I was working on the Daily Blogroll this morning, and I uploaded it to Github, as normal. When I went to verify it made it safely and that Github Pages had recompiled the site, I found that the whole site was dead. All I got was a Cloudflare error that insisted that while Cloudflare (host of my domain name’s DNS records) was working, my site was just gone.
Wow. My “definitely need to go into the office day” turned instantly into a “I guess we’re going to work at home to fix this day”. The Github Pages certificate had expired, and it couldn’t make a new one because Cloudflare was proxying the DNS records and so I had to turn off the proxies, let Github do its thing, then turn them on again, and after a couple minutes for the certificate to come up, everything was fine.
But while I was there, I checked out the Cloudflare stats on the Daily Blogroll site, and… I am getting an average four hundred unique visitors a day there. Wow. Totally regretting my decision to not put ads up there now, lemme tell you.
Anyway, I added a bunch of new blogs to the blogroll; one of them is an experiment that if it works, great. If it does not, it’s gone. It’s the first forum I’ve added. I’ve been looking for single author blogs, and forums tend to be a little… unpredictable. But it has good content, so we will see.
I had a bunch of my favorite bloggers on “required” — if they posted, it made it on the blogroll. I have toned that down somewhat in order to let newer blogs have their chance, but I’ll keep adjusting it. I want to see everyone’s posts, but there’s only twelve slots on the blogroll each day and I like keeping it to that number. This blog, westkarana.blog, is not on the required list btw. Chasing Dings is.
So, who are the newbies?
READ ONLY MEMO
Wes Fenlon is a senior editor at PC Gamer. READ ONLY MEMO is his personal blog covering the emulation and retro game world. I’m all over that. I stumbled over his blog while looking for blogs about Quest 64, and this won’t be the last blog I found that way.
I do feel that the Daily Blogroll is moving away from the “Blaugust all year round” idea that I had at the start, and more toward the “These are things I, Tipa, am interested in” idea, but I do feel video gaming is at least adjacent to MMOs, and I have to admit that I am not as interested in MMOs now as much as I once was. I didn’t outgrow it, just tired of having to fit my fun to someone else’s schedule.
nicole express
I’ve been reading Nicole for a little while. She’s a gadget geek with a focus on Japanese games; arcade games; handheld games and so on. She’s a terrific writer and I think that even if you don’t have an interest particularly in what she’s writing about, you’re going to enjoy reading about it anyway.
RPG CODEX
This is the forum I was talking about. I’m iffy about it, because having randos get featured here is a grab bag, and forums can so quickly go south. But I have a bunch of nostalgia for forums; wasn’t just twenty years ago that all the serious gaming conversations took place on forums. They’ve been replaced largely by Reddit and similar, but still.
RPG Codex is an old school forum with a bunch of insightful regulars and wide ranging interests, and they start new main forum threads at a slow enough pace that they won’t dominate the blogroll. If it’s useful, I’ll keep it. If not, I’ll toss it. It’s on probation.
Quarter Circle Forward
Yeah, I found this blog through Quest 64, but I regret not having discovered Andrew Lokken’s console gaming blog before. He’s an infrequent blogger, but when he does write, he writes wonderfully about console and PC games, old and new. Despite the fighting game influence in the title, I haven’t seen any fighting game content from him recently. He needs to step up his game. Otherwise I’ll have to resurrect my old “I Just Button Mash” blog. You know, take up the slack.
Buried Treasure
John Walker, co-creator of Rock Paper Shotgun and late of PC Gamer and many other commercial gaming blogs, keeps Buried Treasure as his place to celebrate weird games that you’ve probably not heard of; but you probably would want to.
John and Wes aren’t the first two pro writers on the blogroll; Syp of Bio Break was there first. And many of the bloggers have Patreons, Ko-fi and other ways to send them thanks in a spendable way, though I’m unsure how many earn their living from it.
I just appreciate that even after spending their day writing, they can spend their “me” time writing just a little more.
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