State of the Blog – 6 year Anniversary (post #750)

Timing of this round-number blog and anniversary of this site getting activated coincide so let us take a look back at the mission statement; it was brief enough I can reproduce the whole thing here:

Mission Statement: dusting off the old, creating the new

So – running bottom to top; on sharpening up publishing skills – oops. Even recognising this is a clunky set up with Blogger, I Cast Light! is an exemplar of how this place could look a lot shinier. Something to work on.

As a notepad for work in progress this place is serving well – from the currently hosted Hexcrawl25 experiment and lessons learned from that and running hexcrawls to a place to Spelljamming and astral musings the challenge of shaping up some half-formed musings into a table or a region or some lessons learned has been useful to me.

In hosting tidied up old material from the 90’s/00’s era 2E/3E games I ran – not so much the content of those original campaigns but some hopefully useful campaign retrospectives and lessons learned write-ups. Not sure my hastily sketched campaign notes actually serve much use for folk – I kept a lot of it in my head, the notes are aides memoire more than helpful to someone else.

So … somewhat achieving the declared mission? The original mission statement missed the three big things I reckon anyone would mention this place for – the Shiny Weekly Links, game reviews and the data posts so on that basis it is not reflective of what goes on here but an interesting marker of what I thought I was going to be doing.

On Content

The cycle of trawling the blogrolls to keep abreast of things, posting what catches my eye to the Shiny Weekly Links and then testing out what I find at my regular tables keeps me from getting too stuck in my ways.

Consciously considering what I come across through the lens of whether it is an improvement I can work into my DM’ing is a useful lens for sharpening up my own approaches both to gaming and to blogging. Feeding those thoughts and learnings back here keeps the cycle going!

On Traffic

Things have been busy this year so far with a few notable drivers
* The sorcerer from my home campaign bought me xaosseed.com and seedofworlds.com for my birthday
* I see a thing ‘leaks.com’ turning up a lot (bots? AI-scrapers?)
* Traffic is beginning to come through notably from Bluesky.
* The restarted OSR blogroll drives some traffic – even though the interaction in likes and responses on the blogroll is quite subdued

I figure TTRPG players are not appearing in vast new quantities in places they were never seen before so when I see odd countries pop up in my top 3 for any given time period, that is probably nonsense.

On Comrades

Once more I must thank the following comrade-bloggers from whose sidebar blog-rolls readers find their way here. Many have appeared before:
DIY & Dragons,
Nothics Eye,
Retired Adventurer,
Archons March On,
Shuttered Room,
Bruce Heard,
Lizardman Diaries,
Weaver.skepti.ch,
Chaudron Chromatique,
Ynas Midgard,
Uncaring Cosmos,
Kelvin Green,
Awesome Lies,
Spot Hidden,
Wierd Wonderful Worlds,
A Continent of Banalities,
3d6 Polar Bears,
Advanced Mystery and Manners,
Prismatic Wasteland,
Beneath Foreign Planets,
Taskerland,
Tim S Brannan and
Spriggans Den
plus new appearer Sundered Shields and Silver Shillings

As ever, I greatly appreciate being on your blogrolls – that human touch is ever more appreciated as the machines swarm ever more thickly about. If you do not already have these folk on your blogrolls, add them!