Resurrecting AltDevBlog? Any interest?

[DoctorMikeReddy]

Ok, it's been years, but this was excellent. Any hope of resurrecting AltDevBlog?

Mike

[Rebecca Heineman]

That would be awesome. 

Becky

On Mar 6, 2019, at 5:26 PM, DoctorMikeReddy <doctorm...@gmail.com> wrote:

Ok, it's been years, but this was excellent. Any hope of resurrecting AltDevBlog?

Mike

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[Tiffany Smith]

I would also be very happy if this were to happen.

Tiff

[Nicolas Lamanna]

+1 to bringing this back :). It was a great way to see what was going on and get a rare insight on devs from the industry and different perspectives.

Nicolas Lamanna

[Andre Leiradella]

+1!

---- On Wed, 06 Mar 2019 23:39:43 +0000 nicl...@gmail.com wrote ----

[Mark Lee]

Ooh, that's sounds exciting!

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From: altdev...@googlegroups.com <altdev...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Andre Leiradella <an...@leiradella.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 3:40 PM
To: altdev...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: Resurrecting AltDevBlog? Any interest?

 

[Jason Swearingen]

would this be gamedev specific?  I crash and burned my studio to the ground and now run a small SaaS business.

 - Jason

On Wed, Mar 6, 2019 at 3:38 PM Tiffany Smith <tiffl...@gmail.com> wrote:

[Wolfgang Engel]

Is the old website still available? Maybe we start with bringing it back?

[James Mitchell]

I'd love to see it brought back

[Simon Cooke]

Count me in, as long as I can find useful stuff to write about :) 

--
Simon Cooke
Where am I? Whose yard is this? What on earth is this milkshake doing here?

[Andy Firth]

i'm in and +1 to bringing back the old site... is someone holding onto it?

[Lloyd Nguyen]

A lot has really happened since then, hasn't there? It was right at the cusp of the new VR stuff, and uh, I dropped my degree right before graduating for different pastures...

I dunno, it could work, it might not. It'd be cool but there's still the same risk of people getting busy and the whole thing slowing down again. Gotta be realistic, y'know?

[Keith Judge]

I’m out of the games industry these days too, though still doing game-like things in Unity. Doubt I'd be allowed to write about any of it in detail though.

 

Sent from my Windows 10 device

 

---

From: altdev...@googlegroups.com <altdev...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jason Swearingen <jas...@novaleaf.com>
Sent: Wednesday, March 6, 2019 11:43:33 PM
To: AltDevAuthors

Subject: Re: Resurrecting AltDevBlog? Any interest?

[Paul Evans]

Sure - I wouldn't be opposed to a altdev-like ;)

[ケスラ-・ジェイミン]

While I'm not particularly against bringing it back, we should at least have a plan to deal with the things that went wrong last time. 

0) moderation. I know what Mike-san was getting at when he said it's not our place to judge what's useful to people, but one of the site's downfalls was pros not wanting to be associated with the site due to multiple posts from people with no experience making stuff up. I'm not saying we elect a gatekeeper, but surely we need some peer review

1) schedule. Requiring people to post so frequently isn't a sustainable solution. Not only is it a problem of finding time to post, but most of us just don't have that many things they can post about. I know I don't have 52 interesting useful posts in me

2) new problem: the industry (and us) has changed. Fewer teams are rolling custom tech in favour of using crappy off the shelf engines and solutions. On top of that, some (not all) devs become more specialised later in their careers, limiting the range of stuff they do and therefore the range of topics they can post on. And before you ask, yes all my posts are going to be on SystemVerilog and Famicom dev :)

TL;DR I'm in, but I'm hoping we have a plan for the stuff that brought down the site last time

iPhoneから送信

2019/03/06 23:39、Keith Judge <hungrypr...@hotmail.com>のメール:

[Adam Martin]

Without curation (including moderation where appropriate), I don't see the
value (what is the value? What is missing today?) . There's more sources of
interesting gamedev blogs/posts than I can manage, let alone the number of
authors posting in each of them.

[Paul Evans]

So to me the project was about two things. One was to develop a habit of writing regularly. The second part was having that writing peer reviewed and practice giving and receiving constructive feedback.

Arguably the most valuable part of the project wasn't the exposure - it was access to peers who spanned a wide range of professional experience levels, cultures and life experiences that were willing to put in time for that review on this email list.

