It has been somewhat over a year since I first started this blog, so I figured I would go over how it has gone so far.
My stats say that the site has had 3002 views at the moment of writing this sentence. I assume that the vast majority of this is bots and indexers and the like. There is always a large spike immediately after posting, and I am quite confident in saying that nobody is following my writings enough for it to be a spike in actual views by humans. I suspect that maybe around 100 people have actually read any of this, at the most.
I made 16 posts in my first year. 8 of these comprised the two After Action Reports I have written for my Mega Empires games. Otherwise it is mostly TTRPG material, with a bit of other game design thoughts. I have no individual page metrics, and my site is set up in such a way that tracking individual page metrics would be difficult, so I am not able to comment on which of my posts is most popular. I suspect that it would be one of the Day 1 posts for an AAR, or my first content post which was about the now cancelled Age of Empires 3 DLC - as these are the posts I have linked in other locations.
As for future posts, I do have a lot of plans and a document with an ever growing list of topics. Some of them will likely become components on my work on using Speech Act Theory as well as other discussions in Philosophy of Language studies to determine the meaningfulness of statements within TTRPGs.I will likely use this blog as a way to slowly make progress on that topic, posting components as I work through them. My other planned project is my plan for a weekly TTRPG. The goal with this will be to create a new system for TTRPGs each week - by necessity they will have to be quite small and barebones, this will be more along the lines of lightly themed resolution methods rather than extensive and fully balanced systems full of content. Currently, many of these systems are planned to be part of my sub-project for making a collection of RPGs based on the Gloryhammer song Wasteland Warrior Hoots Patrol. Both the meaningfullness project and the rpg a week project are slated to be mostly ignored until I finish my actual masters thesis that I am supposed to be working on. I think maybe I will turn some of the more independant segements of that work into posts here too.
I am quite happy with the current structure I have made for the blog, despite it being somewhat unconventional and not quite fitting within the framework of normal web stuff. However I do have some changes and updates that I want to make.
The primary feature missing is user comments. Normally, a blog is hosted somewhere which allows for the very easy addition of user comments, as these are not a technically difficult thing to implement. However, that assumes that the developer has some sort of back-end and database, which Neocities does not provide at all. The challenge of adding comments using only front-end tools is one I want to dive into, but I haven't had the chance since I first looked at it about a year ago. I had an idea of how to do it, but it seems like there are restrictions on newly created Neocities sites that stopped my method from working, thus I am unsure if it is functional or not. I intend to look into it again soon, as the restrictions should be long gone.
I also want to make some fixes to the loading of content pages. The system that I have does not actually ever change the webpage the user is on when they load different content, it just grabs the new content and replaces the current content with it. This has a minor quirk where the content loads but the user stays where they are on the page, so for instance scrolling down to the oldest post and opening it has the user already at the bottom and they are forced to scroll up manually. I think it should not be a hard fix to just include some code that also scroll up to the top of the page on a main content load. I would also like to user this general method to use the space that is currently the news sidebar for other content; primarily I want to implement a method for the user to select some text in the main page and have additional information load into the sidebar - given that space usage is currently also pretty bad, I may want to look into a way to exapnd the percentage of the screen used by the main content and add the extra info sidebard in addition to the news.
The second fix to page loading is regarding external links. Currently, links to specific posts work in many ways like normal webpages, instead of my 1-page changing content system. What this causes is a problem where if someone navigates around to other content then refreshes, they are sent back to the content they initially hit the link for - because that is still what is in the URL. I need to find a way to redirect from the link urls to the main one, while maintaining memory of the content the user was attempting to read. I think maybe I can use cookies for this, but I am currently unsure of the best way to approach this problem.
That seems to be all, hopefully I have another good year or so of writing random crap and a few more AARs (I have some shorter and less elaborate ones in the works), and if all goes well my thesis will be finished soon enough and I will be able to work on some of the other projects that have been stewing in my brain for the last couple years.