Newbie Blogging Initiative: How to get noticed…

All kids love log. And all bloggers love attention. I know I do, attention and log. But as a blogger just how do you get noticed? I don’t know why you are asking me but I’ll give it my best shot…

First off write well and often. People don’t follow blogs that are dead or just downright awful. Once people follow you you’ll find at some of them will link to your blog, both in their blogrolls and posts and your readership will slowly increase. But if you are looking to be more proactive than that then here are a few tips I know other blogs have tried (not me, I’m far too lazy):

• Find a niche, an alternative view point – give people something to think about and they will come back for more.
• Get a gravatar and use it when you comment – that way you build up recognition and people can follow your comments back to your blog.
• Join all the forums you can – post there and people will follow your profile back.
• Look for well known blogs that may want a guest contributor - get a good guest spot and you’ll get known pretty quickly.
• Syp from Biobreak contacted up all the other cool blogs and interviewed the owners – this is a great idea to both get known and up your readership in all the right circles.

This message was brought to you by the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Dr Burro’s Dept of Log!.

 

LOTRO: A bright but brief flame…

Today marks the end of my first annual subscription to LOTRO. As far as I can see it will also be my last.

I won’t go over the reasons for my dissatisfaction with the game again, suffice to say that although the premium wallet “scam” played its part, it’s fairer to say I just can’t face all the bloody pointless grind the game uses to keep the monthly subs rolling in. I can never collect another stupid missing page as long as I bloody live.

So today I’ll move from VIP to free/premium. I think I’ll have to cash some TPs in to keep all my character slots open but that’s fine. I spent last night consolidating inventories and upping everyone’s vault space to 120 with the gold I’d made in the auction house.

After that I tried to restart Ranhold’s trip through Moria but I found I just couldn’t be arsed. I was totally bored.

Sad times. Roll on Guild Wars 2 – let’s hope you can save me

 

Newbie Blogger Initiative: Is it ever ok to rant?

Oh hell yes, it’s just a matter of context & delivery.If you don’t care about alienating some readers then you can rant to your heart’s content in the shoutiest way possible, but if you want to manage how your online persona is perceived then you need to give real thought to not only when & if but also to how you blow off steam.

If you are passionate about something then it’s a fair bet that you’re going to come up against something that annoys you, some development or event that really rips your knitting. Sometimes even the most patient among us (and I do not count myself as on of these enlightened souls) just reaches a point where a red haze descends and our fingers take on a writing life of their own. When that happens you need to know you balanced on a razor’s edge; on one side lays the deep yawning crevasse of ridicule whilst on the other a cold ocean of lost respect and in both lurk the twin evils of error and libel. Your job, should you chose to walk this fine line, is to get you message across with all the passion you feel whilst at the same time ensuring you are correct, polite and, if possible, amusing. If you can do that then your rant will have been worth it – you will feel better, your readers will have had an amusing post to read and the target of your rant won’t feel you are a loon wanting to call a jihad down upon them.

I’ve had several rants on this blog, mostly about technical difficulties or roleplaying dullards I encountered in Second Life and which conspired to ruin my fun. It’s fair to say that since I left SL and started playing MMOs my ranty nature has calmed down a lot and now my only rant in the last year was expressed in a polite open letter to Turbine about why I was not going to renew my LOTRO subscription. Still, back in the day when I did rant I always tried to make the post funny and never actually attack any game devs personally (after all, they are just regular people too and don’t set out to annoy you personally) and instead directed my criticisms at the company, or the direction the management appeared to be taking it in. My advice is to keep your rants polite and on message because if you throw in personal attacks, drag up other issues and generally construct your rant in the manner of a tinfoil hat wearing loon, you will deserve the derision that is passed back at you.