When that curation process was skipped for whatever reason and reviewers became overloaded with articles then the tone of the site changed a lot.

The original idea also included topics and posts that aimed to show that developers are allowed to have interests outside of development. I enjoyed some of those posts too, but I also know some found them distracting.

I mean we could even start up using this list for peer reviewing what we are writing or planning to talk about without having a central website for it.

There's things like Slack and Discord that have probably could even replace or augment this list for that kind of thing. I know the game tools gdc interest group have a slack for talking about proposals for example - and people share drafts there.

[Simon Cooke]

Keith -

0) Totally agree. That was roughly where I lost interest entirely last time. This also speaks to Paul Evan's point - It's not a bad thing for the site to have focus. It also makes people seek out the blog for that reason! - people in general are lousy at handling the idea of "X does A, B AND C - they want X = A". Marketers call this being on/off brand but it's a side effect of stereotyping and categorization; humans are bad at things that don't fit into one category.

1) I don't think you need one post a week. Or to require people to post on a schedule. We do need a steady stream of content or the audience dies - but that just means more writers.

What I'd like to see would be a list of "things to write about". Members could suggest blue-sky topics that others could write about to a list that we keep away from the public eye. That way if you're stuck for an idea on what to contribute, you can look at the list and know that at least one other person wants to read something about that topic. The hardest part for me has always been trying to decide what's obvious and what's not (and therefore compelling). This has gotten easier over the years since I've been running content curation for gamedev conferences, but I still find it trips me up. If I have a list I can go through and cherry-pick article ideas from, that part gets a lot easier.

[Don Olmstead]

At the very least it would be good to resurrect the content that was there. Some of it might not have aged well but having it lost completely is bad.

One thought is to move the content to GitHub and just have a generated static site hosted on GitHub pages. I've had a really good experience using https://gohugo.io/ and its relatively easy to get going. Its just running an executable for your platform so it doesn't require someone to configure a development environment like other site generators, like Jekyll would. From there it would be getting a CI/CD solution and I'm willing to assist there.

In terms of workflow for authors they'd have write everything in markdown. We could add some specific hooks and all that for other styling, like having a figure or an aside in the article. We could assign reviewers to particular content and then they go through that process before a post is released.

In terms of the community people could open "issues" for potential topics and if someone wants to grab it and write an article that'd be great. We could probably embed some kind of comment system or just have people tweet discussions or whatever.

We could always put together a slack channel for authors and all that for additional discussion or coordination or just keep with a mailing list.

Anyways those are my thoughts on next steps,

[Paul Laska]

As far as curating the old content, someone did a bit of that a few years back; it's missing the images.  You can find the curation in link [1] below, taken from link [2].

Also, since Mike was very adamant that the authors owned their work, we should respect that, and make sure each author is okay with their work being re-published.

Jaymin-san makes some very good points.  I think topic 0, moderation, in his list needs to be addressed definitively.  While I still respect the effort that people put into their articles, and in principle agree that we shouldn't judge what will be useful to people, reading things like, 

     "they did no quality-control, and as it became poplar it attracted increasingly low-quality posts, and many of the original posters lost interest"[2]

provides support to the argument that not everything should be posted on the site.  It's also a bit disheartening to hear the perception was that there was no quality control, especially knowing how much effort was put into the peer reviews.  To prevent a similar occurrence, the site should have a "mission statement" and declare a set of rules for determining what is/isn't on or off topic.  A list of categorized topics could also be a good start, along with a process for vetting new topics against said rule set.  Keeping the focus of the site to that list is not intended as a means of judging what is or isn't useful to people, but rather a way to focus what the site is or is not there to serve or represent.  The site can't be all things to all people; that's just too broad and unwieldy for anyone to manage.  If there are topics or posts that don't fall within the scope of the site's mission statement, then there's nothing wrong with going through a review process to see if the site should evolve, or if the site should encourage those poster's to build a a sister site to serve that audience.  

Another approach to prevent the site from judging what is or isn't useful to others could be to grant each author a page for their own blogs, musings, un-reviewed articles, or articles that have not passed peer review.  In this solution, only articles that had passed peer review would be posted to the main page.  This way the information would still be available on the site, just not featured.  People could find which authors and articles fulfilled their needs, authors could post whatever seemed important to them, all without diluting the main page.  For something like this though, each author would need to bear the cost of their page (i.e. they would need to pay a subscription / dues); this does entail some additional overhead of collecting fees, managing who has or has not paid, enabling or disabling access based on payment, etc.  The idea of just providing links to individual author's own sites for their articles seems more appealing, but definitely loses focus on the content being on the site; in this situation it may be better to just encourage sister sites.

