Resolutions

I’m starting with WeeWorld next week doing QA, a world apart from the startups and indies I’m used to minglining with, but it’s also exciting to work as a small part of a team that have command over hundreds of thousands of users every month.

I also have a day in the week for personal project, which though I think in the early days will be dominated by learning the latest in web app testing; something that’s always taken a bit of a back seat roll in the other teams I’ve worked at, as getting it out the door first was always top priority. If things improve that day will go back into working on my own games and experiments - primarily Game Dev City which currently exists as a crude server-side AI simulation.

I’m also really interested in publishing solutions and have become increasingly aware of the importance of SEO in building this new-look website. I really love Jekyll - the static blogging tool I use that generates static html pages rather than using serverside templates to render them when requested. The benefit of this is faster, more efficient content delivery (and people can opt to have their site hosted for free on Github Pages)

The jekyll blog method does take longer than typical workflows, primarily because it’s all text files and terminal commands. The best alternative I’ve seen to date is Ghost, but I’d rather edit everything on my local machine and push the pages out to a server or github repo to be hosted statically rather than having a whole CMS dashboard on my website. This could be a thing to work on in the future: A kind of user-friendly version of jekyll that combines the nice user experience and flexibility of ghost with efficient static file publishing…

My interest in content publishing has also extended to cross-media publishing. I’ve seen more than a couple of projects that have been searching around for a one-stop-shop which can turn their markdown files into both websites, epubs and pdfs. You can cobble something together using plugins and tools, but still people are opting to manually compile things into multiple formats, which has it’s challenges in it’s own.

Only three-hundred-and-sixty-something days to do it all! I’m excited for this year. Last year was really tough on me. I think I’m finally rising out of my “blues” period as one dear friend called it. Here’s to me. Here’s to you.