Blogging update
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Behold, the Gaming Glut of 2007, she is upon us. We here at Buttonmashing.com are well aware and are ready to go with the blogging you crave.
I haven’t been able to blog lately as we have family visiting from out of town. I was busy last weekend and I’ll be busy this week entertaining them (which thankfully includes lots of 360-time in the form of NCAA 08, Forza, and Burnout, so it’s not a total loss) but I don’t have as much time to blog as I’d like. Heck, I don’t have as much time to game as I’d like. I still haven’t finished Bioshock, which I must do before Tuesday. I hope to get to that soon.
We still have some good stuff on tap. Nat has told me he’s working on some Metroid Prime 3 posts and he just picked up some PSP games, so we’ll be hearing about those as well. He’s really enjoying MP3 and I am jealous. I need me a Wii!
Dark Reyule has been busy on the 360 front and he’s mentioned he’s got some reviews in the works, possibly one for Two Worlds. I know he’ll be busy with Halo 3 once it drops. We’ll be giving it the co-op business together.
I’ve also been asked by video game blogger extraordinaire Kyle Orland to guest-blog at his review site, Games for Lunch. The premise of the site is to take a game you’ve never played before, play it for an hour straight and then write up your impressions based on your first hour. I’m thinking of doing a Pixar game on the Xbox 360, something along the lines of Cars or Ratatouille (which I saw with the daughter and absolutely loved). I’ll probably play the game with the kiddos watching so I can get their impressions along with mine. Should be interesting. Of course, I’m always open for suggestions. Let me know of any 360 game that may have flown under my radar.
Finally, since we are almost seven days away from Halo 3, I’m declaring it Cuteness Overload Week here at buttonmashing.com. Since I won’t have a lot of time to dedicate to blogging, I’ll be going the easy route with a heaping helping of cuteness so cute you won’t be able to stand it. It’s just to remind everyone it’s not all about blasting aliens and pwning noobs on Live. There’s more to gaming than that. Sometimes we just need to be reminded.
It’s a great time to be a gamer.
(As an aside, tonight was the Prison Break premiere! What did you PB fans think?)
k2 0.9
I’m finally making the transition to K2 0.9, which was released last week. Things will look hairy during the transition.
This message will self-destruct in 24 18 hours (I hope)
Update: So far things have gone pretty swimmingly. The two coolest additions that I’ve made (so far) are the Sidebar Modules (which will be mostly transparent to the reader) and the Subscribe to Comments.
The SBM plug-in makes adding, editing, and removing content on the sidebar much easier, including the ability to choose which modules show up on the main page and what modules show up on individual post pages (like this one) and static pages (like the Carnival HQ).
The Subscribe to Comments plug-in is quite nifty. After commenting on a post, you can check the little “notify me” box and you’ll get an email anytime someone else comments on a post you’ve commented on. Very cool and very handy.
I should wrap up the rest of the tweaks, time permitting, before the weekend.
Buttonmashing.com turns 2!
Help me blow out the candles on buttonmashing.com’s second birthday cake! It’s hard for me to believe that another year has passed, but two years ago to the day buttonmashing.com went live.
A lot has happened in the past year, both here at Buttonmashing and in the gaming community as a whole. Some highlights:
- The GTA Hot Cofee scandal (which will not go away!)
- My blogger validation came as I obtained a “stalker” (who is really just a friend that wanted me to discover Harry Potter)
- I noticed a lot of posts trying to refute all the crap that Jack Thompson spewed. I’m particularly fond of this one, which also helped on a poor gamer to convince his mom to get him Resident Evil 4 and helped another lost soul with his homework.
- The 360 was launched on the world, and I didn’t get one. Poor me.
- A whole year of Carnivals, including one held at Slashdot Games.
A crazy year, indeed. Thanks again to all you who’ve stuck around through the thick and thin, to all the Carnies, and to everyone who’s ever read/commented on/linked something here at buttonmashing.com. I appreciate all the feedback. It’s been a great two years. Here’s to another great year.
Before I blow out the candles, I should probably make a wish… (DS Lite… DS Lite… DS Lite…)
House Cleaning
Things might get a little wonky around here, I’m going to be tinkering under the Wordpress hood. I’d like to update the look of my site with a more appropriate banner and color scheme. I’ve also got a backlog of posts that I need to tag. I hope it doesn’t make the feed go screwy. I apologize in advance if it does.
