Launch day is here!

Launch day arrives, and I've been beavering away for the past week or so on creating content, choosing a theme for the site, tweaking the theme for the site, and generally making sure I'm happy with how everything just is.

I wanted to launch with some content in place, for a couple of reasons.

One, I didn't want to be directing people to a site that had very little to read already. No-one's going to hang around for 1 blog post and a vague hand-wavey promise that more is coming. So I decided to build the content out first, as a kind of demonstration of intent.

Secondly, and more practically, most CMS themes, be it Ghost, WordPress, Publii or whatever it happens to be, tend to look bad with a lack of content for the structure of the homepage. Individual posts may look fine, but with only 1 or 2 articles, homepages on newly started blogs tend to look a bit anaemic without the content there to provide homepage structure.

Future Direction

My intentions with this blog are to be more casual in terms of my writing. I know that I've never exactly been someone to write in an academic style on previous blogs (and there's been a few), but more in my approach to how I choose to write, the topics I write about, and how often I do just that.

My previous blog, Nerdrooted, became weighed down by World of Warcraft. For a long time I became so single-minded on writing about WoW that that blog then became a WoW blog, and nothing else ever got written on it. That pigeonholed me longer-term with what I felt like I should do with the blog, and as a result it became harder and harder to write posts for it. Especially during quieter periods such as the one the game is currently going through.

I want to try my best to diversify with this site, and hope that it can stick around and become more of a central hub for my writing. I've missed it. I used to blog a lot.

And I mean a LOT.

Back in the day I'd be knocking out several articles/posts a week, for months and months on end. Mainly about WoW, granted, but still.

Then as that singular topic started to become a millstone, my frequency of posting begun to dwindle, to the point where it became months and months between posts, before guilt would force me to write something, anything, just to justify my hosting costs...

This however I intend to be more diverse. A better reflection of me. As a person, as a writer, and as a middle-aged idiot with a keyboard, an internet connection and an unrelenting gaming addiction 😆

So my intention as I sit here, writing this post, is that this site will reflect more of me and my interests, and hopefully you can find some value or entertainment in my word salad.

I'm an AuDHD middle-aged man who loves gaming, has been married for over 20yrs, have a kid, a mortgage and fairly varied interests, albeit some fleeting thanks to my aforementioned ADHD 😄

I'll be writing about my experiences with, but not limited to:

• My journey getting diagnosed with Autism and ADHD
• Technology related to gaming
• Gaming in general
• WoW, albeit much less than previously
• Open Source software
• Online Privacy in a world determined to erode it
• Linux, including gaming on it
• Some light political stuff
• Maybe some D&D stuff!
• Anything else really that strikes my fancy!

And yeah, that's it. The site is now live!

Subscriptions?

I know Ghost has facilities for allowing "content creators" to monetise their output on the site, putting paywalls on articles, and "allowing" you guys to subscribe for a fee to read said articles.

That won't be happening here.

I have no interest in making money off of this site, and I never will. There is a subscribe button at the top and bottom of the page (on desktop, on mobile it's in the hamburger menu), but that's so you can get these articles & posts emailed to you if you prefer.

Needless to say I will never be using your information for anything, the site will handle all of the emails out by itself with no interference from me. Hell, feel free to use an email alias if you like - in fact I recommend it when signing up for stuff like that, especially if you're a privacy advocate like me. I recommend Proton btw, they're pretty damn good.

All that said, I'm not overly sold on the email facility, so it may be something I disable in the not-too distant future.

I'm certainly not enabling comments on the blog, as they inevitably get filled with spambots and trolling, which frankly I can't be arsed dealing with 😆

And finally...

With that out of the way, I hope you have fun reading the stuff I post here. I can be contacted on any of my socials if you want to chat about anything site-related or any topics I've posted about 😊