Recently in About the Blog Category

I haven't been looking at Google Analytics for this blog in a long time. I was slightly surprised by the results, really. First of all - search (ie. Google) brings only about 60 % of the visitors. I'm used to much larger share. What's even more odd is the amount of direct traffic, about 21 %. That's a lot in my opinion.

My top keywords are three variations of "gameblog": together, apart and with a hyphen. I don't have really good keywords, really, but I get a lot of long tail searches for wildly different topics. I'll just hope people find what they're looking for...

What comes to content, this blog has very few killer entries. The front page is most popular, without any competition whatsoever. The front page has about 25 000 hits so far this year, while the ten most popular page has just 600 hits.

However, I managed to create something unique and attractive this year, and that's the playing card reviews. That category has been a minor hit. I should do more of them, but unfortunately the new job I started in June killed that project.

Some hopeful was looking for "over sized naked playing cards", found my playing card reviews and bounced away, unsatisfied. Too bad... People are also surprisingly interested in the facial hair of playing cards.

I haven't been terribly busy blogging here anyway, but I think I'll warn you now: next year is likely to be the quietest so far for Gameblog. The first half or so, anyway, since our second child is due early January. In less than a month, that is!

That, of course, is totally cool and I'm more than a bit thrilled about it. The new family member is most welcome: we can then play four-player games, once the kids grow up a bit. For now, though, I believe my gaming time will be somewhat limited. Nooa didn't hurt my game hobby a lot -- quite the contrary, since I started the weekly game sessions last year -- but I'm afraid the second child will change that.

Well, that's temporary, like most things with kids. To be honest, I'm not that excited about the little baby phase. Nooa, our charming first-born is now 2.5 years old and rather chatty little fellow. I like that, much more fun than a small baby, however cute babies are.

Gameblog turns five this month. Five years! That's almost ancient when it comes to web sites. To celebrate the blog's advanced age, I decided to give it a bit of a makeover - after all, it has looked pretty much the same for the whole five years. Hope you like it, I think it looks a lot more modern than the old look. If you notice something odd going on, missing stuff or so, please let me know.

This new look is courtesy of Movable Type 4, the brand-new version of my favourite blogging platform. The new version is packed with interesting features and free for personal use - if you're looking for a good blogging platform, Movable Type is an excellent choice.

Hooray! Gameblog turns four today! Pretty amazing. Turns out many of my projects have longevity that surpasses what is generally expected from web fads. I suppose Gameblog will be there after next four years (it should get pretty interesting then, as Nooa will be four years old and in a prime age for his gaming education to start).

Feel free to suggest good stuff I've written and should highlight, if there are any.

I installed a new version of Movable Type, which features tags. So, I've started tagging my entries. I think the tags are a good addition: they work a bit like categories, but are a lot more specific and thus can be a lot more useful in some situations.

Clicking the tags will show you all entries tagged with the same tag. That's a not a big list, yet, but I expect to tag all my entries in Autumn, when I'm bored at work... If you click a tag, you'll also notice that you can subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag, so if there's a topic you're particularly interested in - say, TradeResolver - you can grab the feed and get all the new stuff on that topic delivered to you.

I also have a tag cloud (which is the hip thing right now, it seems).

I'm proud to tell you, my dear readers, that Gameblog has won an award! Gone Gaming Board Game Internet Awards jury gave Gameblog the best session report award for my Essen 2005 coverage. That's not all! Gameblog also got an honorable mention for the award of the best game blog (winner was Chris Farrell's blog, so it's indeed honorary to be mentioned by such an excellent blog).

Thanks for those who nominated me, thanks to the jury for choosing me and thanks for all my readers!

By the way, I appreciate the way they chose Gamefest's GameWire as the best board game news service instead of Boardgame News (which won the best new site award anyway). After all, GameWire started the high-quality board game news reporting.

Here's a list of games. Can you guess the order behind this top ten?

1. Go
2. Puerto Rico
3. Carcassonne
4. Die Macher
5. St. Petersburg
6. Age of Steam
7. San Juan
8. Gang of Four
9. Sunda to Sahul
10. Lost Cities

It's a list of games I've mentioned most often in this blog. Go and Puerto Rico really stand out (mentioned in about 70 entries), others are between 30 and 20 entries. The titles are links to the lists of entries where the games are mentioned.

You can find this information from the sidebar from now on: List of games I've mentioned

After meddling with the colours and the looks at Lautapelaaja.net, I kind of realised this blog looks pretty boring. I mean, just one colour and black and white. More colours! EasyRGB Color harmonies tool gave me some blues and purples and I ended up with this. How do you like the new style?

This blog has been categorized in a terrible way. The division between Less about games and More about games is idiotic. No librarian can be proud of a classification like that, no way. Thus, it's time to re-work the categories. Sorry for the trouble! I'm going through my archives, throwing stuff from one bin to another. As a result, the categories should make a lot more sense. When there are over 200 entries in a category, it's usually a good idea to see if it can be split into more manageable parts.

I'm now running Movable Type 3.121 here. Major changes include new, smarter URLs for entries (old files remain, so links are not entirely broken) and new commenting system. I now support TypeKey, which is a global registration service. If you register with TypeKey, you can use that id to comment in several blogs. In Gameblog, comments from non-TypeKey users are welcome, but moderated.

This is a minor annoyance, but I'm not doing it just for fun - the comment spam problem is intolerable and this is a full stop for all that nonsense. Signing up for TypeKey shouldn't be too complicated and if you're an active reader of blogs, chances are you can use the id somewhere else as well. Of course, signing up isn't mandatory - you can always post anonymously, it'll just take a while for your comment to appear.

Movable Type 3 isn't the most popular option, thanks to the new pricing scheme, but I think it's well worth the $70 I had to shell for it. There just aren't any good alternatives to Movable Type. WordPress is popular, but doesn't work for me because it only supports one blog per each installment. I don't want to have half a dozen installments, I want one entry point to all my blogs and for all my bloggers. Nothing else does it, as far as I know, except Movable Type.