I realize my posting has been getting pretty infrequent here at Dragonchasers. Sadly, it’s going to become even more so. As of today, I’m writing for ITworld.com, and I’m committed to a post a day for those good folks, which is going to leave even less time for personal blogging (and for that matter, less time for gaming).

For me personally, this is great news. My writing has been getting sloppier and sloppier over the past several years since I have no one to answer to. Now I have to start disciplining myself and sharpening up my skills again. And of course, the money never hurts!!

Hopefully people will still have room in their RSS feeds for those days when I can squeak out a DC post (or on weekends). Adding to the weird scheduling is my full-time job. I think I may have mentioned here that we had some layoffs in December, and at the same time all the survivors had their pay & hours cut by 10%. I opted to work 4×9 hour days, so Monday-Thursday I’m getting home pretty late. An extra hour doesn’t sound like much but it really has impacted my schedule quite a bit. So most of my gaming and consequently, personal blogging time is happening Friday-Sunday these days.

As always, thanks so much for reading Dragonchasers!

If dragonchasers is displaying wonky, please do a shift-refresh and see if that fixes things. I asked Angela to tweak the theme a bit, removing the left sidebar so the text isn’t so narrow, and it seems like the old stylesheet is cached or something. Rather than fix it, I’m taking the lazy way out and asking readers to refresh.

Hopefully the new layout will give me a bit more freedom when it comes to laying out posts with images, as well as cutting down on all the scrolling the old version required. Next time, I’ll take the designer’s advice and get things right the first time!!

I was doing a bit of blog surfing tonight and happened to notice someone who had Dragonchasers in their blog roll. Someone who wasn’t in my blog roll.

I fixed that now.

But please, I don’t want to be what Ysh an unnamed blogger calls a link leech!! If you’re linking here and I’m not returning the favor, just give me a shout. You can comment here or nudge me on twitter.

This is a public service announcement from me, your faithful reader, to all you bloggers out there.

RSS feeds rock for those of us who read a lot of blogs. It gives us a 1-stop location to see what new posts are out there in the blogosphere. I urge you to subscribe to the RSS feed of your own blog and take a look at it now and then, and think about it from a reader’s perspective.

There are basically 3 choices as to what you’re going to put into your feed: the entire post, a title and summary, or just a title. Let’s look at these options.

Putting the entire contents of a post into your feed is perfect for your readers, but of course it means no one needs to actually come to your website (unless they want to comment), which can be a problem if your site is ad-supported or you just want to analyze traffic patterns at your site.

Putting a summary of your post in your feed gives readers an idea of what the post is about so they can decide if they want to ‘click through’ and read the rest of the post. If you do this, you should probably write a custom summary, not just let your blogging software grab the first paragraph or something. If you don’t feel like writing a summary at least keep in mind that for some segment of your readers, that first graph is going to determine whether they read on or not. Using a summary forces readers to come to your site to read the entire post, which gets ad revenue and good analytics for your website.

The last option is title only. This is a bad idea, unless you write incredibly intriguing titles (I’ve yet to see an example of this). When a reader is deciding which posts to read and which to skip, it becomes really easy to skip just a title with no more information about what the post is about. Presumably your #1 goal is to get people to read your posts (if your #1 goal is go make money, you’re in the wrong business!) and by only giving readers a title, you’re working against your own best interests. You have to entice readers to read you!

This may all seem really obvious, but I have a few blogs that I follow that only offer a title and I have to confess that even though I’m interested in reading this bloggers, I often find myself skipping them because I’m not sure what the post is about. It’s so much easier to hit “Read Next” and bop on down to the next blog in my reader’s list.

For your sake and mine, at least give us a summary!

My deepest apologies for starting conversations and then disappearing on my readers. It wasn’t planned but neither was it really avoidable. If you happen to follow me on Twitter then you probably had an idea that the week wasn’t going exactly swimmingly. Lots of work (literally from the time I got to the office until the time I went to bed, with an hour off for dinner), a bad financial crisis, a savaging of company morale, and some sudden changes in travel plans… I couldn’t manage to keep up with my RSS feeds, let alone find time to post.

Mother Nature appears to be coming to the rescue though. School closings have already been announced for tomorrow in this area, and some of my friends at other companies in the area told me they’ve already been told the office is being closed.

Of course, my company said “We care deeply for the safety of our employees, but short of a National Emergency, the office remains open.” That said, my intent is to take half a vacation day. Last year there was a storm that made my normal 20 minute commute into a harrowing 6 hours on the road, and the weather service says this is going to be the same kind of storm. Specifically they said:

“At this time…travel is not recommended anytime Friday afternoon and evening…as we expect heavy snow treacherous road conditions during this time.”

No way I’m risking another ordeal like last year!!

Anyway, hopefully I’ll be back on my feet and posting again soon. Thanks for sticking with me through this dry spell!

I posted a, er, post this morning, and might have got a lot of it wrong…

I’m at work and can’t really take the time to straighten the mess out, so for now I’m just unpublishing the post. If I’m mis-representing someone, I don’t want to leave the post up there until tonight.

