I am going to be off line much of the week, working in Edinburgh. Been there before; hope to have some good ale along the way in the fine drinking establishments.
This is the second time I have been in the UK during the World Cup. Last time I was in London; I guess the Scottish crowd will not give much thought to England’s hopes and dreams. I am bummed that I will miss the U.S. / Algeria game, which will probably be ending about the time we are wrapping up work for the day on Wednesday.
Just for the heck of it I decided to pick up some additional domains earlier this morning to go along with .COM and .US. I doubt these pickups will receive additional traffic, but it just did not seem right to leave these available for someone else to reference.
Don’t fret from the lack of updates. I decided to take a mini sabbatical; call it Spring Break 2010!
Regular programming will resume shortly. Stay tuned and you will be the first to know.
I am traveling to Calgary for business; will be back to regular posting action starting Saturday. Check back daily for some articles to help you pass the time. Yes, I have several articles lined up, coming your way in my absence. Most likely I am going to miss a few days of posting, but that cannot be helped.
Happy March! Welcome madness; it’s almost here.
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!
The weather this weekend has been absolutely wonderful – upper 60s and blue skies on Saturday and Sunday. We spent most of our free time outdoors – throwing footballs, practicing soccer, riding bikes, going on long walks, and cleaning up the year. You get the picture. It would have been a perfect weekend for shooting the airguns – the R1, R1 Carbine, R7, and the Marauder – however I never had the chance. Not that I am complaining that there were always kids in my shooting range; maybe next weekend.
Auto Club 500 Fontana
I am watching the closing stages of the race [50 laps left] as I write this entry; rain looms. I only watched the opening laps and this last part of the race. As mentioned above, the weather is too nice to stay inside. Fontana has never been one of my favorite tracks; just wish some of my drivers (Gordon, JPM, Junior, Smoke) where closer to the front. On the occasional look-ins, Gordon has been up front some, but it looks like he has a wounded engine.
Gaming Update
Are you kidding? With this weather? When I was not working on the site upgrade Friday and Saturday night, I was not in front of the TV. I did get in a couple of hours of White Knight Chronicles: International, which I continue to find a lot of fun. From a mechanics point of view, it is actually more interesting as you gain more skill points and build combinations.
Heavy Rain is coming on Tuesday (Feb. 23), followed by MLB 10: The Show (Mar. 2), and Final Fantasy XIII (Mar. 9). Needless to say, I have no idea how I will get in all these games, but I am going to try.
I am considering eBay’ing Madden 10 because I have not played it in a week, football season is over, and I would like to capitalize on something to put towards Madden 11. This is always a challenge – trying to hit the perfect moment to still get something for the game before the upcoming version makes the current version worthless. I am not sure if I am ready to throw Madden 10 away; it’s the best Madden in years and Madden Ultimate Team is a lot of fun. However I have not played it in two weeks, and with a slew of incoming games, my Madden opportunities are probably slim.
I’m actually having the same debate with FIFA 10. Unlike Madden, I have not gotten my money’s worth out of FIFA. The World Cup version will be here in April. I need to do some research to see what sort of gameplay upgrades the new version would offer over FIFA 10. Decisions, decisions, decisions.
More Site Stuffs – Green is Back!
I know I am biased; I love the new theme. I think it is the perfect complement to the original Calvert Games brand, without being overly done. It has taken a long time [calendar and actual weekend work] to get it back to this point. I think it was worth the effort.
As I mentioned yesterday, I still have some maintenance I need to do before I put a ribbon on this puppy and call it clean. I continued to polish the site today, and I have a few other items I would like to touch-up this week. I would also like to add in a few more plugins and widgets; nothing too over the top … just enough to make the site a more dynamic experience.
I have been playing around with a lot of different WordPress themes the last 12 or so hours, and finally found one that I think will stick. It is different than the old 3 column layout, but I think it is nice and crisp. The design is fairly simple and easy to modify. I think I will stick with this one for a while, and continue making it Calvert Games branded.
For those that are interested, I will post a change log at the end of the upgrade.
*****
Update 1 [afternoon]: I am continuing to play around with themes and colors; I think this one will work.
Update 2 [night] Change Log …
There is still some work in front of me. WordPress 2.9.2 includes Tags; I need to see how to best utilize them with all the previous historical content.