Of course there is a flip side to ranting – the replies. Not everyone who reads your words will agree and some of them may well be moved to comment that they think you are wrong. What should you do about these? Delete them? Hell no! Look, it may well be your blog and the commenter does not agree with your passionately held view, but as long they are expressing themselves in an equally polite and well constructed manner you should let the comments stand – maybe even reply to them, after all this is how adults behave and how discussions evolve to inform. If you treat those readers who disagree with you with respect and fairness then all of your readers, including those who disagree with you, will respect you all the more. Now if some twunt just posts a reply that is offensive or trolly then delete it & don’t give these people the oxygen of recognition as they will only derail your post and dilute your issues – be bigger than they are*.

This message was brought to you by the Newbie Blogger Initiative & Dr Burro’s educational leaflet entitled “I’m alright. You’re alright. Let’s have a ruddy good rant!”

*Mind you, when some lazy git just takes on of your fun rants and uses it to prove a fatuous point over on their blog, I say it’s ok to have some fun with them. This happened to me when some blooger took one of my SL rants and likened  me to the “Leave Britney Alone!” guy. This annoyed me for many reasons, not least being he didn’t have the nuts to say it to me with a comment**, so I took the *ahem* conversation back to him and a fun time was had by all, even him although he’d never admit it.

** But also because the Britney guy was obviously a set up, a piece of performance art and as such had roughly 1,000 time the validity of my original ranty post. I keep saying it – this is a blog about a game and therefore is as deep as a puddle and as meaningful as daytime TV, something my detractor never really understood.

 

Of Mice and Men… This Time It’s Personal!

Remember how I was a-bleating about my inability to play GW2 with just a mouse and keyboard? Well after a very lengthy & bloody useful comments storm on that post (thanks guys – you know who you are and you all really helped!) I decided to try the Logitech G13 gamepad. I also swapped back to my Logitech G500 mouse and have shoved the Razer Naga in a drawer.

Now let me say that although I’ve done this to play Guild Wars 2 I have yet to try it out with Guild Wars 2 as there hasn’t been another stress test or beta weekend yet (I’m hoping there will be one this coming weekend) so I still don’t know if works. Still, I did get to test it out with LOTRO and after mucho head-scratching, heaps of program switching and a naval carrier full of swearing I managed to get to a set up that pretty much worked *and* has the capacity to work for GW2.

At first I tried strafing with the G13 thumb stick whilst moving & looking with the mouse but although it was easy to do, I found it tied my left hand up and I couldn’t fire off the skills. I tried loads more variations, even pulling out the Naga again, but it wasn’t until I had a brainwave over a ham & mayo butty on Sunday morning that I had a break-through. The G500 has a mousewheel that can be tilted left and right for scrolling. Or, it occurred to me, strafing!

Now it took me a looooong time to actually get LOTRO to recognise these small, sideways movements – in the end I found that I had to kill the G500 SetPoint software if I wanted LOTRO to see the side-scrolling movements and edit the keymap file to disable the up/down mousewheel scrolling which was making strafing a game of crazy mouse swingball. But by then end I found that I had a system that worked!

My right hand controls the camera & where I look as well as forward & backwards movement – my thumb sits on the wheel and tilts it left and right for circle strafing. This means I can do all the movement with my right hand so my left hand can sit on the G13 and hit the skills, jump & dodge (which I just made another jump in LOTRO). I took this rig out for a spin in Moria and it worked pretty well, I have to say. It’s going to take a lot of practice, but at least I feel the end result is achievable.

Hopefully there will be a beta soon and I can regain my hope.

Oh, one piece of advice if you are interested in the G13 – get big hands!

 

Newbie Blogger Initiative: Are comments important? Hell yes!

Are comments on your blog important?

Yes. Next question.

What do you mean “Is that it?” You want more? Blimey! You NBIers are a demanding lot!

Look, as far as I’m concerned, right after providing me with a creative outlet/hobby/platform for saying daft things to amuse myself, comments are what blogging is about. Obviously you want people to read your posts otherwise you wouldn’t have written them, but other than a few numbers on a stats page how do you know if people are reading you? Comments! That’s how! You want your readers to be so impressed that they stop whatever they are doing to actually write to you.

