New Site Design and Layout

July 27th, 2008

The title basically says it all, so if you are reading this by RSS or Email then click through to the site and take a look.

I wanted to redesign the site to create a more personalized look, to reinforce the character that is developing within my blogging voice. While the previous “bathroom” look the site was fine and received a good wrap by most readers, in my mind it lacked the sensory warmth that I wanted my readers to feel when experiencing my site.

Overall I am very happy with the new design as it was an opportunity to alleviate some of the previous layout and design issues. I now have a proper header, text doesn’t burn your eyes anymore, links are noticeable and clutter is removed.

Along with the new design I have again renamed to site to just Daniel Primed, which is also my online alias. I’ll be rolling out a resized header and will be using larger, images in my post as it paints a better picture of what I am talking about and improves flow, expect those starting from the next post.

Of course, fixes such as the contact form shall be done in the next week, for the most part everything is completed. I would love to hear your thoughts on the new design so leave me a comment.

Not Quite the Anniversary

July 10th, 2008

super mario bros 3

It would be convenient for me to crown today as being the first anniversary of my venture into the realm of video game blogging, unfortunately that would be far too easy considering that my step into the gaming blogosphere was quite the slow, transitional one.

A Bit of a History Lesson…

You’ll notice that on the 23rd of November last year I posted up an article titled “Welcome to The Gaming Blog” which if you did notice probably begs numerous questions. You see, for the past 4 years I have been merrily blogging away in my personal blog which I fittingly dubbed PrimeScape. Around February of last year I created a new site to house Primescape with a Wordpress CMS and gave it the address http://danielprimed.com.

It was a few months later that I began slowly shifting my efforts towards video game writing, sticking everything on PrimeScape until I eventually decided that I’d be best if I separate the blog into two; one personal and one gaming, so back last Novemeber I did just that. Since then my focus has been firmly set on improving my video game flavoured writing.

Quick Flick Through the Album

Naturally this past year of blogging has been a challenge. It’s been an uphill battle between my dedication as a gamer with something to say and my inability to fluently translate that something into words. Behind the soft blues and not too saturated to be grey whites the journey to find my feet and on those feet stand has been a struggle. I consider myself as someone who has never been well versed in professional or at least entertaining writing and while the content might seem fair on the outside, it’s taken a lot of screen staring, proof reading, re-writing and research to get to the somewhat lustrous level that it is now. I’m not sure if it comes across but I do try really hard to make everything with my rubber stamp on it to be as good as it can.

Thankfully though, amongst the struggle I have been fortunate enough to be surrounded by a great community of gamer’s who genuinely care about the medium, where it’s heading and also pipsqueaks like me trying to cut a slice of the blogging pie. You know, before I started blogging about games I’d never read a games blog before. I didn’t know where to start, where to even find them! All I wanted was a platform to share my thoughts on games. It’s been through these people, their blogs and support that I have been able to become better accquanted with what exactly it is I’ve been wishing to say. I feel like I’ve my words now, so thanks for that.

A Few Ideas for the Future

Where to from here? The same route as I’m currently on, I suppose. My writing still needs massive improvement so I’ll be investing most of my time on that. I need to tighten up my articles and show you guys a little bit of mercy with the bloated length of my work. I’m also trying to bolstering my writing vocabulary, improving my general punctuation and finally creating a much more distinct voice. Hopefully these will become noticeable changes over time. Thanks again.

Posted in Site Updates | Comments (2)
Tags: blog, daniel primed

Few Tweaks and a Re-Focused Outlook

June 25th, 2008

Another brief status report coming your way. You may have noticed a few changes that I have made to the site, here is a punchy, dotpoint outline:

feel the magic silhouette New Slew of Content Spotlight articles
Removed Sexiest People in Games
Removed Retro Review
Removed Images that Defined Video Games
Added Visual Connection
Added Journals
Removed BlogRush Widget
Added Twitter Feed

Basically I felt that the removed features didn’t match where I want to go with the site. The Retro Review was originally intended to be an overview of older titles but I think that this ultimately fails when A) I’d rather critique then write a technical account B) There are already sites like Wikipedia, MobyGames and HardcoreGaming101 which do this already and do it better.

Despite Googles favouritism towards it, I don’t wish to continue the Sexiest People in Games feature. Once again it is a bit like me pretending to be biopic/Wikipedia role doesn’t really fit me. I do like the idea of Visual Connection though as it is a way for me to congregate those largely image dominated articles together. Journals as stated last time is a platform for me to attempt (read: struggle) to write something of an academic nature.

I have also kindly taken up Twitter in the past month and now it is a part of this site. Yay! If you haven’t caught on yet (don’t worry I was pretty slow with this one too) Twitter is a new interactive site where you post what you are doing in 140 words and less and people “tweet” back and forth. This is a great way for you to stalk me, alas, stalk away!

I also removed that BlogRush rubbish which is 100% useless trash for self conscious web entrepreneurs, just to let you know. ^_^

300 words in and I have already lied about this being brief. No matter it makes an adequate enough segue. I know that the last couple of articles have been colossus in size, while I enjoy writing to such length I would like to condense and concentrate the majority of future articles so that it makes everything a bit easier to digest on your end. That doesn’t mean I will quit the lengthy article because I love them dearly, rather as the title pokes at, I just want to re-focus and concentrate my efforts. Thank you.

Posted in Site Updates | Comments (0)
Tags: categories, twitter

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