Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Bloggage

The SYW Painting Project groans on, but my wargaming remains active. As a matter of fact, I’m actually buffing up some ACW figures at present, following my recent reading of Bruce Catton’s excellent books on it.

Aha! The above sentence may be something of a surprise to you, as it’s the first time I’ve mentioned non-18th Century wargaming. I actually do a fair bit, like DBA ancients, Medievals, 2mm Napoleonics, ACW (soon!), WW1, etc. etc. However, I’ve always kept the ol’ blog strictly focused on my 18th-Century campaign. Mentioning anything else felt strangely like ‘breaking the fourth wall’ in a way, as if I was spoiling it.

However, over time I’ve come across many other blogs (Wargaming Miscellany, A Wargaming Odyssey, Geektactica, Steve’s Random Musings, Steel on Sand, - to name only a couple) which cover several periods. Plus, with this repainting scheme underway, it’ll be a fair while before I can campaign again for the blog – while in the real world, I’m still very active in the hobby. I've other campaigns I'm happy to share, but no blogging outlet for it all.

So, I thought I’d solicit some opinions from the valued readership – should I convert my blog into a multi-period ‘General Wargaming’ blog, or should I start a new one for this and keep ‘K-und-K’ strictly 18th-C only? I’m still pondering what to do, but haven’t made up my mind yet. Any other bloggers out there with advice are welcome to share their thoughts!

4 comments:

Bluebear Jeff said...

I started the "Emperor vs Elector" group blog . . . and my main personal blog is "Saxe-Bearstein".

I try to keep a lot of my other gaming activities on some of my secondary blogs . . . but it doesn't always work that way.

I post things from other periods from time to time, I post personal news from time to time . . . and, of course I post 18th century material.

Sometimes I preface non-18th posts with "(OT)" for "Off Topic" . . . but often I forget to do that.

In other words, while I try to stay "on focus" it doesn't always work that way in reality.

So you can start a secondary blog OR post everything here OR use the (OT) notation OR not . . . OR do "all of the above".

There is no "wrong answer".

However, I will note that I find that I do not keep some of my secondary blogs up as well as I should.

I don't know if any of this helps . . . but I hope so.


-- Jeff

abdul666 said...

No obvious answer. As something of a maniac of easy and sure information retrieval I'd favor separate blogs, with mutual references / crosslinking when a post on one of them is of wider interest (terrain, a peculiar painting technique, rules...).

Otherwise -think that newcomers to a given period will discover your blog in years to come- be careful to use 'labels' to 'tag' your posts, so that a reader can easily recover all your posts dealing e.g. with the 18th C.

Jean-Louis

Fitz-Badger said...

Whatever works for you. As Jeff said, there is no wrong answer.
For me, I tend to agree with Jean-Louis - separate blogs, with tags, seems to work well. But so far I only have 2, one for my 18th century ImagiNations and one for my old fantasy stuff. Those are the only 2 areas I've done much in. A larger number of blogs might mean some get very infrequent updates, but I think that's okay. There are ways, like Google Reader, for readers to keep up to date and know when new posts are added.

CWT said...

Thanks, guys. I think I'll start a separate blog with tagged articles, so this one stays 100% 18th-Century. Still, I've a bit of painting yet to do, so hopefully it won't take long to get things going.

C