What Happened to The Speakeasy?

Like I'd been saying for a long time, part of the upgrade included incorporating blogs into the overall structure and design to better handle and manage the sheer bulk of text articles. I never intended The Weirding to be a wiki for all sorts of reasons, but I did want more opportunity for interactivity; a Content Management System was too much for my purposes, but a traditional, HTML-only website would have made visitor collaboration difficult.

The Weirding covers pop-culture, in general - this is basically an extension, maybe not of my personality, per se, but of my life - my interests, my hobbies, what catches my attention, and so on. I spend an inordinate amount of time online largely because I spend an inordinate amount of time in front of a computer. I have, literally, for half my life now. I played RPGs and read, wrote, and drew comic books for the other. What you are getting is a whole lot of what I designed, created, collected, and organized for my personal use - and a lot of it is text-based.

RPGs require much reading and writing and traditional webpages with a lot of text are hard to read and even harder to manage. A blog/CMS system handles them much better, largely because tags give you an extra navigational tool to employ. But another great thing is commenting.

With this approach, we can achieve the true spirit of role-playing gaming, because visitors and readers can actually contribute and it's all right there! Before, if someone sent in a great idea or a correction, I had to go into the entire page and sometimes it was just too big a hassle. Workaround after workaround, hour after hour... I was always looking for a better way to handle it. This is it; blogs have "built-in forums" and the comments exist right alongside the original content - and can be directly accessed.

If you recall, we had forums for the first couple years, but I shut it down because it only drew spam; policing the forums became a full-time job and it wasn't worth it. The Speakeasy (message boards) will not be returning.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008