I’ve got lots of board game geeks in my Google+ circles. I’ve been posting board game notes there, mostly quick thoughts of what I’ve played. Those notes appear much faster and more reliably than what I post here.

I’ve run into a limitation with Google+: I don’t mind sharing those notes in public, yet I want to keep them in a board game circle. Now, finally there’s a solution, which I learnt from Matthew Gray: I’ve started a public page for this blog. From now on, I’ll post my board game notes on G+ to that page, which everybody can follow. It’ll be my publicly followable board game circle!

So, I’m not going to dump this blog and I’ll keep on blogging here, but if you want more, go follow the blog on Google+ (Google+ is full of interesting board game folks anyway, in case you don’t already have a profile).

Mikko’s Gameblog on G+

I added a list of the most popular posts in the sidebar. It lists the most-viewed posts for the last 60 days. Looks like the playing card review articles enjoy constant popularity. There are couple of other favourite posts, but those are the most popular.

Funny enough, while looking at the Google keyword hits from the last couple of months, the most popular keyword phrase hitting those articles is “schafkopf tarock” with six hits. Those articles attract a really wide array of long tail searches. I don’t think it’s a huge surprise, as the topic is somewhat interesting and fairly lightly covered in the web. The articles also attract Google image searches, thanks to the scanned images of cards.

Looks like I should do more of them. I’ve been busy with card games, actually, since I did the book and recently I’ve been doing the companion web site for the book. The site will have card game rules and information, articles on playing cards and a small web store for unusual playing cards (Piatnik cards). It’ll be interesting to see how popular the site’ll turn out.

It was about time! I switched the blog from Movable Type to WordPress. I thought it would be a harrowing process, but it was fairly smooth (ok, my idea of smooth involves a fair bit of regexp fixing, mining data with MySQL queries and so on). This was my last active blog using Movable Type, now I’m all WordPress. WordPress is simply so much better.

I’ve been writing this blog since August 2002. In 7.5 years I’ve written almost 1200 blog posts and received almost as many comments. The whole export archive was over three megabytes of text.

Feed readers won’t notice anything, visitors have noticed the new look already. This is just a beginning, the theme is something I threw together in few minutes. I’ll fix the look somewhat, add some pictures to the sidebar rotator and maybe some widgets and other fun details. Playing with the blog is much more fun now it’s running WordPress, I can use all sorts of plugins and tools.

Image via Wikipedia

My web site Melankolia.net was taken down by hackers. It’s still down, as my hosting provider became quite unsupportive about it. Unfortunately the new host doesn’t have a certain module Movable Type needs and so I had to find another place to host this blog… All way too complicated.

Nevertheless, here we are, and I got a new domain too. So, back to normal. The Feedburner feed leads to the right place now and as soon as I get the Melankolia.net domain under control, the old address will forward here. If you link to Gameblog from your web site, please update your links to point to the new URL, http://www.mikkosgameblog.com/.

As for actual games-related content, stay tuned!

I haven’t been looking at Google Analytics for this blog in a long time. I was slightly surprised by the results, really. First of all — search (ie. Google) brings only about 60 % of the visitors. I’m used to much larger share. What’s even more odd is the amount of direct traffic, about 21 %. That’s a lot in my opinion.

My top keywords are three variations of “gameblog”: together, apart and with a hyphen. I don’t have really good keywords, really, but I get a lot of long tail searches for wildly different topics. I’ll just hope people find what they’re looking for…

What comes to content, this blog has very few killer entries. The front page is most popular, without any competition whatsoever. The front page has about 25 000 hits so far this year, while the ten most popular page has just 600 hits.

However, I managed to create something unique and attractive this year, and that’s the playing card reviews. That category has been a minor hit. I should do more of them, but unfortunately the new job I started in June killed that project.

Some hopeful was looking for “over sized naked playing cards, found my playing card reviews and bounced away, unsatisfied. Too bad… People are also surprisingly interested in the facial hair of playing cards.

I haven’t been terribly busy blogging here anyway, but I think I’ll warn you now: next year is likely to be the quietest so far for Gameblog. The first half or so, anyway, since our second child is due early January. In less than a month, that is!

That, of course, is totally cool and I’m more than a bit thrilled about it. The new family member is most welcome: we can then play four-player games, once the kids grow up a bit. For now, though, I believe my gaming time will be somewhat limited. Nooa didn’t hurt my game hobby a lot — quite the contrary, since I started the weekly game sessions last year — but I’m afraid the second child will change that.

Well, that’s temporary, like most things with kids. To be honest, I’m not that excited about the little baby phase. Nooa, our charming first-born is now 2.5 years old and rather chatty little fellow. I like that, much more fun than a small baby, however cute babies are.

Gameblog turns five this month. Five years! That’s almost ancient when it comes to web sites. To celebrate the blog’s advanced age, I decided to give it a bit of a makeover — after all, it has looked pretty much the same for the whole five years. Hope you like it, I think it looks a lot more modern than the old look. If you notice something odd going on, missing stuff or so, please let me know.

This new look is courtesy of Movable Type 4, the brand-new version of my favourite blogging platform. The new version is packed with interesting features and free for personal use — if you’re looking for a good blogging platform, Movable Type is an excellent choice.

Hooray! Gameblog turns four today! Pretty amazing. Turns out many of my projects have longevity that surpasses what is generally expected from web fads. I suppose Gameblog will be there after next four years (it should get pretty interesting then, as Nooa will be four years old and in a prime age for his gaming education to start).

Feel free to suggest good stuff I’ve written and should highlight, if there are any.

I installed a new version of Movable Type, which features tags. So, I’ve started tagging my entries. I think the tags are a good addition: they work a bit like categories, but are a lot more specific and thus can be a lot more useful in some situations.

Clicking the tags will show you all entries tagged with the same tag. That’s a not a big list, yet, but I expect to tag all my entries in Autumn, when I’m bored at work… If you click a tag, you’ll also notice that you can subscribe to a RSS feed for a tag, so if there’s a topic you’re particularly interested in — say, TradeResolver — you can grab the feed and get all the new stuff on that topic delivered to you.

I also have a tag cloud (which is the hip thing right now, it seems).

I’m proud to tell you, my dear readers, that Gameblog has won an award! Gone Gaming Board Game Internet Awards jury gave Gameblog the best session report award for my Essen 2005 coverage. That’s not all! Gameblog also got an honorable mention for the award of the best game blog (winner was Chris Farrell’s blog, so it’s indeed honorary to be mentioned by such an excellent blog).

Thanks for those who nominated me, thanks to the jury for choosing me and thanks for all my readers!

By the way, I appreciate the way they chose Gamefest’s GameWire as the best board game news service instead of Boardgame News (which won the best new site award anyway). After all, GameWire started the high-quality board game news reporting.