The past few years have been very spotty for Genius Loci Games (or GL Games or GLG as I’ve been recently calling it). I have made several planned comebacks to no avail as real life tended to get in the way in one form or another. Recently I have been thinking of giving it another go … no releases, no products, or adventures, nothing business related. Instead, I have been thinking of just getting back to what I started as a guy who loves games, loves to write about games, and likes to share the little hobbyist things he creates.
To that point the blog is a huge part of what made GLG what it was back between 2012 and 2016. I posted heavily, shared ideas and would like to think I fostered a nice small community. Going forward I would like to make the blog a big part of that again, however, as a post I made on G+ and MeWe tonight suggested, I am not overly confident that Blogger is going to be around for much longer.
Google has made it clear in the last few months that many of its web projects are on the chopping block. By August 2019 Hangouts, Inbox, and Google Plus will be gone and who knows what will follow. By now the clear leader in blog creation is Word Press and many sites have either moved there or are in the process of moving their (or Wix so I am told) … Google does not like to be second-place and because of that I have little faith in Blogger seeing 2021.
Right now I am up in the air on where to go. Word Press, Wix, and MeWe pages have all been suggested to me as viable alternatives to Blogger and I am looking into them all. I will say that despite being “flush” with employed money, I am not keen on paying for a service (Word Press and Wix), however, MeWe offers limitations of its own in terms of community, visablity, etc. One option would be to try and reorganize my patreon as a means to set-up and sustain a paid service, however, my personal feelings toward that are grim. I know there are bloggers, vloggers, influencers, etc who do this but my thought is that if I am running a patreon I should be giving something tangible and seperate from the thing I would be doing anyway.
So a lot to look into, to think about, etc going into 2019.
4 thoughts on “Op-Ed: Future Imperfect”
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They are getting rid of inbox? Ie gmail? Ahck! At some point I should download all my stuff from blogger. I've kept a running list of tables I created and put them in a doc. I've used WordPress for awhile at work, and don't mind it (however labelling posts is a bit more difficult than blogger). I agree about spending more time blogging, I intend to do the same. Have you added yourself to campaignwiki.org/osr/ yet?
Gmail is staying but the "gmail replacement" Inbox (https://www.google.com/inbox/) has gone the way of the dodo. I have not heard othe campaignwiki site, but will check it out.
Get some cheap server hosting and install WordPress. Then you have almost complete control (save the hosting company going out of business, and you can take steps against that), or use WordPress.com if you don’t mind not using your own domain (or are happy to pay WordPress to allow you to use one).
As long as you don’t go mad installing plugins and take some basic security precautions, you will have a stable safe blogging platform that should be around for some time to come. IIRC, there is even a blogger > WordPress import tool, so you can pull all your content across.
– Neil.
Word Press is really were my mind has been going with the move, and given now that we have the domain name, it should be relatively easy to do. Thanks for the input and for mentioning the import tool, I would have been starting from scratch, but now I know to look for it.