Topic 1, schedule, was always a tough one for me to keep up with.  Not only was the time to write and get the articles peer reviewed before they were due an issue, but coming up with something interesting to write about was always a bit of a challenge.  Rather than having a schedule to write to, it might be more realistic to ask people to submit articles for peer review, and once those articles have gone through the peer review process, they can be categorized and scheduled to appear.

TL;DNR  I'm also interested in reviving the site, and definitely agree there are issues that need to be addressed.  Let's discuss what can/should be done, and see if we can reach a consensus.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140328003222/http://www.altdevblogaday.com/

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/3h3y4f/reviving_altdevblogaday/

Best Regards,

Paul Laska

Sent from my iPhone

[Jaymin Kessler]

So now I am curious what we want the balance of articles for the site to be: only stuff of practical use in modern gamedev, stuff related to gamedev, topics of interest to gamedevs, or anything goes. Examples:

practical use: how to render X, how to do physics in GPU compute, maya tricks, build system opt

related to gamedev: Raspberry Pi, RTL coding, interesting info/stories, classic console history

topics of interest: cooking tips to stay healthy during crunch, what to do if laid off, dealing with crap coworkers

anything goes:photos of my cats Neutrino&Cosmos, OmarVsJaymin humour stuff

I'd be ok with a inverse pyramid structure, provided the anything goes stuff is rare and the practical use stuff makes up the majority of articles. I guess I am bringing this up because having multiple categories gives people more material they can post about, but we probably want to keep people coming back to the site with lots of practical useful info they can use in their own games

One thought is to move the content to GitHub and just have a generated static site hosted on GitHub pages ... In terms of workflow for authors they'd have write everything in markdown.

I love each and every one of you, and would be honoured to work with you on ADBAD again, but this is a dealbreaker for me. I've no time to be messing with markdown, and I'm absolutely not going anywhere git or github. If that's the direction everyone wants to go in, I respect that and wish you well, but I probably won't be involved.

2019年3月7日(木) 12:42 Paul Laska <paul....@gmail.com>:

[Wolfgang Engel]

Does anyone remember why the old content had to be taken down?

[Lloyd Nguyen]

Aside from the archive.org version (which is just mirrored by bots) the rehost of the original articles by those redditors is at a new site @ https://altdevblog.com/ . I'm neutral towards the Internet Archive but if anyone has issues with republishing, this repost site would be a concern.

Now, if I remember the feedback to AltDevBlogADay correctly, mostly from my peers back then, the main draw to the site actually came from programmers interested in hearing about esoteric technical subjects. You can even see some of that opinion in that reddit thread. For other people like designers and artists, there was a big question in how this sets itself apart from Gamasutra's blog section. I know the idea was to get a lot of different viewpoints from a variety of fields and experience levels, but that's the audience it ended up attracting, in the end.

So, I think we really do need to identify what made this valuable aside from it being "Gamasutra blogs, but with blackjack and hookers." Niche gamedev subjects is a nice angle to start with, and god knows how many times I've raised an eyebrow at some incorrect Famicom tech info, but what made everyone stay? Or rather, what would've made you want to stay on ADBAD? We need to think of the hook, line, and the sinker, so to speak.

> Does anyone remember why the old content had to be taken down?  

I think it was just neglected. Mike got too busy with Sunset Overdrive if I recall correctly, and he was hosting it out of pocket.

Lloyd N

llw...@gmail.com

[Don Olmstead]

I thought the server just died and there weren't backups.

[Josh Caratelli]

I agree with Jaymin-san, although Git/Markdown is an option I feel it's just another barrier that we don't need. It's hard enough to get people to write content consistently in the first place. 

On that note, we could always focus the site on quality over quantity and say only have one or two blog-posts a week for the entire site? Brand the whole thing as:

"Oh cool, today's Thursday so I can start my day with a coffee and a new AltDev blog post".

Also it's very cool to see this is all happening again, great work folks! 

