Blogging

[WILL]

Hey everyone, I just wanted to discuss the Blogs feature of PGD to see what everyone thought about them. It's been many months since we upgraded to the new vBulletin software and with it came the feature of being able to start your own blog on this site.

I'd like to know if you liked the feature and if you are not using it, are you considering it? Should you not want to use it, why? Is there something that can be improved by it or is there simply another site out there that you'd prefer to blog on or is blogging not your thing?

Please drop a reply and let us know what you think about Blogging on PGD.

[Carver413]

Well I tried my hand at the whole blogging thing and it only ended in disaster. I hit the save draft button so I could work on it latter but instead it posted it. this made me less then happy so I deleted it thinking that would end the problem and I could try again later. that didn't really work ether because it was still there it just said deleted. and if you clicked on it you could still see what was written even though it was deleted. I finally had to go in the edit mode to erase what I had written as there was no way to un delete it even though I could edit it. I don't really see me blogging again after all that. at least not on this board.

[WILL]

Hmm yeah I can see how that's frustrating. One of the things that might be a bit unnerving about vBulletin is that much of the content that you have posted and/or deleted will remain for YOU and the admins to see. So even though you can see it, others can't. Except for me and the other staff of course.

I'll agree that saving as a draft isn't the nicest it could be right now. I'm looking forward to their improvements on this in the near future.

Sorry about the frustration. I hope that you would try again perhaps after the blogging has gone through some improvements?

[Carver413]

Yes I would like to try again if things worked as expected.

[chronozphere]

I am planning to start a blog but not on this site. That is because I intend on blogging about very different things (not neccesarily pascal or gamdev) and because I really want to use my own webspace and domain (which are still unused). That would also allow me to pick my favorite layout etc. Finally the story above doesn't motivate me to use the PGD blogging facilities at this moment.

[farcodev]

"Thought about using it, but can't think of what to blog. "... and maybe people should post on which topics to blog, a little direction always help

[User137]

I don't really see a difference between a blog and forum thread... I rather make a topic about something when getting new ideas or anything, even if its for tutorials.

[code_glitch]

Guess what option I chose...

Sometimes its nice to post and not worry about cluttering threads etc... Ironically, people do read posts, but hardly ever comment bar a few rarer exceptions

[WILL]

"Thought about using it, but can't think of what to blog. "... and maybe people should post on which topics to blog, a little direction always help

Well a lot of people like to show off what they do in their game development. A perfect example is Sascha Willems who shows off some of his great projects and some of the cool stuff he does behind the scenes with it. Michael Pote was another, but his poor old site fell down some time ago. Should anyone ever want to travel over to GameDev.net and check out their Developer Diaries that their members have posted, you'll see some interesting stuff too.

I think some of the creativity has fallen away from this site. This is probably due to all the changes over the last few years. I think it wouldn't hurt for those of you who still come up with a lot of neat ideas for games and game development to share those here. In a blog or in forum threads. You can even take a look at RedAntGames.com (my own profile site) and see some of the things I've posted there too. Then there is some of the existing blogs you can read there now and I've had my own blogging account on Blogger.com which you can take ideas from too.

Sometimes it's nice to just blog about games and fun ideas that don't go anywhere too. ie. What games have been distracting me from programming lately.

[WILL]

Yes I would like to try again if things worked as expected.

You know it might not have actually shown it to everyone, just you. Usually when something is not officially posted, if shows a little red notation stating that it's not yet published. Was there a bit of red text to that nature? You might have mistook that it actually posted it publicly when it only showed you the post as it would look when posted. News acts much the same way for us admins and moderators.