This weekend I am offering up another round of site maintenance for your viewing pleasure. Several upgrades are in the works, and should be appearing throughout the weekend.
Tags Away
With the upgrade to WordPress 2.9.2, I can introduce tags, or more importantly, Clouds of Tags. Calvert Games has amassed over 2000 articles in its current database; there are literally 1000s more that were left behind in previous incarnations of the site. Archiving those into WordPress is a job for another day.
I have probably only put tags on 15% of the articles. I will slowly work my way through the archive, tagging as time permits; watch the cloud change over time.
I had to make a few decisions on what to tag, and what tags to create. First, the primary focus of the site (see Site Focus below) is videogames so generic entries such as Baseball, Basketball, Football, and Racing pertain to videogames. Some games such as WKC:I, MLB: The Show, OOTP, and Madden (to name a few) get their own tags. Second, some specific real life sporting topics that I enjoy writing about have been given their own tags. UGA, Atlanta Falcons, Atlanta Braves all get their own tags, while there are also some broader range sports tags to cover NFL and NCAA Football. There is a method to the madness.
Check out the new Tags Cloud on the side-nav; when it actually appears. For an example of tags in action, check out the White Knight Chronicles: International (WKC:I) tag.
Site Focus – Airguns, Videogames, Sports …
And don’t forget the beer! Let’s be honest; Calvert Games lost its direction over the last 18 months. While the focus was primarily videogames, the site did go in directions that did not make a lot of sense. Over first two months of 2010 I am attempting to remedy the situation.
If you have noticed, this year the site has been extremely focused on videogames and sports coverage. I intend to continue to cover videogames in earnest, from my own unique perspective as a contrarian gamer. For me videogames are a hobby, a family activity, and a great stress release. Videogames will remain (or return as) Calvert Games primary focus.
Sports, primarily diatribes and commentary on the Falcons, Braves, UGA, and U.S. Soccer will also remain a staple.
Like it or not, adult airguns coverage will remain; I will keep anything over the top as opt-in have-to-click-to-see-it. However I am considering moving airguns coverage to a sub-domain. Maybe. For me airguns are another great stress relief, so once the weather is nice, look for more airgun coverage.
Stuffs (yes the ‘s’ is intentional) will remain a staple because there is always a place for off topic coverage. You just are not going to see as much of it as you have in the past. I am still going to write about beer, because I have to be me.
Some Categories will go away. For example, Birdwatching (WTF was I thinking) is now a tag; if I happen to write about birding, it will be designated as Stuffs, and as I just said, much less Stuffs than in the past. Same for Chronicles; at one point in time, under the old format, these types of articles made sense, but not anymore.
I haven’t decided yet what to do with D&D coverage. My intentions were sound; just not sure if it distracts too much from the main focus of Calvert Games – videogames and sports coverage.
Popular and Random Posts
I have added a new popular posts widget on the side-nav. Unfortunately it does not grandfather in any of the past history, so going forward articles showing up in this section are either really popular (linked from other sites) or search engines have decided to prominently display Calvert Games articles in their search results.
I am also looking at adding a “random post of the day” – after all, there are 2000+ articles on the site. While I may be biased, some of them are pretty damn good.
Ads and Other Nonsense
The Google Ad space (aka Sell Out) has not made a triumphant return. I think it will at some point. Maybe next weekend. Or a paypal solicitation space for beer money; have to pay the rent somehow.
Happy Saturday!