So for the love of all that is holy, turn your ruddy comment feature on and make sure anyone can use it (Blogger & Live Journal I’m looking at you – nothing guarantees I will never read a blog again than finding I can’t leave a comment) and reply to them!

Ahhh, replying to comments. Should you, you wonder? You’re busy after all, you have stuff to do, things to write, should you reply to all the comments you get? Well, and this is a personal choice of course, but I would say yes! yes! and double bloody yes! Look, if someone has been good enough to reach out to you, you really owe it to them to say something back, even if it’s a “Thanks for your kind comment!” or “Cheers for that!” Also, unless you are a a huge blog like Massively then the chances are you aren’t going to be inundated with comments so I wouldn’t worry about it taking over your life Looking at my stats most posts here never get a single comment and I’d call 2 or 3 on a post a success. Hell, even though I’ve been blogging here for 5 years the single highest commenter has only left a grand total of 56 comments!

If you want my honest opinion, we bloggers should be honoured that people read our scratchings (especially the drivel I offer up!) so the least we can do is say thanks when they leave us a note

But what to do when a commenter disagrees with you, or is being abusive? Well first off you need to be prepared that if you are posting opinion pieces then you will get people who disagree with your opinions and there is nothing wrong with that – I’m a great believer in allowing such comments through and then replying to them, after all an open dialogue is always a great way to spark debate and that in itself will bring readers to you blog. But if you also attract trolls and idiots who just post crap then feel free to delete it and ignore them – do not take them on because not only is that what they want, but such displays of anger will drive the intelligent readers away from your blog in droves. The golden rule is: Ignore comments at your peril but ignore trolls and idiots at all costs.

As an adjunct to that last point, even though I always advise you always turn your comments on to allow people to interact with you, you must equally always keep some form of moderation in place so that trolls, idiots and spammers can’t just post away with impunity – there is nothing worse than being unable to get online for a day only to come back and find some pillock has spammed a stack of your posts with idiocy and/or filth that has then gone out to any readers following those posts. WordPress has a very powerful but very simple set of moderation functions that help keep my blog free of crap with a combination of ensuring that someone’s first ever comment is held back for my approval as well as comment containing even a single URL is also held back – this way not only can I see that a new commenter isn’t a troll, but I can also intercept any mass Russian lolita pr0n links before they get to my readers. WordPress for the win, I say

This message was brought to you by the Newbie Blooger Initiative and Dr Burro’s Dept. of Mutual Back Scratching.

 

Guild Wars 2: When Animals Attack!

In both April’s beta event and the recent stress test I noticed something happening in the game world that made me stop and gawp in wonder. Something so simple yet so revolutionary that the only other time I have heard of something similar happening was way back in legendary days of Second Life’s pre-alpha existence. Something I have wanted to see ever since I joined my first persistent online world in 2006.

I saw animals attacking each other.

Now lest you think me no better than a bloody-thirsty virtual bear-baiter, let me qualify my last statement – I haven’t wanted to see animals fighting per se, rather I’ve often found myself looking at the lack of wildlife in Second life, and the dumb sword-fodder of LOTRO and thinking “There has to be more to in-game fauna than this…”

You see, in Second Life the only wildlife you ever see are the scripted creations belonging to (and made by) the users – there simply are no animals, no birds, no fish, no insects even that intrinsically exist in that world and that void leaves me with a saddening sense of sterility. Now LOTRO is different – LOTRO has wildlife in abundance, but once you’d got over the fact that some animals attack you whilst others run from you (unless you are an elf, of course) you began to notice something very, very odd indeed… a deer that would flee from your approach would stand quite happily next to a huge, slavering wolf! Hell, more than that, the ruddy great wolf that would nosily chew your legs off if you crossed its invisible aggression threshold appears to be quite happy ignoring the tasty deer stood a mere two feet away munching on lovely grass! How can this be right? Let me answer that for you, it isn’t. It isn’t right and annoys me because it seems so… well, lazy.

