Some Housecleaning at the End of the Year

Slowly but surely I've been going back over our blog and pulling out weeds, clearing out dead links, deleting defunct bits and scouring through the old Drafts folder and so on. 

The RPG Blog Alliance is undergoing some sort of evolution or going into hibernation or hiatus, so I pulled that logo and the links associated with that organization off of our right-hand side-bar. Sorry to see the group go away, but I really do appreciate having been part of that network. I found a few bloggers through the RPGBA that I still enjoy reading when I get the chance.

The RPG Spotlight Network appears to be defunct, at least the site has been unreachable for a good long while now and the RSS feed hasn't updated since 2018, so I deleted that logo and the feed-thingy for that as well. Not sure what happened, but I am in pruning-the-deadwood mode, so I removed it; if it returns or revives, or whatever, I can always add it back onto the side-bar later.

The link list for online Generators was going to be converted into either a Page or a Post (or multiple Posts), but as I was going over it I ran across sites that were no longer accessible, or were flagged as malware, etc. so I'm dropping those just because Ain't Nobody Got Time For That. I also realized that in looking over some of the really interesting things that Alex has produced over the years at Campaign Wiki, in addition to Old School RPG Planet and Links of Wisdom, that I probably ought to do a post just about some of those projects. Yeah, I will be doing that in the near future.

As for the Generators in general, I see the whole Dungeon23 thing as an opportunity to review the links I have on-hand and to maybe look for a few new ones and put together a more curated list that includes my brief but pertinent observations on the ones I include in the list. So there will be a new and improved list, probably as a post that I can include in a Handy Resources link list on the side-bar.

The rest of the right-hand side-bar needs to get swamped out. Oh wait. I did clear out a lot of dead stuff earlier this morning. Just need to move a few things about, add some links, delete a few, that sort of minor stuff. 

I also need to draw-up a little Planet icon for the side-bar to help make the RSS feed-thingy more easily findable. I'll do that today over lunch.

The current blogrolls are a bit messy. Basically I've just been tossing everything into one catch-all, but then added a special blogroll for Dungeon23, which now feels a bit redundant, since so many bloggers are joining in the challenge. Back in the Olden Times, before the Lyme-demons dragged me down and the rise of the Plague that made WotC rich, we had multiple blogrolls sorted out by alphabet. That kind of worked, but it was also clunky and really ought to have been some sort of open source RSS feed or simply a link to OSR Search or Old School RPG Planet and just let them sort it all out. But I'm a fiddly old bastard who likes to tinker with things, so that was never going to be quite enough. Maybe I'll go with the curated approach once again and do something along the lines of a Top Ten or Top Twenty (d30?) Blogs I actually read on a semi-regular basis. We'll see. Right now I'm leaving well enough alone.

Then it's time to swamp-out the Drafts folder. As of now there are 200+ drafts in various stages of completion in there. I plan on going through and deleting everything that is just a placeholder, raw formatting, or not particularly well fleshed-out. Any interesting fragments or notes or raw posts will get cut and pasted into Scrivener so they can be gone over later and maybe even grow into real posts.

Once all that's caught-up...it's time to sort out some sort of schedule or some-such. That can wait until after I wrap-up some of the projects that have been hibernating in the hard-drive since nearly forever. Yikes. I'd almost worry about what I'm getting myself into, but really it's actually pretty cool to finally be able to feel well enough to get going on stuff for real. I won't discuss anything that's in progress, so no speculative teasers or any of that rubbish. You'll see things as they get done and are made available. 

So that's that for old stuff, mostly.

Here's hoping we all have a wonderful end of 2022 and an excellent fresh start for 2023!