I’ve been tweaking the blog a lot of late; some of it may have been noticeable (particularly for those on the RSS feed, which seems to pop out a “new post” notification every time I sneeze when tweaking bits of the blog – my apologies for that), other changes hopefully not so blatant!
Today I’m launching the new theme and updates, and would welcome constructive feedback on the revised look and feel of the place. Key changes are:
New Categories menu (sidebar)
A new theme with greater white space within the text and an updated font, both of which I hope will improve readability
Inclusion of the sidebar on every page, rather than just the home page, which I hope will assist in better navigation
New hierarchical Categories menu, with additional sub-categories to improve topic selection (e.g. Viewer and Clients has been updated to allow you to pull-up all reviews on a specific viewer, rather than relying on tags, plus three new sub-categories added for viewer round-up summaries, general news on viewers of any flavour (rather than reviews) and news and updates relating to the TPV Policy)
New sidebar DESTINATIONS REVIEWS category for accessing reviews of SL destinations and other virtual worlds / immersive environments I’ve visited.
Hopefully, these changes will help make the blog more readable and more effective as a resource / reference tool for those who use it that way.
I’ve retained the menus as well, but the new theme allows me to move them to the top of the page. Hopefully this will make those items which include drop-down lists and sub-menus (e.g. Reviews) to be more usable than the older layout, which sometimes required page scrolling in order to properly display a sub-menu.
I’ve included a little poll here, please feel free to use it as an indicator of how well you like the new layout.
This post is a bit of a milestone – and one I almost missed in trying to balance a number of draft posts!
It’s my 1,000th post to Modemworld since I created this blog mid-2009 following my move from Blogger, where I’d been since the start of 2007.
When I started out, it wasn’t with the intent to become any form of commentator on SL – social commentary isn’t my Forté (as I’m sure many would agree!); my original blog was far more personal in nature. But the move to WordPress encouraged me to split things, and so Modemworld was born.
I don’t want to be particularly narcissistic and mark my 1,000th post by prattling on about the blog, but there are some things that I genuinely find humbling; such as having 283 people subscribe to it by e-mail, and having nigh-on 250,000 hits during the 12 months between August 1st 2011 and July 31st 2012 alone. These may not sound like big numbers to some, but for me, they really are staggering and represent a level of interest in the blog that amazes me.
As such, to everyone who takes the time and trouble to visit these pages and read my mental meanderings (typos and all ;-)), I’d like to say it really is appreciated and also say…
I’ve been going through the blog and trying to rationalise things like categories and tags, and fix broken links (the result of websites elsewhere vanishing / blog posts on other sites being moved, etc.).
While I was predominantly using the WordPress “quick edit” tool, WP still took it upon itself to send out random notifications via RSS denoting old articles as being new posts. If you were one of the people who received such false updates, my sincere apologies.
Anyway, the core work is done: hopefully there won’t be any more spurious messages, and with the overall rationalisation, things should now be easier to search via both categories and tags.
I’m going to be working on the blog over the next few days. Hopefully, most of this should be transparent; however I’m aware that when I did some work last month, WordPress sent out “new post” notifications for at least two post from 2009 as a result of my changing the tags on them.
If you are a subscriber to the blog and you receive notifications in the next day or so for “new” posts that prove to be articles from the past, my apologies.
Update August 3rd 17:45 BST: I’m about half-way there sorting through stuff. Hopefully after this categories and tags will be easier to use, and related posts easier to find (allowing for the vagaries of the WordPress search, which is perhaps worse than SL’s!).
The last three months have been especially mind-boggling for me – thank you to all of you who have expressed support and appreciation for this blog both through comments and via in-world IMs, e-mails, etc, and to all of you who have taken the time to comment on the various articles and posts. Your feedback and input, and the fact you do take the time to read this blog is sincerely appreciated. Thanks to, for those who have given their time and had me worrying them with questions or pestering them in other ways.
I don’t tend to do month-end reviews for this blog, but August has been quite extraordinary all ways around. News has poured forth from Linden Lab and elsewhere; we’ve had SLCC, mesh, and numerous other events that have been keeping a lot of people busy.
For me, it has meant that this blog, which usually trundles along quietly with a few thousand page views a month, has hit over 14,000 page views for August, and blasted through 51,000 views since I started it. These may be modest figures for some blogs, but I’m just stunned and overwhelmed. As such, I’d like to say a heartfelt thank you to everyone who came and looked, and read and shared your thoughts and feedback.
I’ve been averaging around a post a day – and at times through the month around 4 or 5 posts a day while hitting seven in one day mid-month. I’ve blogged every day bar the 9th and 27th, although the 13th shows a blank on the calendar despite the fact I published a page-based item then. All told, it’s fair to say I feel liked I’ve lived more inside WordPress than in-world!
So what has been going on?
Well, mesh was obviously the biggest news of the month, with my selection of four videos from YouTube drawing huge attention (Thank you Linden Lab for the blog link!); while the notice that mesh was commencing roll-out also gained a lot of attention, together with my July *simple* guide to mesh and mesh and your Viewer – both of which I’ve attempted to keep updated – coming in for attention in August. Mesh also saw Viewer 2 increment to Viewer 3, a strange way to mark the roll-out, but there you go.
It is also fair to say that with mesh, I did get a couple of things wrong. In July I bid a personal goodbye to Viewer 1 and 1.x TPVs and listed mesh as one of the potential reasons people will be pulling away. Of course, I’d neglected to consider mesh being out on OpenSim as well. Hence, while there may well be concerns about keeping 1.x Viewers up-to-date and functional, mesh may not be one of them, as experimental releases this month of Asta and Cool VL Viewer demonstrate.
I also reported on a Region Setting Linden Lab appeared to be including in Viewer 3 that would enable sim owners to disable mesh rendering. However, although it took a while, Charlar Linden eventually admitted by way of the JIRA on the matter that the option wasn’t actually supposed to be in the Viewer. Which in itself leaves a lot unsaid and questions that will probably never be answered.
Of course, with mesh can the new 64m native prim size, which has been at least as popular as the arrival of mesh.
August also saw SLCC 2011 take place, with a very strong presence from Linden Lab, with some excellent keynote and breakout presentations from Rodvik, the Product Team, Viale and Brett, and Charlar and Runitai on…mesh.SL residents were also activie in both keynote addresses and running and participating in talks and panels, making the entire convention a well-rounded event, that was well put together both in Oakland and in-world on four beautiful sims.
SLCC left me feeling positive bouyed up with all that is happening within Second Life and Linden Lab. Which is not to say the company has some way to go towards getting things like Customer Support sorted out – but all those attending slcc physically or virtually all came away with a feeling that we’ve got “our” Lab back after its desert sojourn 2008-2010. Much of this latter emotion was superbly captured by Draxtor Despres in his post-convention video:
Firestorm made news as well, with the announcement that a new release will be rolling out in September, with a raft of new features and capabilities that are likely to vastly increase its popularity within the community. Chief among these is liable to be the new Contact Sets.
Elsewhere, the month also saw the announcement of a new on-line collaborative effort with The Blu; while in-world, we had the Zexpo Festival kicking-off, and Burn-2 started ramping-up in earnest and the first LEA Full Sim Art series was announced.
The Blu
Of course, there was much I missed or didn’t have time to cover – such as the temporary closure of the Metaverse Island, as reported upon by Daniel Voyager, and the on-going SpotON3D patents controversy that I barely touched upon, but which Maria Korolov has been following closely over at Hypergrid Business. So all-in-all it’s been a massively-busy month for everyone, and one that I’ve really enjoyed.
Inara Pey: Living in a Modemworld 