Robert Birming started collecting links to interesting and inspiring blogging journeys of which most are /timeline “slash pages”. He was kind enough to include a link to my /museum page, even though technically speaking, that’s not my blogging journey but more broadly speaking my internet presence journey. But what exactly is the difference? When is a site considered a blog?

Wikipedia defines a weblog as:

An informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order so that the most recent post appears first, at the top of the web page.

Diary-style text entries called posts seems to be the primary component—and the most important driver. But that still is vague: is a news entry with a timestamp a diary-style text entry?

I was just wondering where to draw the line in context of my own website/blogging journey. My first website from 1998¹ was mainly static: it contained sections such as info about me, code snippets, and a few pages on games I like. Now and then I’d update these, but that clearly wasn’t in a diary-style fashion.

Marc Weidenbaum who maintained his website since 1996 notes that back then the term “blog” simply didn’t exist yet. Having a website meant doing technical things like using writing HTML and using FTP to put it somewhere, reducing its usage mostly to computing enthusiasts. The term became popular when website publishing tools eased the technical pain and really opened up the web.

In 2000, I added a news section, which was the first time I wrote a few sentences wrapped in a table with a title and a date as the table heading. These were primarily site update progress reports, the obligatory merry Christmas one, and a “hey I’ve updated this software download the new version here” entry. It would be a stretch to call these blog posts. There were not many different topics and opinions to be published and they were all categorised under site news. In 2001, forum news was added to dynamically show the latest active forum threads I started hosting.

In 2002, I created a dedicated gaming website where not just gaming news but also (p)reviews were published. I guess that’s the first site that truly had dynamic content: where as a visitor it was worth it to come back once a week. These news entries certainly were informal diary-style text entries but we didn’t call them “posts” back then, just “game news”. The longer articles themselves were timestamped but the chronological order was less important than say an index where you could find any info on your favourite game.

In 2006, the multi-editor game site morphed into a more personal one where I could focus on game-related content as a personal experience to share with the world—this came a lot closer to what we nowadays could consider blogging, although to me it still didn’t feel that way, and I certainly didn’t use the term blog.

In 2012, after cultivating an interest in cooking (and later specializing in bread baking), I convinced a few colleagues to start a shared food blog on the Blogger hosted service. For me, that was the first time I was actually “blogging”, by sharing recipes and mishaps in the kitchen.

In 2013, the first version of Brain Baking was born as a personal tech blog. This was still a very stiff version of a diary and more of a record of the too complicated software engineering things we did at work that I wanted to preserve in case we needed it later. That makes sense as it started as a Wiki. As I wrote on too many occasions before, I never really liked limiting myself to just one topic. It took four more years to finally let go.

It seems that my journey towards the above definition of weblogging took quite a bit of wandering. I prefer the less strict Oxford definition of a blog:

A frequently updated website, typically run by a single person and consisting of personal observations arranged in chronological order, excerpts from other sources, hyperlinks to other sites, etc.; an online journal or diary.

The dynamic content condition (1) remains the same, while my 2006 game-related articles can fit into the personal observations condition (2); and I’ve been timestamping entries since 2000 (3). For me, those are the three essential components that form a blog.

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You don’t need a website to blog. By 2005 microblogging on dedicated Twitter- and Tumblr-like platforms became a thing where frequent timestamped personal status updates still adhered to the above definition.

Besides these more traditional means of blogging, at least by nowadays standards, you can also “blog” on forums. I follow the board gaming adventures of a couple of folks that post their stories on the Board Game Geek forums which luckily comes with separate RSS feeds. If you stretch the definition a bit, even BBS or IRC servers can count as (community) blogs. I’ve been very active on a local forum in the early to late naughties: according to my view, those longer threads—long before Meta’s Threads was a thing—technically count as blog posts.

Just don’t forget to keep backups as you don’t own your publications. Many of these vBulletin-style forums are of course long gone now. That reminds me to go looking for a backup somewhere and put these online together with the rest of my old crap.

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I’ll end with an apt interpretation of the term by Jeremy Wagstaff:

A blog isn’t a publication. It’s a person.

Brain Baking is Wouter.

Related topics: / blogging /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 23 July 2024.  Reply via email.

Two years ago, I initiated a yearly recurring thing called The Board Game Shelf Analysis that hasn’t yet recurred so I figured it’s about time to change that. Here’s the summer 2024 edition of the Board Game Shelf Analysis that’s hopefully going to be a yearly series now!

This time, I don’t want to go into the whole grading debate, but rather zoom in on the deltas: which boxes have left the shelf and which ones were new? The figure below contains a photo of the shelf in its previous 2022 state to the left and its current 2024 state to the right:

Admittedly, the current state seems a bit cramped; it looks like I went on a buying spree—although in my defence, we skipped the 2023 edition and the state on the left was just after clearing everything out.