Which is why when I came across a wild boar fighting a ruddy great spider in the Guild Wars 2 beta I assumed it was part of a scripted dynamic event I’d stumbled on. But it wasn’t. A little later on I saw a giant wasp fighting another spider and a huge timber wolf brazenly wander up to a pack of moose and determinedly attack and kill them. In fact the more I wandered, the more animals I found in the middle of a rumble – they are wild already, wild and ready to start a fight with their own shadow it seems!

You see Arenanet have managed to do something I’ve never thought I’d see anyone pull off. They have created a world populated with animals that wander and think and fight each other and in my book that is a rather bloody wonderful addition to an already wonderful world. Now, shall we run a book on a fight between a timber wolf and a giant spider?

 

Newbie Blogger Initiative: What should you blog about?

An question that every person thinking about blogging asks at some point, I know I did. I started this blog after my previous blog came a natural end – the thing is, that blog had been written specifically to document the home improvements I was undertaking at the time where as this blog was harder to define. I started off telling a story but it quickly began to morph into a destination guide and then moving into the realms of a journal that found its way back towards being a story-based blog once more before finally settling as a hodgepodge of the lot. This is not a blog with a coherent voice, rather they are legion and they are are all, without exception, as dumb as mules and twice as rude.

Now if my experience is to help you, what can you take from the evolution of this blog? Well, first and foremost, whether you chose to roleplay from inside the game or present hard-nosed articles on its development outside, all you need to do is write. If you find you want to change your style then do it. Just keep writing and soon you’ll find where you are happiest. Sure your blog may not be the first with breaking news or have the most original content (I know I don’t, that’s for damn sure) but none of that matters when you find your voice because people won’t come so much to read what you say as how you say it. Say it well and they will come back.

So don’t worry about what to write, just write and write about what you are passionate about and you will enjoy your blog immensely - and so will your your readers!

This message was brought to you by the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Dr Burro’s pamphlet “Feel the fear and write it anyway: 101 tips for making post titles puntastic!”

 

Guild Wars 2 – how you broke my heart last night…

Last night Arenanet opened their doors for a few hours to run a stress test on their servers before the next beta weekend. Given how things melted last time I can’t blame them, after all they want their betas to run smoothly because if people can’t get in, nothing is getting tested except patience. So it was with a joyous heart that I worked through yesterday knowing that after the kids were in bed I would get a few hours back in Tyria and what plans I had. Exploring Divinty’s reach was to be the order of the day, but not until I had remapped my keys once more to use my latest purchase, a Razer Naga.

Oh the joy of having so many buttons on a mouse! Surely this would mean I would at last be able to fight effectively, surely this would allow me to do more than dash around stabbing wildly at skills with all the finesse of a drunken idiot.

No. It would appear not. If anything it was worse.

Partly the mouse is to blame – it is too small to use comfortably and many of the thumb buttons are impossible to reach without shifting your grip on the mouse itself.

Partly I am to blame – I am obviously not co-ordinated enough to use so many keys and buttons.

Partly Guild Wars 2 is too blame – their key mapping options may well be extensive but they are far from flexible. To use the mouse effectively I need – NEED –  to be able to bind actions to mouse buttons 1 to 3. Hell, being able to *unbind* from 1 to 3 would be a start!

You see, mouse buttons 1 and 2 (the left & right clickers for simpler folk like me) move the camera around and your character forward so to use them in a battle renders my thumb buttons not only hard to use, but dangerous as the added pressure shifts either my camera view or my character (or, more often then not, both). Imagine trying to have a fight when your guy insists on running forward like a loon and the camera swings about as if someone is playing swingball with it. Hell, 90% the time I never see what I’m fighting except for half-glimpses as the camera shoots past it! I had my arse handed to me in every frigging scrap I went into – in fact I can only put the reason I lasted any time at all in fights down to the bizarre movements I made as I must have confused the hell out of the other players!