I also would like to re-introduce GoogleAds. I am going to research some additional widgets/plugins to make for a more dynamic site. The site still needs more Calvert Games branding, but I am happy with the initial results.
Yea me! I just upgraded from Word Press 2.2 to 2.9, which is a pretty substantial upgrade to [knock on wood] not experience any issues with the upgrade process.
For those of you that are interested, I followed these fairly simple upgrade instructions. Of course, like a good company man, I did a backup, made sure I had my shell access working, and then started the ftp for the updated files.
I have only done initial tests, but everything seems to be working correctly, included the current theme. I figured that puppy was going to die a painful upgrade death.
It looks like a couple of my plugins may not be working, but no worries, as I was planning to add some new ones anyway.
You may see some more wackiness and the like as I continue some improvements over the weekend, but the major stuff is out of the way. Happy days!
I plan to perform some much needed site maintenance over the weekend. Hopefully most of this will be transparent to the masses. Starting tonight you may see some error messages, strange behavior, and otherwise stuff that may make you scratch your head.
You need not worry. While maintenance on this site has long been neglected, I am in the opening throes of moving from the Recycle Bin (call in CG 3.0) back into the realm of Calvert Games. Yes, CG 3.5 is calling. Maybe.
And all the choir girls said hell yes…
I thought it would be interesting to do a quick recap of January. From a gaming perspective, I lost my soul months ago, so longtime readers can appreciate that content provided for your viewing pleasure has been all over the map. Ah, but the winds of change are blowing, and the Recycle Bin (dare I say Calvert Games) is once again featuring a healthy dose of gaming.
For January 2010, the score reads (63 articles**):
**Percentage breakdown totals 102% – 1 article was categorized as sports and stuffs; 1 article was categorized as sports and videogames.
You may ask how this compares to Calvert Games historical averages. I am glad you did! Calvert Games has maintained its current format since August 2004, which is a span of 66 months. During that time 1975 articles have been written, which amounts to almost 30 articles per month, or an amazing one article per day. Take my breath away!
As with the January monthly percentages, the “lifetime” totals are calculated based on category counts applied to total articles, which slightly skews the results higher than the expected 100%. In other words, there are ~100 articles that are in multiple categories.
All-Time (current format as of August 2004):
***Miscellaneous contains Airguns (61), Birdwatching (5), Chronicles (7 – which are really Videogame related articles), and D&D (8) articles.
I should probably put this on the About Us page of the site. One of these days I will get around to it, but since there is only me in us, I have not gotten around to putting up an About page. Sue me.
It looks like the site is becoming rather seasonal. Videogames in the hot summer months and the cold of winter. Football, some video games, and airguns in the fair weather months.
Hobbies come and go, and while this site was originally dedicated to videogames, and most sports videogames, it has morphed over the years. While the last two months have seen a heavy return to videogames, I figured I would give everyone fair warning that Georgia and Falcons coverage is about to pick up, and a return to some adult airgun coverage (minus the graphic kill shots).
Current interests …
So you will continue to see a little of this and that, but the roots of the site are still founded in videogames. When I started this blog I did not have Falcons season tickets and I had not taken the plunge into adult airguns.
Stick around. It will be a fun ride.
Finally had a few minutes to make this place look a little more like home. I have been putting in lots of minor tweaks and whatnot, hopefully all for a better end-user experience.
I plan to do more housekeeping in the coming days, but all that matters today is that Mean Green is alive and kicking.
Webdanzer is now a blogger at Webdanzer’s Spin and Ted Leiker (i.e. Grantofan) has gone blogging with Granatofan’s Corner. I wish them both the best of success and look forward to reading the creativity that flows from their new-found homes.
Now we wait to see if Adam and Kevin join the party with a blog of their own, join another site, start up something fresh, remain low-key, or something else equally exciting.
I guess I am just a bitter b*st^rd about the whole php Nuke fiasco. Nuke is not a bad CMS by any stretch, and it certainly proved its usefulness to me over the last year, but this junk is completely unsecured and hack prone.
Nuke Cops is a fairly respectable site when it comes to securing a php Nuke deployment. They have 1000s of registered users, and it is the first place a php Nuke admin should look to find the latest downloads, mods, and security fixes. It really is a one-stop shop for php Nuke security info.