The box art on the side of the Uwe Rosenberg games on top look great if you stack these aside just like books, but the components inside each box get all garbled up; especially with some of my custom box inserts. It looks like the second section wasn’t changed much. Perhaps I should put Memoir ‘44 back in its rightful place there instead of the Framework box to the left of The Quest For El Dorado.

I did get rid of quite a few games lately, not just making room for others as our modest cabinet can’t possibly compete with the boasting of my friends’ big ones, but also because I don’t want to hold on to games we simply don’t play. The lists below are deltas compared to the own list of 2022¹.

The Gone Ones

• Carson City
• Dice Realms (bought after the 2022 list)
• Nightfall (still for sale if you’re interested)

It took almost two years to clear out some of The Gone Ones from the 2022 analysis…

The New Ones

Again, the columns are defined as follows: game name, BoardGameGeek average score (1-10), own score (4: Great!, 3: Good, 2: Average, 1: Bad, see my grading systems discussion), BoardGameGeek weight (1-5), estimated plays (From ++; played a lot, to -; barely played).

Game	Score (BGG/Own)	Weight	Plays
Fields of Arle: Tea & Trade	8.4 (4)	3.96	-
Framework	7.1 (2)	1.78	+
Railroad Ink: Lush Green Edition	7.6 (3)	2.14	++
Caper	7.0 (2)	2.21	+
Grand Austria Hotel	7.9 (4)	3.21	+
Grand Austria Hotel: Let’s Waltz!	8.4 (3)	3.31	-
Dungeons, Dice & Danger	7.1 (2)	1.92	-
Hawaii	7.1 (3)	2.90	-
The White Castle	8.0 (3)	3.03	-
Jaipur	7.5 (3)	1.46	+
Dice Realms	7.2 (2)	2.34	-
Three Sisters	7.6 (3)	2.72	++

There’s a couple of boxes I’m holding on to for a friend that’s in the process of moving that are only partially depicted in the 2024 photo: a sliver of the gargantuan Gloomhaven box on top of the Magic Planechase Anthology box, The Village, and Dominion Intrigue. That last one was a gift but I still need to figure out how to properly store it among my original Dominion copy. The Let’s Waltz! and Tea & Trade expansion boxes are also stored out of view, with the components snugly tucked away in the base game box. Sometimes one has to optimize every single millimetre of space.

Looking at my shelf now, I realise I need to do another clearing: we have too many smaller 2-player-only boxes (top right), and arguably too many Uwe games although these are pretty hard to let go. Framework and Robin of Locksley might become candidates. Dungeons, Dice & Danger also isn’t very good—sorry Richard. The “roll & write” I’ve had the most fun with is Three Sisters. I also co-own Hadrian’s Wall that’s not in the above list, but I do prefer planting beans and pumpkins to building fortifications and theatres.

The 2024 Play Stats So Far

Since our baby turned into a rebellious toddler we’ve had to dial back hobby time significantly. That means we didn’t really play that many board games the last few months: the 18 plays logged in February turned into not even 5 in June. At least I’m still using the BGG Catalog app to record plays which does provide interesting insights in our play behaviour.

As for the famous H-Index number that shows the amount of games you played at least that amount of times, for 2024, I’m trying to fill in the 10x10 zone created by the BGG plays tool:

What are the main insights here?

• I managed to play two (2!) games with three people and none with more. Wow.
• I do play games solo now and then; when my wife isn’t in the mood and I’m to tired to gather a few friends.
• Most games with high play ranks are simpler, faster games except for Ark Nova and Gloomhaven.
• I played (much) more in January and February.
• I tried out quite a few new ones but didn’t replay them too much. We had a Board Game Arena subscription for a few months.
• My current H-Index is 5 and I’ll probably never reach 10.

That being said, It’ I don’t really like that H-Index stat—or any of them, for that matter—since focusing too much on the above visualisation means I’ll start playing games I don’t really want to play just to fill that 10x10 grid. It won’t be too difficult to pull off but I’d rather just play depending on my mood. There are enough other chores to be done in and around the house, let’s not make board gaming yet another one.

The cross-section of the above play stats with the current collection on the shelf also tells me that most boxes are not even opened once a year. Oh well.

I guess we can fix that by buying—no wait, playing, yes, that’s what I meant—more of ’em!

Related topics: / boardgames /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 20 July 2024.  Reply via email.

Remember that time when after downloading and installing WinZip using Internet Explorer, the next thing on the list was fetching the latest ICQ installer from the Mirabilis website? No? I’ll oblige with another hint in case the memory needs a bit of a jog:

Toc-toc-toc… Uh-oh¹.

