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About Me: I knew at an early age that I wanted to make a career out of writing about games, and now I have. You'll find most of my stuff right here on HonestGamers, of course, but don't be surprised if my name pops up elsewhere. Living out my dream keeps me very busy, and I wouldn't have it any other way! |
Today is a Monday, which means the start of the 'real' week for me. I work on the site week-round, month-round and year-round, but Saturday and Sunday are slower days where most of my work is either coding projects or straight-up gaming (with dead space filled by AIM conversations with contributors and staff).
Monday, of course, represents the next flood of press e-mails. I'm subscribed to a lot of mailing lists from various game publishers and their PR firms, so I can count on something like 15 or 20 e-mails coming through from them on even a slow day (let alone Tuesdays and Thursdays, which are the busiest days of the week in PR land).
I hadn't checked it until just recently, so I didn't realize for a long time that the site's News Stories RSS feed has been broken. However, that lack of awareness on my part recently changed, since I'm looking into all possible ways to give exposure to our content, so I decided today that it was time to fix things.
The problem was actually easy to rectify... once I figured out what it was. It's that last part that gave me trouble. Basically, a lot of press releases include some unusual symbols, like the trademark symbol. These don't show properly in UTF-encoded XML, which spits out an error message when a feed is parsed and prevents it from updating with a lot of providers (including, for once, the usually not-so-picky Internet Explorer 7 and presumably 8).
I figure it's been at least a few weeks since the last "HonestGamers depends on you to spread the word!" post, so I might as well post another one.
Over the last few days, I've been making extensive efforts to hone the HonestGamers site into a self-promoting machine. The site has its own Twitter profile, where I post links to our newest content as it becomes available. I've made a bunch of small tweaks to the source code and the way URLs are handled on the site, as well. All of that should help the site to gain more attention on search engines, going forward, but there's still a lot of work to be done.
Not long ago, randxian posted in the greeting topic on the forums that he found the site by way of a series of editorials I once posted on the site during its infancy. I think it was from a few months or even years before this site became widely used by the GameFAQs crew!
Anyway, those editorials are still hanging around even though the standard 'editorials' feature fell by the wayside. Now that I've added the feature back to the site, I thought it might be fun to look back on some of the old content I wrote. I actually drafted 8 of these things before moving onto other things.
Well, today was the last of four days of work in a row. I'm generally only supposed to get 20 hours of work per week, leaving me free to do freelance work on the side (and work on the site), but this week I got 32 and so the last 4 days have been spent with little bits of busy work outside of my day job.
Today was hectic like you wouldn't believe, with all sorts of mundane things I won't relate here and a few very stressful moments. I finally got off work a few hours ago and since then I've spent the time updating the site with news stories and content--a big task tonight--going through e-mail and assorted other things.
Today was a typically busy day off from work for me, the last of three consecutive days of freedom. How did I spend it? In the usual way, of course: working on the site!
Well, and working on content for the site. Today I wrote a review for I'm Gonna Serve You -Voice Plus!- (PC), but first I had to finish up playing through the last few scenarios, which took some time. Read my review to see what I thought in the end.
So, there's an independent film called "The Hunt for Gollum" that is (obviously, I would hope) based on the characters in Tolkien's masterful trilogy, "The Lord of the Rings."
An independent filmmaker felt inspired by Tolkien's notes to produce a screenplay--which has since become a 40-some-minute film--about Aragorn's search for Gollum to find what he knows. The project is in no way endorsed by Tolkien's estate, or by Peter Jackson or any other number of people who have made money from the license over the years. However, it seems pretty cool.
Perhaps the best part is that the whole deal will be available for viewing online, at no cost whatsoever to people like you. The trailer is available here:
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