Blog News - 23/05/24

I had planned such great things - to be extra productive, to fill this blog with plenty of articles and posts and bring entertainment to the masses. Yet despite this I have barely written anything lately and even my streams have been coming to a halt. That would be because a thing called "life" (what's that when it's at home?) has been dealing me a bum hand recently and I have not really been in the mood to write or appear on your computer screens. This has mainly been to do with some very tragic developments occurring in my actual, real life that have been more important than streams and little miniatures in my eyes and as such have demanded more of my attention than this humble blog. That's not to say I'm completely ignoring the site, but my productivity has slowed right down.

Whilst I will keep the personal stuff out of things, for that is not for the consumption of the wider internet, I thought it would be good to take this time to update you all on what is going on and the ideas I have going forward.

I am going away for a week

I will not have access to my laptop or the blog for the next week as I will be going camping with my wife and my daughter. I had hoped to have some posts ready ahead of time to publish sporadically during the week, and maybe I still will, but I have very little time to be trying to hammer out a week's worth of content over the next night or so. I have spent several days working on my next Persona 3: Reload Stream Summary but it is taking longer than I had anticipated so that might have to wait. I also plan on doing a birthday stream summary covering everything I did on stream on my birthday, but that might have to wait too sadly.

Navigation bar overhaul plans

It has been no secret that I have been somewhat concerned with how my navigation bars have been displaying my posts with some posts not appearing at all and some pages having uneven amounts of article listings. To make the matter worse the sheer amount of menu listings I have is making it increasingly more difficult and time consuming to edit because of the weird and inefficient way Blogger forces me to design them.

The gist of my idea is this. For each section I will set up a page that is not an actual article, much like the about page. Those pages will be where the navigation buttons will link to in the future and these pages will act more like "hubs". This will mean I will have to minorly edit several pages every time I add a post but the theoretical pros of this system should outweigh the negatives. Those pros being:

1. No more missing articles from each navigation button.
2. Less cluttered navigation bar as sub links can be compiled under one page (for example, each 40k army can be found under their own heading in the "Warhammer 40k" page rather than having their own sub links).
3. More streamlined hubs for all sections of the site, for example the Random Sel-X section can have all the awards, current voting pool and stream summaries listed in one convenient place without being a wall of text and grey thumbnails. This also means that any important posts (such as the current voting pool for the aforementioned Random Sel-X) can just be prioritised on the page for ease of access.
   
   

Speaking of Random Sel-X Voting Pools...

I am not a fan of how the games are being voted on at the moment, it is very messy. I may very well be looking into using Google Forms to set up a central voting system going forward, but any feedback would be greatly appreciated.

Also!

Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door on Switch is an excellent remaster of one of the greatest Gamecube games ever made and I have been playing it a lot today. If you have a Switch I highly recommend purchasing it!