Thursday, September 14, 2006

Sauerbraten, Site Upgrade

Sauerbraten



There's a new Sauerbraten download and this one is looking beautiful. Just check out the screenshot... wow! This update introduces reflective water, performance improvements, bug fixes, and lots of other little features.



Well the time has come to upgrade the Free Gamer site. Things to expect:



  • Tags
    Blogger beta introduces tags so now I can tag all my posts. What will this mean? Automatic listing of article types plus game name tags - so you can get a list of e.g. all reviews or e.g. all posts referencing game X. I'll be going back through my posts and tagging them all appropriately to adhere to this.

  • Sortable Games List
    I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do it yet, but using an AJAX table I'll have the games in a proper list sorted by genre, type, etc etc. I'll still maintain my own little top-ten but a full list where you can order by what you are looking for will make browsing the list much easier. Plus it'll be on a separate page so the information should be more direct.

  • Smaller Front Page
    The front page at the moment is somewhat massive. Only the latest article will be in full on the front page, with other recent articles summarized with links.

  • Free Gamer Logo
    I'm going to come up with one. Or if somebody else submits one, I'll take that too. ;-)
The idea is to make the site:
  1. Easier to navigate
  2. Easier to read
  3. And by virtue of the above, more useful as a resource

If anybody has any concerns or ideas, please speak up!



That downside to all this is that, due to the nature of the blogger.com templating system, during the implementation period things might break or go weird or not work. This isn't because I'm erasing the site and removing the list or trying to kill newborn puppies. It is simply a consequence of trying to get the best out of blogger.com which frustratingly involves doing a lot of update development directly on a live site.

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous6:55 pm

    looks incredible. i hope there are some levels to play on :]

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous8:56 pm

    What about switching to something more serious and easy to mantain, let's say, Wordpress?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well if I switch to something more serious and easy to maintain then I lose the free hosting that blogger/blogspot provides.

    It can be done with Blogger - I have the necessary js (from some dhtml wizard) and now all I need to do is design/migrate the template. It'll be there in no time and it'll be great.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous5:26 pm

    Correct me if i'm wrong, but isn't wordpress.com offering free hosting, too?

    ReplyDelete
  5. Wordpress.com offers free hosting as well, but it doesn't allow you to customize your site template at all. (Which is why I'm sticking to Blogger as well...)

    ReplyDelete
  6. Anonymous5:30 am

    I noticed you said something about a new logo for Free-Gamer.

    I run an art blog with b5media, and was curious about maybe doing this as a contest on Artist Hideout to come up with a logo for you. Winner gets their logo displayed and you get a top-notch artist design for free.

    Let me know, and we can maybe talk about it a little more beforehand if you would like to try this.

    ReplyDelete

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