Blog Facelift Complete

For better or worse, this is what my blog will look like going forward. Anyone who saw the ‘dev’ version, mentioned in the previous posts, will find this familiar. (I’ll take down the ‘dev’ site shortly.)

To summarize the changes:

1. I retired the Ananke theme in favor of XMin.

2. I then heavily customized the XMin theme for the following:

   • “Single” (article) pages list tags at the bottom
   • “List” pages note creation and modification of articles
   • The Home page uses its own template, which at the moment differs only slightly from the “list” temlate.
   • The Posts list page uses XMin’s original “list” template, i.e. posts in order of creation date, most recent first.
   • Some “single” pages include a Table of Contents, based on a toc parameter in the article’s “front matter”.
   • The Resume page (see below) omits the standard title header, again based on a single parameter in the article’s “front matter”.

3. I’ve also integrated my resume page into the Hugo project.

4. I’ve added a (placeholder) page for Table Top Role-Playing Game articles (see below).

5. Finally I tweaked the CSS to use serif fonts, among other minor touches.

(The menu at the top of the page is also new. I could have done it with Ananke, but decided to wait for the facelift.)

With the new templates in place, I can concentrate on “content” (a term I still hate). This means more brand new blog posts and maybe posts from my old blogs, notably Pen and Paper Games and (possibly) G+.

The “TTRPG” section is empty now. Soon I hope to fill it in with some of the following:

• RPG-related articles from a previous incarnation of this site. Most of these articles will require significant work; some have dead links to sites that changed or expired in the past decade, others are, well, badly formatted or edited, and a few will require enough revisions to count as entirely new articles.

• An article on “Constructs in BRP” I wrote nearly a decade ago. The last draft is on BRP Central. Uncounted Worlds #3 never materialized, and a d100 science fiction supplement expressed interest but ultimately cut it. The d100 landscape has changed dramatically over the decade (for example, Chaosium no longer supports or prints BRP), some sections seem not quite ready (notably the section on golems), and I’m not as big a fan of d100 as I was. Over the years I’ve started to revise it a few times, but never finished. Right now my plan is to post the original with some minor fixes, then pull out the best ideas – a few of them system independent – and present them as optional rules or new creatures. I still support the fundamental idea, that artificial creatures don’t work like biological or quasi-biological ones and therefore need new rules. The implementation of those ideas was, however, somewhat lacking.

• A “light” version of the Year Zero Engine SRD for games resembling Tales from the Loop. Much of that work will require removing sections of the original, although I’d need to write rules for Conditions from scratch.

• Other new RPG-related articles, from new rules and sub-systems for existing games to (maybe) some of the full RPGs I discussed previously like Astral, Paranormality, or The Elf Game, or something derived from “Year Zero Lite” above.

I might also add a section of fiction, both old (i.e. from the old site) and hopefully new.