Now I don’t know if changing my mouse buttons 1-3 would help much but until they allow me to try I won’t know. In the end I had to go back to using my keyboard alone, this time with yet another experimental key map that made my hands ache within five minutes. I’m back to using my right hand on the number pad to move and dodge whilst using my left hand to space-bar-jump and use the skills, which I moved down to A S D F G Z X C V B. The whole set up feels as natural as chewing lego and as comfortable as putting my hands through a mangle.

After my umpteenth death during which I had no idea what bloody skills were mapped to what bastard letter, and cramp finally made my right shoulder burn as if it were on fire, I gave up. I quit trying World v World and gave up exploring in PvE. I switched it all off and went to watch telly instead and felt my heart break because it looks like I won’t be able to ever really enjoy this game, not when all I’m thinking about is how quickly I’ll die in any given fight and how bloody uncomfortable I am whilst playing it.

Please Arenanet, please let us map actions to ALL mouse buttons. And please give us the option to map an action to more than one key or button.

If you have made it this far down this post dear reader, and you have experience of playing Guild Wars 2 or other MMOs, please could you leave me a comment that explains how you map your keys and buttons and how you fight because if I don’t get better soon, I won’t even bother downloading the final version and I don’t want another Call of Duty experience, I really don’t…

 

Newbie Blogger Initiative: How to deal with writer’s block…

If you’re going write, whether for fun or (possible) profit then you are going to face the dreaded Writer’s Block. Sometimes you’re not in the writing mood, sometimes your’re knackered or have too much on in your day to day life. Other times you want to write but nothing pours forth from your fingertips and every word you tap out comes to you like a pine-cone moving through your lower intestine.Sideways. Whatever the reason and whenever it strikes, writer’s block can be a right bastard and no mistake. It robs your hobby of joy (and your working day of its productive reason if blogging helps put food on the table) and can, if it goes on for any period of time, be a worrying thing to experience. If you have it now, then you also have my sympathy – I’m sure you’re rather not have either, but I can only offer so much.

Now there are a metric ton of articles offering advice on writer’s block out there (really – look!) so I won’t waste your time or mine rehashing them. Suffice to say that when the words won’t come then you should take a look at some of these articles – especially if you need food on the table! No, instead I’m going to give you the one piece of advice I’ve always found helpful when I have found myself barely able to type my own name without slipping into a coma. I don’t know where I got this advice from, I like to think a wandering Tibetan monk imparted a nugget of wisdom unto me in my moment of need but we both know that’s not going to be true so I won’t try and pass that off as a likely source. Instead I’ll cut to the chase and say that if you find writing hard, if the posts slow or even stop then the first thing, next and last thing you should do is quite simply this…

Nothing.

That’s right. Do absolutely nothing and then mooch off somewhere to chill.

The muse has left you yes, but she will be back so until then just accept, wait & relax. After all, it’s only blogging. No one is going to die on an operating table, eh?

This message was brought to you by the Newbie Blogger Initiative and Dr Burro’s Campaign to Chill Out and Live Longer.

 

Newbie Blogger Initiative: Some great NBI advice from the sponsors

The super talented sponsors over on the Newbie Blogger Initiative forums have been busy posting a metric ton of advice to help all the newbie bloggers out there.

• Syp has been posting links to newly started blogs: http://biobreak.wordpress.com/category/newbie-blogger-initiative/
• Suzita has produced a brilliant series of guides to using (the excellent & free!) wordpress: http://en.search.wordpress.com/?q=wordpress+tips&site=suzitastarshadow.wordpress.com
• Roger over on Contains Moderate Peril has some great guidance on the art of blogging: http://www.containsmoderateperil.com/newbie-blogger-initiative-some-general-guidance/

Head over to these posts as well the NBI forum for more great advice and help, and why not show a little newbie love and follow the new blogs – I’m going to read ever one of them and I’ll drop some links for you when I find a post that catches my eye.