Development Blogs - What when and where?

Unfortunately with so many blogs out there the chances of people just stumbling upon it and actually sticking around to read what you have to say are exceedingly low unless you are of some personal significance or have some good networking ties — the 'build and they will come' blogging boom is pretty much over.

For example, if you work for a well-known company or whatever then people may bookmark/subscribe for that reason alone — the whole 'celebrity' pull thing is surprisingly effective. Similarly, if you're linked to from the blogs/sites of other people who fit that profile you may net some readers that way.

However if you literally open up a blog and expect people to just find it, even if your content is consistently awesome you'll end up very disappointed. You basically need to market yourself, get involved with fellow designers' blogs and whatnot so people find it. Getting blog readership is kind of organic, where the more you involve yourself with the community of your choice (ie: game development) the more you'll expose your site to like-minded people.

I'm sure even by posting on MapCore you'll get a few guys from here seeing your signature, reading your blog, and maybe linking to you. And if you don't, ask them to!

It depends on your quality of work, I wouldn't read a blog about dm_css_fy_ka_kz_iceworld2000BC, but if you have 1 or more exiting projects, it might be worth checking maybe weekly etc. And then you could even "go to my blog to see more screens" etc. to draw some attention, because if you have a blog, you sure better be a community person.

Also, helpful info and such are also a good ways of drawing at least some attention.

I have a blog but I really just use it as a personal log of my work, I can tell the points in tmie I've been lazy when there's a big gap in posts. It's nice to reflect on things you learned as you go along.

http://gamedevblog.levelism.com/

is my addy

As for setting it up, if you have an SQL database on your host then go for wordpress, it practically sets itself up and works like a dream.

^ yeah, that was a little hard to get used to. It seems to have a resolution limit for images as well.

Wilco made me a cool website and I planned to do monthly updates and have tutorial links etc. I really just can't be assed to update it now though

I will update it one day because it's my portfolio but the point here it got boring quite fast ;P

The media handling functionality was dramatically upgraded about a year ago in WordPress. Have you used it since then?

I personally think the way it handles media is fantastic, able to auto-generate galleries and whatnot. I use them all the time on my WordPress site. You can even easily get per-image comments.

There's no upper limit on image resolution, to clarify. It'll always leave your original image as the largest size, and then auto-generate three smaller sizes for you that you can specify.

I believe the only level design blog that i ever followed regularely was levelords and that was mostly because of his antics with russian whores.

If you want people to follow your blog you need to post often (at least once a week) and it must be interesting.

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If you want people to follow your blog you need to post often (at least once a week) and it must be interesting.

I think very few people have something new and valuable to say every week

Anyway, I think if you want to get fame, you have to use Wordpress or another content management system. Thanks to its formatting and features, your articles can directly be used on community websites and other blogs. A friend wrote a post for his blog recently and realized it ended up on the front page of Gamasutra, and he was proposed a job thanks to it. That wouldn't have happened if he had had a custom layout and no standard formating.

It's a bit hypocritical for me to say that as I didn't go for Wordpress, but that's just because I don't pretend what I have to say is gold, I don't strive for fame, and I like to have complete control over the layout. But it sure is a handy tool that came a long way.

I think you won't be able to write something good often enough if you don't post "devblog" entries, like Robert Briscoe does. You can't come up with new techniques and concepts that make up for interesting articles every week, so writing about your work and progress is a good way to fill your blog.

However, my personal opinion on the matter is that you shouldn't post just for posting. I'd rather read a blog that gets updated only every month but with awesome articles than read one every week and get bored. Less is more I say, keep to the best you can come up with.

Quote from Thrik

The media handling functionality was dramatically upgraded about a year ago in WordPress. Have you used it since then? I personally think the way it handles media is fantastic, able to auto-generate galleries and whatnot. I use them all the time on my WordPress site. You can even easily get per-image comments.

There's no upper limit on image resolution, to clarify. It'll always leave your original image as the largest size, and then auto-generate three smaller sizes for you that you can specify.

For some reason when I put in an image of 1680x1050 it looks like it's doing the auto image generation but what actually happens is it posts the full res image in the blog. So far the only way I've been able to rectify this is to reduce the image enough that it manages to correctly create a thumbnail.

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For some reason when I put in an image of 1680x1050 it looks like it's doing the auto image generation but what actually happens is it posts the full res image in the blog. So far the only way I've been able to rectify this is to reduce the image enough that it manages to correctly create a thumbnail.

Maybe your server doesn't support the thumbnail generating tools (I don't remember the name, it's some kind of PHP extension if I remember well) ? There must be scripts online that help you test that, but that's only worth it if it's a real pain in the back.

Mm, yeah I don't know what's going on there but it's definitely not something I've experienced. I have some huge images myself:

http://www.brutallegend.net/concept-art ... 811201933/

And it successfully generated that medium-sized version and also the tiny version.

In your articles consider using words like "diegetic narrative" for no reason, write as if rank is a modern innovation with the "AI director" and force references to it, ask that token game mechanics be removed for being unrealistic or old without any real justification other than "it's about time...", muse over a game you played 5 minutes ago with some youtube research for comparisons, suggest we remove "barriers" so games play on one context sensitive button, reach no conclusions under any circumstances, and champion post-game emotional art synergy.

Quote from Taylor

In your articles consider using words like "diegetic narrative" for no reason, write as if rank is a modern innovation with the "AI director" and force references to it, ask that token game mechanics be removed for being unrealistic or old without any real justification other than "it's about time...", muse over a game you played 5 minutes ago with some youtube research for comparisons, suggest we remove "barriers" so games play on one context sensitive button, reach no conclusions under any circumstances, and champion post-game emotional art synergy.

Quote from Lord Ned

Maybe because i'm tired and my eyes are blurring... but that made no sense to me.

In the game design blogosphere it's those types of articles that are popular. Not ones that are, err, actually helpful.

Taylor, I love your posts

There it's said

While Thrik is 100% right about popularity of blogs being strongly related to community participation and 'celebrity' factory, you should bear in mind that blogging isn't all about popularity! For me, blogging has been a very effective tool for rationalising and better understanding the subject matter of each post. In particular, it's often the case that we just 'know' why something works or does not work. When you write a blog post about the topic, you must understand the topic before you can explain it to someone else. On quite a few occasions, I've had "aha!" moments while typing a post .

My job up til now has involved convincing software engineers to change the way they write their code, so being able to put forward a convincing argument was extremely important to me, and blogging definitely made a difference. I would thoroughly recommend blogging as a way to better understand your chosen field.