UPDATE: Lunch hour FTW. After discussing some things with some people, I’ve reworked the post to more accurately reflect what was actually said (vs what I thought was being said) and my reaction to one minor point in someone else’s blog.

My apologies for all the drama-queenerie.

In some ways it is grimly amusing how many of us bloggers can take something as fun as gaming and turn it into a source of negativity. I both produce irrelevant negativity, and consume it. I’ve been trying to stop, on both counts.

From the posting side of things, I’ve been trying to focus on the joy that comes from this wonderful hobby of ours. I will still say negative things about a game I’m playing, but only in the context of a “review-like” post that is meant to help you decide whether you want to buy or avoid. I’m trying to stay far away from “Game X [which I am not playing] sucks because of Y” and staying even farther away from negative comments about other gamers and their choices.

From a consumption point of view, I’ve been thinning down the list of sites and blogs in my RSS reader. If a blogger or site writes the kinds of posts that are full of negativity, I’m removing that site. I understand how cathartic venting in text can be; I’m not judging anyone! But I just don’t want to read that kind of post any more.

Since trying on this new attitude, I’ve found I’ve been enjoying gaming a lot more. I have more time to play (fewer sites to read = more free time). And I’ve felt better emotionally, and this feeling extends beyond gaming.

I just too easily slip into the Quixotic desire to debate/debunk posts that I feel are unfairly negative towards a product or service. And those can become real tar baby issues for me, leading towards frustration and wasted energy. They quickly become toxic.

Anyway, that’s my Monday morning rambling for this week. Please call me on it if you see me slipping back into writing pointlessly negative posts. Gaming (to me at least) is supposed to be about discovering new worlds and having fun. I’m going to try to keep my focus there.

Last night being Halloween, we spent it all watching the Ghost Hunters Live Event. Seven straight hours of Ghost Hunters doesn’t leave any room for gaming. But can I just say, Amanda Tapping as a guest investigator = epic win. I now have a huge nerd crush on her.

Anyway since I didn’t do any gaming yesterday I don’t have any news to relate. Instead, I want to talk about mean people. Specifically, mean gaming bloggers. And no, I’m not going to include any links: no need to improve mean people’s google page ranks!

Right now it seems like there’s a wave of gaming bloggers leaving Warhammer Online. For the most part these are people who were in the beta, loved the game, got caught up in the hype and the excitement, threw down their money, and found a game very different (and less fun) from what they’d been playing in beta. So they’re disappointed and either a little sad or a little angry, and they’re quitting.

I find this sad. Granted these are just games, but still, to see a person going from excited about an event to disappointed…I have enough humanity in me to see this as unfortunate. But for some bloggers, this is an opportunity to laugh and jeer and enjoy the misfortune of others. That’s just mean and frankly, it says a lot about you as a person.

Even though “gaming” is becoming more mainstream, as “Gamers” (and particularly as “MMO Gamers” we’re still the object of much puzzlement and faint scorn in the greater public. When we go back to work after a few days off and someone asks “Did you do anything fun on your vacation?” most of us won’t say “Hell yeah, I hit level cap with my Priest!” because if we say that, we’re going to be labeled as some kind of anti-social loser, and honestly in a lot of companies this kind of label can negatively impact opportunities for advancement. Instead we say “Ah, I just kind of hung-out at home and relaxed, y’know? Rested up, read some books, watched some movies.” and then the person we’re talking to will smile knowingly and say “Yes, sometimes the best vacation is just to stay home and enjoy the family.” and all is well.

Which is a wild tangent, but my point is I still think we gamers need to stick together and cut each other some slack. The fact that you love World of Middle Earth and I love Warcraft Online is a teeny, tiny, trivial difference compared to the fact that we both love staying home and playing an MMO vs the people who choose to go to the movies/bar/opera/crack den/sports arena/hiking/ballet as their preferred way of spending leisure time.

Tearing each other down just makes our community weaker. How about we all (myself included, I’m certainly not infallible in this respect) try to be a bit more supportive of each other. We’re all gamers, after all. We’ve got plenty of common ground to cover.

Cleaned up the blogroll some more.

I re-ordered links in reverse alphabetical order. Why? Well I wanted to organize them in some kind of objective fashion, and since almost everyone goes with alphabetical, I figured I’d give the late-alphabet folks some love by moving them to the top for once.

The blogroll is a perpetual work-in-progress. If you want to be on it, or know a blog I should be reading, feel free to leave a comment. Here’s a repost on my criteria for linking to you, reprinted from my last post on the subject:
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If you’re not on there and want to be, drop a comment. My criteria for inclusion on my blogroll are pretty hazy but generally: 1) if you have Dragonchasers on your blog roll, I’ll almost certainly include you unless your blog is actively offensive to me (not very likely). 2) If I read you regularly, I’ll include you as a “public service” for other Dragonchasers readers because I think you rock. 3) If you’re a frequent commenter, I’ll include you as an indication of what great taste in blogs you have. Plus I probably read you as well…I often follow links from commenters to check out your blogs.

If you’re reading this via RSS, please come to the site and check out the new theme that WebSiteTaylor created for me. I think she did an absolutely fantastic job and I couldn’t be happier!!

It’s possible some rough spots slipped through, and if so please let us know via a comment. Thanks!