Great, another “Inside Baseball” post
Hi all. Me again.
Uh, been making a few changes around here lately. Nothing big, but since I apparently feel the need to justify everything I do, let’s talk about them.
Replacing Links and Small Web Shoutout with Cheers
My links page needed updating; and anyway, I wasn’t satisfied with it (despite it being, like, my third revision). I didn’t want to work on it. I just wanted to banish it from my site so I never had to think about it again.
Then I remembered, oh. It’s my site. I can just… do that.
But I don’t want to stop linking to other people and sites entirely. Doing so is such a big part of what makes the small web community a community. You’re showing enthusiasm for what others make and helping expose their creativity to new audiences. This is one of our best aspects, and I don’t want to lose it.
I thought about this for a while before landing on Cheers; but once I had the idea, I knew it was the way to go. To me, it has two advantages:
- It encourages context. It’s no longer just a hyperlink; now I can say what resonated with me. It’s a more personal recommendation, which is always going to be more impactful than a button on a wall.
- It’s time-centric. Not “I like this”, but “I like this today”. That tells a greater story, I think. Everything on the internet is ephemeral, to some degree (except Skep’s Place, which is eternal). Ideas come and go. Just because my tastes change or something ceases to exist doesn’t invalidate what I felt at the time, and I think that’s a fact worth acknowledging.
Plus, like I joked about when I launched Cheers—most of my posts take multiple hours to write. It’s nice to be able to say something that doesn’t demand a huge time investment.
Anyway, I figured this setup sort of made Small Web Shoutoutcite> redundant; I can still do that here. But with context this time!
Discontinuing A Playdate With Skep
This was a great idea to get me to use my Playdate more. It still hasn’t entered my regular gaming rotation; more like, I go through phases where I’ll play a couple games, or I’ll ignore it.
Last year, though (especially following the release of Season 2), I hit a stretch where I was bouncing between games pretty quickly. Some of them I spent quite a bit of time with; others, much less so. Regardless, I came to one very obvious conclusion: I did not want to write a review every time I played a game.
Even still, since I was overwhelmed, I kinda stopped writing about any games (refer to previous comment about everything I write being an hours-long process). Time is a luxury, and I have spread myself too thin with so many different site sections. I intended to do a year-end recap of the games I’d played, but then my focus shifted to making the RSS site, and by the time I was ready to start writing again it was the end of March. And anyway, if I’m doing a recap of games I played… well, that may as well go into the Quarterly Game Reports at that point.
So A Playdate With Skep is being retired. I didn’t want to completely delete it, though, so I created a new site section for old stuff that is no longer a major focus for me. The Eleventy Conversion Project lives there now too, since that is really a product of its time (less than a year ago) and was essentially the equivalent of me live-tweeting my tech overhaul; it was never going to be my best work anyway.
So that’s what’s going on around here. Since I’m lacking any sort of outro today, let me reiterate that y’all are amazing for sticking with me. I’m sure you can tell that I’m having a ton of fun writing for you folks, and I hope you’re having just as much fun here as I am.