation. I’m glad you’re going to keep blogging at least.