Back to Basics

I've been spending a lot of time lately posting on blogs and forums, but not on my own. So, I figure that it's time to get back to basics and relaunch postGeek. This will mean a lot of changes, the most important of which is that I hope to actually post some stuff!

I'll also be messing around with the look and feel of the site. A year or so ago blogger/blogspot added some new site editing tools, but I never switched postGeek over to them. I've done that now, but lost a lot of the old formatting in the process. Some of that is probably better off lost, but other bits and pieces I'll eventually want to put back in. Plus I may want to mess around with colors and other elements.

I'm also re-examining the purposes behind this blog. To recap, this blog was an offshoot of an earlier attempt by a friend of mine to put together a gaming site aimed towards older gamers, or as we put it "gamers with a life". By "gaming" we were referring to video games. The underlying purpose of that site was mainly to get us passes to E3 and perhaps earn a little cash. A secondary purpose was to give us both a forum for practicing our writing.

As that project eventually became stillborn, I spun off this blog to continue to give me a forum for practicing my writing, with the continuing hope that I might still earn a bit of cash (getting a pass to E3 wasn't as big a deal for me). With the second goal tending to outweigh the first in my mind, I tried to distill some of the things that made blogs or blog-like sites interesting to me. One of the things that I latched onto was the existence of visuals.

Pictures capture the attention, and I felt that I needed pictures to keep people's attention, and to hopefully gain new readers. I still feel that the effective use of pictures is essential if you hope to commercialize a blog. The problem for me was that I didn't post anything unless I had pictures. Rather than resulting in good posts with supporting visuals, this resulted in no posts at all. Or, occasionally, bad posts for which I had a picture.

So, I'm tossing that restriction out. If I happen to have a good visual for a post, then I'll use it, but otherwise I'm just posting when I have something to post about.

That's not the only thing I'm tossing out. As already mentioned, postGeek started as a site about video games aimed towards older gamers. I've already strayed from much of that over the past couple of years, but I'm now officially ditching it all.

From now on this site is simply about the games I play, the books I read, and other personal interests I feel about talking about. As gaming is a big part of my life, gaming will still be the main topic of this blog. I'm not going to turn it into a family photo album, or use it as a social networking site, or anything like that. It just means that there aren't going to be any more forced comments on suitability for children or other specialized review information, and that I'm not going to let some announced purpose for this blog limit me in my choices of topics.

I more closely resemble the original target audience of postGeek now than I did when it first started, so the end result may actually be more suited to "gamers with a life" than before. The difference is that if it happens it won't be because of a deliberate effort, but instead it will be a natural outcome of my own preferences and interests.