Fanlistings

Just a thought: How, I wonder, can some people own so many fanlistings and manage to update them all on a timely basis?

I see some collectives that have 40 or more (one collective I just looked at had 82 owned fanlistings!) and think to myself, WOW… Hell, I have a lot of free time and enjoy working on websites, but I couldn’t even manage updating and maintaining 40++ sites. I think the most fanlistings I owned at one point in time was 30, and I ended up closing a lot of them because of lack of interest/activity and a few were removed. Recently, I mentioned that 9 of the fanlistings I owned were removed after getting “3 strikes” over a one-year time period. I felt bad, considering a lot of them were several years old and I put time into them, but hey- sometimes there are other obligations in life to deal with. (Speaking of, there’s yet another reason why Burned-Bridges has been on hiatus so long…)

Short but sweet

Just came across an entry at Random Suprises regarding bite-sized blog posts that got me thinking.

I’ve been blogging for about 8 years and I used to post quite a few times a day when I was younger. I would post links, videos, and images that I found interesting and other musings in posts that were anywhere from a few sentences (10-50 words) to a few paragraphs (hundreds of words) long. Sometimes I didn’t feel like elaborating on why I found something interesting, or how I felt, or why I posted something… it was just a short blurb, something I wanted to quickly share, and nothing more.

Looking back on it, that was when blogging was fun for me- when I didn’t worry about how long a post was, how frequently I had to update, and how a post would be perceived in terms of “quality.” Granted, doing daily memes has restored some fun to blogging, but it’s not quite the same as when I was young and would post short entries on a whim. Posting several short entries on a daily basis seemed very real and personal.

Some may argue that short blogs often lack depth and even quality, but I believe just the opposite is true. There’s a lot to be said for a simple, short-but-sweet entry. Why scrounge for ideas to fit a long, “scroll down 3/4 of the page to read the 30 paragraph entry” blog post when something can be summarized with 200 words or so? Short musings are powerful, and let’s be frank: it can be boring to read a long blog entry about the events in a person’s daily life, unless it is about something particularly engaging.

Aside from the sponsored posts, which I actually very much enjoy writing (and not just because I am paid to write them), I don’t force myself to pick a topic and write about it for the sake of updating my blog on a regular basis. Therefore, if I have nothing to blog about because nothing is going on in my life, and there isn’t something interesting that I came across that I willingly want to write about, then so be it. Writing on my blog is supposed to be freeing and enjoyable- not a daunting, monitored task like I’ve sometimes made it out to be by worrying about perceived quality and word counts.

With that said, I would encourage other bloggers to follow in the same trend and relax already. Don’t be a slave to the word count, which could force you to write more than needed. Try posting a blog entry of 200 words or less and write it in Notepad if you find yourself constantly checking to see how many words you have. Hell, try posting an entry that’s 100 words or less, or summarize your feelings in a sentence or two. It’s liberating.

OMG! B-B.net is alive?!

Aside from the content, which really needs to be revised, a new layout for Burned-Bridges is looking finished- finally! Something would have been up by now, but I wasn’t satisfied with anything I came up with. This layout I just finished working on is the third complete prototype layout for the site, which I have been working on re-vamping for about two years (and hardly getting anywhere.)

I’ll briefly talk you through some of the ideas that I had. I would post screenshots, but I didn’t take any along the way.

When I first started working on a new layout for the site, I knew I wanted to have a graphic background because – when properly used – they look nice. I had a horizontal striped background that looked very much like the Victoria’s Secret shopping bags (you know, the pink striped ones…), and I was trying to build something around that look. The colour scheme was two slightly different shades of pink, white, and black. I was trying to work with rounded vector shapes, but I scrapped the idea when it wasn’t turning out the way I envisioned.

Next, I tried using one of the Colourlovers patterns I made as a background: an ornate pattern based off of one of the palettes I made. Let me tell you- that site has been a lifesaver. Even when I lose inspiration when it comes to making graphics and coding layouts, the colour themes are still there to work with. So, based on what I had in mind (light, feminine, and elegant), I chose one of my favourite palettes and went from there. Long story short, I loved the palette and everything came together nicely, after I changed around the navigation numerous times and worked on it slowly over a period of time, but today I was sick of the colour palette and changed it yet again. The colour scheme is very similar to the one I just posted on this site, but for now I don’t care. The orange and pinks remind me of sherbert, which is surely appropriate for the summer. Plus- if I get tired of the layout here, it is a hell of a lot easier to change than the one for Burned-Bridges, which I have been slaving over forever.

Like I said, the damn content is the only thing getting in the way of posting that layout right now. I don’t want to have ancient content sitting there, so that is going to require a little bit more time and effort… unfortunately. I also want to experiment with rounded div corners and see if I can get them to work for me.

And I really want to host some new sites, now that I am trying to get the domain back up and established again. If you or anyone you know is in need of reliable hosting (hell, I’ve had B-B.net for 7 years and plan on riding it out a few years longer before I get sick of it), please comment and contact me for details!

MagNext Virtual World

If you are bored with fancy video game consoles and are looking to play some basic, yet fun, games on the internet, sign up for MagNext, a free game site by Mega Brands, the creators of Rose Art ®, Mega Bloks ®, and other kid-friendly brands. Even though the game is clearly geared towards kids, I like games of all kinds so decided to give it a try. You could give it a try, too, if only just to see if it would be something your child (or a child you know) could play.

In the game, the player uses marble-like spheres called “Magz” (they remind me of the basic sphere object you create on the canvas and see in the Material Editor in 3Ds Studio Max) to navigate through the games. Collect Magz and customize them with different paint colours, from basic solids to fancy textures, and objects, such as baseball caps and king crowns. In the MagNext world, the player has a choice of five things to do: challenge and fight other Magz in the MagNext Arena, play the iCoaster roller coaster game, view the MagNext line of products in the Showroom and what other players have built with them in the Gallery (coming soon), and race in the Spheron Room. After completing the games, the player is awarded coins and experience (XP) points. The website also has a buddy list and chat feature, all kid-friendly and safe.

I must say that the iCoaster game bored me. I thought it involved navigating the Magz through the virtual roller coaster, but most of the game is already animated. The player watches the animation until the game stops at specific points where the player has to select the missing pieces to complete the track. I did enjoy the racing game in the Spheron Room. The player must navigate a car through a course while avoiding the Mag objects, collecting coins, and using the right boosts to gain maximum speed. I enjoyed this game because it was interactive, simple, and fun, just like a lot of the old 8 and 16 bit video games were.

Paint it black

In Sociology today, somebody mentioned something interesting: There are alternative, “green” search engines that apparently save energy just by the colours set in the stylesheet of the page (the background colour was specifically mentioned, but I imagine that this goes for input boxes, text areas, and font colours, too.) Instead of using a white background with white input boxes, there are two Google-like search engine alternatives that use black backgrounds and black input boxes in the effort to cut down on the wattage used to display the page and therefore save energy.

Curious, I looked up “black google alternative” (on Google, out of all places.) I found this site, which claimed that “an all white web page uses about 74 watts to display, while an all black page uses only 59 watts” and referenced to the website Blackle.com. Truthfully, I like this unintentionally-gothy-yet-green Google alternative, which essentially uses the Google search engine but with a different page style, advertisements, and logos. Blackle, like Google, is also available in other languages.

I always found darker page colours to be easier on the eyes, but now I feel really good about myself: I was probably saving tons of energy in the years that I have been mainly using black and other dark background colours on my website layouts!