Good riddance to that old news

Hello readers and welcome to the brand new RamblePak64.com! That’s right, a brand spanking new domain to actually create some level of brand consistency! Pictured above is, of course, the previous design. It was pretty much outdated when I created it in 2010, and it only became increasingly awful looking as time progress.

Aside from a lot less clutter, you’ll notice that this website is actually responsive! For those not into the web development lingo, that means no matter what device you’re using, the website scales to look presentable and readable. I’ve been wanting to redesign the site for a few years now, but I only finally got around to it. Naturally, I’m using an old version of Bootstrap, a toolkit that makes responsive design easy. I’m also using an archaic version of Expression Engine for the CMS still. I’m the world’s only luddite web developer.

So, why don’t we get to the nitty gritty? First, the new and simpler approach to the blog before I detail why I cut and trimmed a lot of the extraneous fat.

The Domain Change: The most important thing to keep in mind is that any old links will need to be updated. The old domain is going to be live for another year and I currently have a redirect in place, but I don’t know how long I’ll keep that in effect. It’s possible I’ll renew the domain for another year just in case, but otherwise I’m looking to phase “gamertagged.net” out. If you’re using the RSS feed, you’ll also need to grab the new link above and make sure you’re using that one instead!

No Categories, Just Columns: When I originally built GamerTagged.net, the hope was to go from a blog to an expansive community of writers and game enthusiasts to come together and talk games. This big-headed and pig-headed idea led to a huge smattering of categories that were completely unnecessary. Inspired by how Shamus Young takes a column-like approach to his blog, I decided to simplify things down little by little. Games are under Game Log, anime, film, and television are under Silver Screenings, and general narcissistic talk about myself or musings on media and its culture are under Ramblings. Sunday Studies is where I’ll put my religious content that no one wants to read about, while Eh! Steve! and RamblePak64 are kept to their labels.

Unfortunately, I have almost 600 essays loaded onto this blog. I could go back and categorize them all, but that would take an immense amount of time what would be better spent writing or recording/cutting video. All of 2018’s content is appropriately categorized, as well as some items from 2017. I may go back and find select entries I still like reading, but otherwise consider this a “soft reboot” of the blog. Which is nice, given that I’m most certainly not the same person I was when I began blogging ten years ago.

Play Eh! Steve! Right In the Post! Thanks to HTML5 I was able to create a better player for anyone listening for the first time, or simply preferring to listen to episodes via the blog. I’ve gone back and updated every single post with it, so if you ever want to share a specific episode it will already be available in a convenient format.

No Clutter! Just about anything you want to find is visible. Those coming to the blog get the latest entries up front, and best of all there’s a lot less for me to update as well. However, that leads us into what got tossed into the trash, such as “What I’m Playing” and an emphasis on “featured content”. I could not get Expression Engine to update these things easily and automatically, so any time I had to make an update – particularly featured reviews – I had to cut additional images together and update specific pages. Do I even have enough readers to justify that much work? Don’t know, but I figure that “featured” type of content won’t be missed.

Even with working image paths this design was horrendous. Who in the world let me graduate with a degree in IT if this is what I was making?!

No More Search: This is not something I plan to keep permanent, I just don’t think a lot of people were really making use of it. I’ll be tossing it back in at some point, I just need time to figure out how I’m going to style it and if I’ll include fancier controls and options for the user. Given that I’ve removed the extensive list of categories in the full archive, I imagine it will be a good idea to implement at some point to make things easier for users.

No Affiliates and No Ad: Affiliates needed to change constantly as the years progressed, and I’m not sure anyone even bothered to check them anyway. So I’ve made it a one-man show all about me! Or rather, got rid of yet more clutter. The Google Ad was also failing to bring in any real significant revenue, so away it came.

No More Comments: Trying to use Facebook to implement comments was probably a bad idea. I can’t imagine many people would want to leave their real identity out for everyone to see, at least not on my blog. If I get the feeling this blog has enough traction I’ll go ahead and add comments via Discus, but until then… well, it’s not like people are reaching out with comments anyway, so nothing lost.

Boring Code Talk: Switching over to Bootstrap was a major relief. Aside from making the process a lot easier for someone with a day job, it really cut the process down to just raw HTML and CSS. The site is now using HTML5 and CSS3, though I’m not even sure I’m using much of the latter’s capabilities. For HTML5, I’m using a bunch of elements that should hopefully be easier for things like screen readers or other such tools to parse the content.

Most of the code needed no change when being brought into the CMS, but there were a few hang-ups and odd quirks I needed to account for. One was the need to use Javascript to clear out empty paragraph tags that mysteriously show up. Another you may see every so often, when an image looks to suddenly increase in size to fill up the full width of the article space. Maybe there’s a fancy way to get around some images mysteriously being placed inside of a paragraph tag – well, more likely a simple solution I’m over-looking – but with the state of the blog’s design I’m not really equipped for a simple solution.

Otherwise, the process was pretty straight-forward, merely time consuming. I have one or two more tasks to check into but they’re for the sake of making sure all old content will look fine in the new layout.

Hopefully this makes the experience of reading my articles not only more pleasant, but attracts more readers as well due to its adaptability to multiple devices.