I’m also going to upgrade to the most recent Wordpress install and update any plugins that may have been updated.
We’ll get to our regular scheduled program shortly.
A milestone
Over the weekend, buttonmashing.com received its 100,000th hit! May not be much, but I was pretty happy about it.
Onward to the next 100k!
Extreme Makeover
Buttonmashing is going through plastic surgery (a little nip here, tuck there) so things may look wonky as I make changes. With a new theme (that obviously isn’t in English) there’s a lot to do here, but things are starting to come together.
Update - Since the anesthetic hasn’t worn off, we’re going in for a second pass. I really like the way the dimension 2k theme looks but it doesn’t completely work and I’m too lazy to translate German so I’m hunting for a new theme. Hopefully it won’t be too hard to get everything looking the way I want it.
Update 2 - I think I’m sticking with my current theme, I like the way it looks and while I’ll be making a few changes, I think I’m pleased with the looks. At least for now.
Update 3 (4/13/2005) - I’ve finally added my blogroll to the sidebar along with some Google Ads. I don’t have to pay for hosting just yet but my free hosting will be ending soon, so any clicks on the Google Ads would be appreciated. I would still like to replace the header graphic, but I don’t have time right now, time to go play some Halo 2 online.
Wow.
Amazing. I am so thoroughly impressed with WordPress right now, I’m at a loss for words to adequately praise it. I just imported nine months of Blogger posts without a hitch. Setting up WordPress has been simple thus far. Now that I’ve got my posts imported, I’m gonna make sure everything looks okay before I move on. We’ll move on from there.
Update 1: Man, it just keeps getting better. Using Bloglines export feature (export to OPML file) I have now imported all my links from Bloglines. I still need to organize them and there doesn’t seem to be an immediately easy way to use Bloglines to update my links, but I’m sure someone out there has solved that problem, too. This is good stuff!
Update 2: Well, the links are organized. Next it categorizing all my old posts. I may put that off until later. Perhaps I’ll try a plug-in or two.
Update 3 (2/24): The process of converting my old Blogger posts continues tonight, I will make sure all of them are all categorized and edited for grammatical errors. Then it’s on to themes and plugins!
Update 3 (2/26): Posts have all be categorized and I’ve been looking at various plugins and themes. This is seriously great stuff, I can’t believe how seamless and easy it’s all been. Kudos to the guys and WordPress.
New and improved!
After fighting with mySQL for the first time (surprisingly painless after I realized what I was doing) we have a new version of buttonmashing. It’s late, so I’ll be going to bed now, but I’ll be trying all the cool WordPress widgets later, starting with the import of my Blogger posts. We’ll see how that goes.
I’m sleepy.
New blogging software?
I’ve been thinking about the managment side of my blog recently. I have been mostly happy with Blogger.com. I’ve been a member for a long time, and I really haven’t had a problem with it, but I think I’m ready to move on to new blogging software. Something with a little more flexibility and new challenges. I’ve been looking at WordPress, Moveable Type, and others. Right now I’m leaning toward WordPress. Most of the bloggers I read use it, it’s FREE (definitely the biggest bonus), and it seems well supported.
What advice to you, my fellow bloggers, recommend? Are you satisfied with your current software? Am I biting off more than I can chew? I am technically competent but I’ve never dealt with anything on the web-server side of things, outside of ftp’ing images and other files. I have programming skills, but I don’t have skillz.
Anyway, look for some possible changes in the next couple of days here. If nothing else, I’m gonna mash some buttons and we’ll see what we end up with. Thanks for any help/advice you can offer.
Back in business!
Our friendly Time Warner tech came over this afternoon to reconnect us to the virtual world of broadband and cable TV, just in time for Monk. Whatta guy! It’s been strange being disconnected from the internet at home. I still my work access, so I was able to follow my blogroll on Bloglines (I have a convert in Jeff Freeman, my first convert. I’m working on more) but being detached from ButtonMashing was good.
It was good because the move has been a big change for the family and I was able to attend to more important things, like hooking up the washer and dryer, and not have to worry if I’ll miss a big gaming story. I love doing the blogging thing and I love doing the gaming thing, but this past week had presented me with some more valuable ways to spend my time, so I’ve been enjoying my time away.