I still know my ICQ number by heart: 78822034. On August 2001, my ICQ nickname was ®Ø@d2ºº1, a cool “encoded” version of Road2001. I know this because I still have an ICQ History Logfile covering almost an entire year of messages between me and my wife: the first digital messages we ever exchanged. How cute.

Half-way through 2002, we switched to the new hot chat protocol network called MSN. The last recorded session of us I still have records of is from the first of March 2003. What struck me the most while scrolling through both of those logfiles, besides the teenage cringe, was the gigantic diverse set of nicknames we both went through as soon as we switched from ICQ to MSN.

MSN popularized modern social media’s “current status” one-liners: besides your nickname and your online/offline/away/invisible network status, you could also type in something in a field that stated <Type a personal message>: the beginning of the end. Group (and live) chats were already possible in ICQ, but with every new MSN release, new features such as a status message more and more turned the platform from a chat service into a fully-fetched social media service.

Still, we almost never used the personal message space and instead happily carried on changing our nicknames every odd day—or rather, adding weird appendices an all forms and shapes. I wrote a script to scrape them from the log and came up with 273 different nicks for both of us over a span of 1.5 years! After the Road2001 to Jefklak moniker change, things like:

• Jefklak || woef
• Jefklak || boring…
• Dokter Djos (Of MC Joël of course)
• | | _ _ | | (No idea)
• Jefklak - :-( (Everyone should know I’m down)
• Jef (l) Lieveke (Everyone should know I’m in love)
• Jefklak [ xzibit +3h 1337 ] (Hey I bough a new album)
• Jefklak ~ [ wish I was 25 ] (Good one, I used to be funny!)
• [DivDiv_Klak] *lvl29* (I was playing Divine Divinity)
• KlakJef (or Jefpet or kalkfeJ or …)

…were not uncommon. For some reason, we only did this during the MSN era: my nick remained the same for an entire year in the ICQ logfile. Re-reading these things now, 22 years later, I can’t believe the amount of crap I used to spit out. Will I be thinking the same thing twenty years from now when I re-read this blog post? Perhaps. It was a time of AFK, LOL, LMAO, and BRB: proper preparation for that 140 character limit that would play a major part in another network many years later.

Anyway, I never really liked the UI of MSN: it was bloated and kept on bloating—including those giant internet banners of the early noughties that required installing another tool to tweak and get rid of those. Especially after the release of Windows XP in 2001, Messenger’s UI started accumulating bloat to fit into the hip embossed XP theming. Back then, ICQ was leaner, and even though people were flocking to the network of Microsoft, I still had a lot of friends who, like me, preferred the leanness and cool factor of ICQ.

Having to use two chat programs isn’t that practical, and luckily other software companies like Cerulean Studios started jumping on the opportunity to develop a multi-protocol instant messaging application: enter Trillian and Gaim/Pidgin. I was a happy user of both: Trillian on Windows and Pidgin on Linux. Both programs were also very skinnable and I remember I used a few Trillian plug-ins but can’t recall what they were for. Unfortunately, I did not keep screenshots of the skins and I haven’t found a similar site like The WinAmp Skin Museum.

And then there was something really weird called Odigo which had you meet and chat with strangers that happened to visit the same websites as you did. The best part of Odigo was the “randomized people finder” where you pressed a button and it sounded like a radar scan Pi-iip followed by someone who just downed a cold Coca Cola after the scanning completed: Ahh. Odigo then presented a dozen or so anonymous other Odigo users for you to interact with (inside the circle in the screenshot below).

I met someone from Indonesia that way and we eventually even wrote letters to each other so Odigo’s people finder title is perhaps deserved. Me and my sisters used the scan feature just to mess around a bit; we didn’t know anyone who also used Odigo. On top of that, at that time, we still had a dial-up connection our parents frequently threw us off because they needed to phone. Writing a letter was (and perhaps still is?) the better way to do long-form conversations! This was before my active ICQ and MSN years, in 1999.

My wife and I stopped using MSN in 2008. I had more grown-up stuff to do—go to work and maintain an apartment—and MSN gradually faded away thanks to the rapid advancement in cellphone fashion such as Apple’s iPhone explosion.

Before nowadays WhatsApp, there was Google Hangouts, and before Hangouts, we mostly just relied on plain old SMSes as having your mobile phone with you at all times became a common bad practice. I never used the AIM network and we haven’t even touched upon the two most important messaging networks of yore: IRC and BBS. That’s a subject for another post!

Related topics: / chat /

By Wouter Groeneveld on 14 July 2024.  Reply via email.