[Don Olmstead]

I pinged Mike on what happened with the server. https://twitter.com/mike_acton/status/1104072155594014720

If we want to revive things we need to think about how the site would be hosted. As a developer I've had success with generating a static site using a static site generator like Hugo and hosting it on GitHub. WordPress means you need someone administering the thing and have to worry about keeping it all up to date. Not just the software but any plugins that get used. You have to worry about backups, server load, hackers etc. To me using GitHub Pages solves these issues. We would have revision control. We would have access control in terms of who can decide an article goes live through the review system. We can add a CI that would then generate the site with the new articles.

When I was writing articles I used Google Docs. That's the only reason I still have the content hanging out that I posted. I liked how I could give a link and people could comment on the article and help get it into a better state before publishing. Then I would take that and add it into WordPress. There are tools available to convert that to Markdown, http://iainbroome.com/how-to-convert-a-google-doc-to-markdown-or-html/ so if an editor took that and made a PR that'd be fine. If someone isn't comfortable enough with Git or for whatever reason is anti-GitHub its not a stretch to just do that work for them.

So what do others think in terms of how to host things? Also how did people write their articles?

[Simon Cooke]

" For something like this though, each author would need to bear the cost of their page (i.e. they would need to pay a subscription / dues); this does entail some additional overhead of collecting fees, managing who has or has not paid, enabling or disabling access based on payment, etc.  The idea of just providing links to individual author's own sites for their articles seems more appealing, but definitely loses focus on the content being on the site; in this situation it may be better to just encourage sister sites."

The cost you're talking about here should be approaching zero. It's $240/yr for a premium site on a2hosting, hosting unlimited domains, with CDN support, and for everything else you can hook up a free cloudflare account. 

As long as people agreed not to - say - upload and host video/music files on there, and stay on topic, this can be set up in a way that is self-controlled and reduces to zero cost. If we want to recoup server costs, we could host ads (typ. you'll get enough to cover hosting per year on a moderate traffic blog), but then people might get pissy about profit sharing.

Either way, this doesn't seem like an issue worth worrying about to me.

[Paul Laska]

> So now I am curious what we want the balance of articles for the site to be: only stuff of practical use in modern gamedev, stuff related to gamedev, topics of interest to gamedevs, or anything goes. Examples:

>

> practical use: how to render X, how to do physics in GPU compute, maya tricks, build system opt

> related to gamedev: Raspberry Pi, RTL coding, interesting info/stories, classic console history

> topics of interest: cooking tips to stay healthy during crunch, what to do if laid off, dealing with crap coworkers

> anything goes:photos of my cats Neutrino&Cosmos, OmarVsJaymin humour stuff

Definitely the OmarVsJamin humour stuff! :D  In all seriousness, I think addressing the comments/concerns that the posts trended toward low-quality is a key element to the success of a re-launch.  Grammar and punctuation aside, I find it easier to control quality in my own articles when I write something that is factually based, rather than opinion or story based.  I think it's also easier for people to review and provide critical feedback on technical or fact-based articles.  That's not to say that people shouldn't include anecdotes in their articles of why they chose to do some technique they are explaining; sometimes the experiences around our failures and successes give the greatest motivations for others to accept what we are saying.  However, making the story of the experience the point of the article loses what I believe is the focus of the site, to pass on the knowledge and experience of how to solve game related challenges to others.  

Of the examples Jaymin-san lists (only in my opinion):

- "practical use" topics seem like they would be the easiest wins toward providing value to the readers.  

- In the "related to gamedev", things like Raspberry PI and RTL coding seem like they could still provide information that people could apply to their own development challenges.  

  - "interesting info/stories", while very cool seems more like a conversation to have at GDC or the local gamedev meetup.

  - "classic console history", is a topic an author could research and write volumes about (e.g. "Blood, Sweat and Pixels"), but doesn't feel focused on passing on the knowledge of how to do game development.

- "topics of interest" seems like very subjective stuff that each individual could have wildly varying experiences or suggestions on, but doesn't feel like it could directly help people with their game development challenges.

- "anything goes", again, **must have** humour stuff! ;)

> "...GitHub..."

I'm less opposed to the idea of using GitHub, if Don's suggested google-doc to markdown conversion plug-in is as good as the site advertises.  However, based on the challenges we faced with WordPress and getting the code blocks to properly format in the past, I'm not a huge fan of anything that requires me to focus on fixing markdown or html.  I want to focus on writing the articles, not fixing the formatting.

