caves of narshe

As I've now done for the last fifteen years, I've recently completed another alteration of the logo for my long-running website, Caves of Narshe, to celebrate the site's 25th anniversary. This one, while not altering the form nearly as much as the prior change for the 20th, takes the basic format of the current logo and does something very different with it to stand out from the site's long history. A Change of Direction While the site has not visually changed significantly overall in the last ten years, the site logo had taken some significant turns. When the overall site design was last...

In the first half of my CDN blog , I talked a little about why I wanted to move my biggest website to leverage cloud delivery of content, and the broad strokes of how I planned to get started. This second half details more of the specifics of how I technically achieved the early days of that transition.

An Actual, Factual CDN This is the part that needs some Amazon. Once you have your Amazon Web Services...

In my day job, we've been steadily moving into the cloud for a while now for all the same reasons everyone else does: it gives us less to maintain ourselves in terms of hardware, it allows us to distribute worldwide more efficiently, it saves us money in the long run, and so on. At home, though, it's a different story, though most of the goals are similar. So now that I have some working knowledge of using Amazon Web Services to create a content delivery network (more commonly known as CDN), I decided it was time to apply it to my largest and oldest hobby site too.

Why CDN? The...

I was catching up on my magazine reading the other day - yeah, I actually read physical magazines because I'm old and I get distracted reading them on screens - and I came across this article in the latest Wired .

I've never been much for watching vlogs like this, but the guy's "character," "NES...

Continuing from the previous Project in Detail blog , the first part of the new CoN logo's creation.

Specialization

As mentioned, the genesis of the logo update was the desire to make another special version of the logo to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary. Very few sites, particularly hobby sites, can claim to have survived so long, and I wanted to do something special to commemorate the time spent in development and among the community. Conceptualizing the new, sleek iteration. The...

This is the first "Project in Detail" blog I've done about something that wasn't either explicitly web code, or heavily web code with some design enhancement along the way. This time around, I'm documenting the process involved in revamping the logo for Caves of Narshe to celebrate the site's 20th anniversary (on July 31, 2017).

...

As most of the web development for the Caves of Narshe is a one-man operation, I admit that the site can be slow to adapt to trends. Most recently, that trend has been responsive web, which is particularly annoying given that the site's core competency, video game information and walkthroughs, lends itself extremely well to use on a mobile device. Most games now are played with the user either on the mobile device itself, or with the phone or tablet sitting next to them as they play from the couch. A hard-to-use UX for mobile makes the site itself less attractive to players, which...

And, does it really matter in every case?

One of my favorite things to blog about is probably the Caves of Narshe, because it's been something that I've worked on for nearly twenty years, and because it's something that I've worked on that I can always have attached to me publicly (unlike my actual job, which deals with enough proprietary code that I don't want most of it out there). I consider it to be a pretty big site within its fairly small niche, and in the places where it's not that big I still tend to think it does a lot of things better than its "competition."

So,...