Too bad Nuke Cop’s user ban system is so f’ed-up. Seriously. I kid you not – their system completely sucks. After the first couple of hack attacks on the previous manifestation of Calvert Games, I decided to explore Nuke Cops to see if I could come up with a solution. I made the mistake of including “script” in one of my searches, thinking about the “admin script” add-on. Too bad for me because the “admin script” is actually “admin secure” and I later learned that fortress (another php Nuke security add on) was responsible for the auto-ban.
And by the way – admin secure is not a good solution in and of itself; it should be run in conjunction with other security scripts such as Fortress.
Fortress is a pretty cool script; I encourage all php Nuke sites to run it – I think it was responsible for finally eliminating the hack attacks on my humble site. While looking at the code I learned that sending the word “script” through a request would trigger an auto ban (assuming a site has this option enabled). Sure is helpful for stopping injection attacks, but down right piss poor for users. I mean, who would not search for the word “script” on a security site (i.e. Nuke Cops) that provides scripts for a CMS script (i.e. php Nuke)?
To this day I still cannot get to Nuke Cops – I am presented with “Banned by BAD-TAGS.” So Nuke Cops is now on my official wanker list. Why have an auto-ban system that does not even provide any sort of contact info “just in case” a mistake is made? Pretty poor decision on the part of Nuke Cops.
Thankfully cheers go to Computer Cops, which is incidentally run by the same guy that founded Nuke Cops. The Computer Cops community was extremely helpful in getting my php Nuke based site secure. The owner even provided me with contact info for the Nuke Cops guys, but no dice. No reply; banned to eternal damnation.
Nuke Cops and BAD-TAGS can jerk off for all I care.
I had something rather glorious to say, and it was said, but that damn hack attack blew it away. Can you tell I am bitter? This time I made a backup! Lesson learned; I may be ignorant, but I am not stupid.
I will try to recap; after all it is only fair to have a historical explanation to the former staff (Adam, Derek, Kevin, and Ted) and the once loyal readers of that previous entity known as Calvert Games. Besides, it brings about some closure, and helps set the tone for where I am going with this blog.
So the question on everyone’s mind is “why?” Why close Calvert Games?
Three years ago I answered my own call (for “the love of the game”) and started Calvert Games after writing the following:
So it is up to the fans, the true “hard core,” to revitalize the hobby. When was the last time you posted a review to your personal web site? When was the last time you posted a review to a message board or Usenet? Give it a go. You will feel better about yourself, and you will provide a service to fellow gamers.
Reviews used to be free. Freely posted, freely distributed, and free from the Monkeys [banner ads]. Remember, it’s not about the money; it’s about the love of the game.
I am biased, but we (the staff) met the call with a no nonsense approach; those guys were the best. Damn good bunch of guys, and great writers to boot! I would say that my staff was the best staff that money could buy – of course I got off on the cheap! I am sure our friendships will last and hopefully transcend the break-up of Calvert Games.
So we come full circle – why? There are a bunch of reasons – maintaining a website grew tiresome, the hack attacks wore me down, it became a burden to review and analyze games instead of just playing them. Gaming is now mainstream, and “breaking down” games became irrelevant (no offense to Adam, Derek, Kevin, and Ted). In short, it was time for a change.
So where do I go from here? What you are now reading is the new Calvert Games; just call it version 3.0. No fuss, low maintenance, carefree, no pressure; just good old fashion short takes about … well … pretty much anything that I happen to be pondering. OK, I admit that the verbose style will most likely live on, but I think something can be said for brevity.
Calvert Games was officially launched September 27, 2001 – it was pretty barebones, and more or less hit the mark despite the Mickey Mouse look and feel. June 2003 saw a major overhaul of the site – the switch to a php Nuke based site brought about Calvert Games 2.0. The blog you are reading is my attempt at a simpler, more interesting format, that hopefully will provide me with an interesting outlet, and maybe, just maybe, entertain a reader or two.
So you see, Calvert Games continues, just in a new, different format. Lift a cold one or two; I know I will; and as long as gaming remains a pleasure, watermark breasteses (thanks for the laughs Don) and Calvert Games will live on to fight the good fight.
