I'm re-re-revamping this blog back to NecroRogIcon.

My plan to fully investigate every major MMORPG never got jumpstarted. My best experiences with these games are with my close-knit group of friends. I enjoy playing a few great games rather than sampling them all.

Oh I'm bound to still throw my opinions around. ;)

I'm no longer a tight industry insider, but I still get the urge to swim in those streams now and then. Overall for this blog however, too tight of a focus just left me less inclined to write, it felt too forced and thus my updates became few and far between.

For a few weeks there, I wasn't even sure if I wanted to keep this webspace at all, it felt like it was just an old shoe that I hadn't thrown out because I'd had it forever. Plus, I've become more of a private person in recent years and I'm not always comfortable with such a public space.

But I need somewhere to vent and stream my thoughts, whether they be about Age of Conan, Tabula Rasa, or some brand of mustard that I happen to like. This is that space, so I'll relabel it appropriately as such.

MMOROG as a name also felt a bit too cult-of-me. Heh, certainly NecroRogIcon is too, but it just suits me, it's more apt.

I'm currently working on converting this blog + a whole bunch of other sites to Drupal. I'm also restructuring my entire server and database setup. So far, it's a bigger task than I had imagined. You can read about my efforts if you wish on my work-in-progress blog: News @ Gameslate.

In the meantime I've been posting less here, not so much because I'm so busy, but when I've got something new on the horizon the incentive is low to add to the pile. It's mostly just an in-my-head thing, because logically I know that a couple more articles in a database of ~1000 isn't going to make much difference in the conversion process, but still it doesn't feel as productive.

I'm looking forward to this blog thriving in my new working environment. I have a few world domination plans here and there. ;)

I've just made a small update to the MMOROG comments->forums bridge, enabling a template theme that matches my blog better, although it still needs more tweaking.

Overall, my forums site will still use the LeftHandPath theme, but I'll work on making appropriate themes for all of the sections supporting my other sites. This is all part of my attempt to consolidate forums for the numerous sites I update.

I've just installed a new comment system for MMOROG, using a Wordpress <--> MyBB bridge.

The plan is to migrate comments over to my forums @ Left Hand Path. I'm hoping this will put a stop to comment spam (I weed through it daily here) and reduce trolling, by requiring registration on the forums for commenting. It should also let me integrate some cross-traffic between my sites via centralized forums.

For the moment, old posts will remain on the old Wordpress comment system. I may change that later, but there are certain posts where I do not wish to disrupt conversations in place.

This change may bork pingbacks and trackbacks, but honestly the value of those has degraded significantly from spam and link farming exploits. I'm not sure if RSS will be affected, but I'm far more supportive of web-browsers than feed readers anyway.

Eventually I'll make a matching theme and try to autodetect visitors via MMOROG so the look and feel stays consistent.

The updates and transformation of this old blog from NecroRogicon »» MMOROG are almost complete. I'm sure the regular visitors here have noticed a whole whackload of layout and feature changes. I've added polls, styles that support narrow browsers, an all-in-one archive page and of course the tags and social bookmark links, which brings me to...

Social Bookmarks, do you bother using them? I've been slow to adopt them myself, partially because I've felt they're mostly toys and back-patting tools for web-design geeks, moreso than other social networks and the so-called Web 2.0. Yeah, it's fun to make a Tagcloud and in theory with the social bookmarks I'm both supporting my audience and giving opportunity to let it grow. But I'm also an anti-clutter and keep-it-simple kinda guy and these things seem more complex than they need to be.

Am I in the minority here though, have you folks passed this geek by and embraced these? I've thrown a poll up on the topic to find out if I should keep the social bookmark links. Right now I'm providing links for Digg, del.icio.us, Furl, Newsvine, Reddit, Stumblupon, Blogmarks, Ma.gnolia, Technorati, Yahoo! Bookmarks and Slashdot Bookmarks. You can click these in little icon boxes below each MMOROG article.

Perhaps instead of trying to support a myriad of social bookmarking sites, I should just focus on one great system. But which one? Wikipedia lists dozens.

{democracy:3}

I'm in the process of transforming this tired old blog of randomness into a much more focused outlet for my opinions and info on games, especially online games and particularly the MMO genres. NecroRogicon was a good name (thanks Cancerboy) but MMOROG represents more directly the new direction I'll be taking here.

I'll be archiving old articles as "off topic" or something similar and I'll also pare down the topics to game related categories.

I may or may not be updating Wordpress, it depends on whether I get around to it. I'm aware that my RSS feeds from this old version are kinda messy, but I'm oddly not much of a feed nut anyway.