But I did miss it, all the same, and it feels good to be back. I’ve still got non-gaming things to take up my time (like making mortgage payments) but I can also have some gaming time, too. All in moderation. So the Button Masher has made a return to the video game blogging world, and he’s all the better for it.
Moving shop
Well, after I hit “Publish Post” on this quick post, I will be packing up all things gaming and computing into boxes. Tomorrow, I will be loading them into a Budget Rental Moving Truck and moving my family about 2 miles down the road to our new home. I will be incommunicado until at least Friday, when Time Warner comes by to jack me back into the net. Until then, I am looking forward to the evenings disconnected from the world of blogging and reconnected with what matters most, video games. (Okay, okay, family matters most, video games second most).
The time down will give me a chance to actually play games instead of blabbering about them here. If you miss me, there’s plenty of other good stuff going on in the gaming blogosphere, I’m sure you’ll make do.
Until then, good gaming.
ButtonMashing.com is evolving
There have been some minor cosmetic and content changes being made here at Button Mashing. The first change I made was the removal of my Blogroll. There’s nothing terribly wrong with the service, I just felt I had more control over my links by coding them myself. I know Bloglines has a similar service but I haven’t tried that out yet. I’ve also added a third category of blogs I’m linking to, video game blogs I’ve recently discovered. There’s also a link for non-gaming blogs, which will range from tech/gizmo/gadget blogs to blogs of friends, etc.
In addition to my weekly review of the world of gaming blogs, I’m also going to highlight some of the new gaming blogs I come across. Hopefully this will be a way to make more people aware of new/up-and-coming gaming blogs. Hopefully they will garner some new readers (and vice-versa) with all that huge traffic I’ll generate for them (uh huh, right).
This site is primarily dedicated to my gaming experiences (and thoughts) but I am also interested in the blogging phenomenon in general, so I also plan to comment on that as I see fit. I read this post over at render, where he mentions he’s thinking about commenting on things non-gaming, i.e. movies, books, websites, etc. I would love to see that. I have mentioned such things here, from time to time. It adds variety and flavor to a blog that has a single dedication. I don’t expect this blog to become a day-to-day journal of my goings-on at work, or as a dad or husband, but my family is inextricably tied to the rest of my life that it’s hard to separate the two. In addition, my opinion on such things as “I, Robot” (thoroughly enjoyed it, it didn’t try hard to be something it’s not) or what’s in heavy rotation on my iPod (”Shimmer” by Fuel, “Great Expectations” by Jurassic 5, others) adds a certain credence to what I say on gaming topics.
In scholastic terms, ButtonMashing.com is majoring in video gaming, minoring in blogs, and taking a handful of humanities courses.
Playing with Blogger
I’ve been messing around with some of the cooler features of Blogger. I’m trying out the feature of posting a little blurb of a post and have the rest of the post show up here. It’s pretty cool stuff but it’s getting frustrating to set it up to only show the “read more” link when I want it to. Well, thanks to this guy, I’ve been able to get it to work. Not too shabby.
Hmmm, I can’t seem to comment on his blog to thank him. If he happens to stumble here, consider himself thanked.
buttonmashing.com is online!
Welcome to the beginnings of my humble gaming blog, buttonmashing.com. Here you will find my sharp wit and insight into the world of video games. Me, I’ve been around the block, starting with my own Atari 2600 back in the 80’s. A lot has changed since then but I’m still playing video games. I doubt I’ll ever stop.
I am a Nintendo fanboy. I will not hide that fact but I am not a rabid fanboy. I love Nintendo, yes, but I’m able to see past the sad state of fanboyisms. I am currently trying to talk my wife into letting me get an XBox. I know that’s blasphemy for true Nintendoboys but I recognize my what my Gamecube lacks and I look to bolster that with a few XBox titles. I will, of course, be first in line for the next Mario/Zelda/Metroid game, but I don’t want to miss out on something good just because it’s on a different system. I just ain’t like that.
So check back often, I’ll link to some of my game reviews, post thoughts here and there about what I think about the video gaming world and I’m sure you’ll share some of the same opinions I do. And if you don’t, sorry, but you’re wrong.
You must own an XBox.
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What we're playing
Tony
GTA IV | Mario Kart Wii | Super Mario Galaxy
Nat
Okami | Bioshock | Overlord | Mario Kart Wii | Boom Blox | FF7: Crisis Core | The World Ends With You | DiRT | Rogue Trooper (PC) -
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