> The cost you're talking about here should be approaching zero. It's $240/yr for a premium site on a2hosting, hosting unlimited domains, with CDN support, and for everything else you can hook up a free cloudflare account.

That's good news.  I've not hosted a site in a long time.  So, if we've got a way to do it at, or near zero cost, that should make things much less complicated.

> If we want to recoup server costs, we could host ads (typ. you'll get enough to cover hosting per year on a moderate traffic blog), but then people might get pissy about profit sharing.

My personal preference is not to have ads.  I'm not 100% against the idea of recouping costs with ads, if people can agree up front what to do with excess funds (to avoid people getting "pissy").  My suggestions would be to take any excess funds, and either use them to award as a prize to a guest/student author that contributes an article about their graduate research project, or donate the funds to a pre-chosen charity, at the end of each year.  Initially I was going to add that as an alternative, I'm willing to chip in some money to help pay for the servers.  However, I quickly realized that after enough people chip in to help pay for the server, we end up right back in the same situation of what to do with the excess funds, etc.  What other suggestions does anyone else have about how we would pay for the site?  How else could we solve the issues of what to do with excess funds, and neutralize anyone feeling entitled to some control over the site because they contributed money?

-Paul Laska
paul....@gmail.com

[Julien Dlv]

At people mentioning curation, I agree, I was probably the second worst author on the site, and my best articles maybe had a bit of value if you squinted, but mostly I didn't belong there (I was 19).

I think what was the most valuable on the site was the fact the people writing there had *experience*, and what they were sharing were things they had been using for years that tended to be either underrated or not very well known.

I don't think the content should be too laser-focused, some of the most valuable articles I read there were only loosely gamedev-related (example: an article on E-prime, it was an amazing discovery), but the fact the people who wrote those had *experience* was what made those articles work well.

Basically, teams spend their time reinventing the wheel over and over, writing things that can shorten iteration times of people at the other end of the industry should be super valuable.

Incidentally I've leveled up a ton since last time, but I still think I'd abstain from writing as much as I did, so yeah I'll agree a rigid schedule isn't best because it does encourage people to write worse. Practice is nice but readers don't want to be treated like guinea pigs I suspect.

[ケスラ-・ジェイミン]

Sorry to detail the conversation but I had an idea that might be a fun series of posts. 

What if we let beginners (or experts) ask questions (via Twitter?), then once a week we select N questions and let any ADBAD author who has something to contribute write up a quick paragraph on their thoughts. I like the idea of multiple authors answering the same question in a single blog post.

0) this is the kind of stuff I wish I had access to when breaking into the industry a million years ago 

1) it shows not all devs think the same and there are quite a bit of variance in how we think and approach stuff.

2) sounds like a great excuse to publicly argue amongst ourselves and learn a bit from the considerable talent pool here

iPhoneから送信

2019/03/09 14:47、Julien Dlv <mete...@gmail.com>のメール:

[Andy Firth]

I like that idea a lot. 

[James Mitchell]

It sounds to me there are multiple different things that people want out of a blog, potentially it could be supported with a good use of tagging.  One possibility is that if it was more of a platform that could have voted and promoted blog posts then the 'expert' blog posts can make their way to the front page  (similar to reddit).

I think it's good to open up to beginners as it enables them to share their experiences and issues, blogging is not just about giving the best advice but also sharing experiences.

With concerns over the quality of articles reflecting badly on the site/platform, I'm don't think that would be an issue if the site was known as an open place for anyone to post (similar to medium), and often with these platforms I normally find my way on them from link aggregators (hn, reddit) and communities (twitter, slack) not from browsing their platform.

[Jaymin Kessler]

hey James-san,

This is why I think we need a clear, defined mission. I'm not saying that college kids have nothing useful to say. In fact, I'm rather interested in stories about people who want to break into the industry and everything they have to go through, since it's probably way different than when I was a kid. But the question is whether those types of things have a place on ADBAD. I only have anecdotal evidence, but from talking to readers about the site, quite a few were there for the useful technical info and lost interest once the site started getting flooded with posts from random people not in games. And I suspect that's why a number of authors quit as well. 

And I'm not implying you must have N years experience or be the best in your field to apply. People like Mark Cerny and Fabien Giesen know everything I know (and way more (plus more in depth ())) but I wouldn't say that means I have no right to post. We just can't survive an anything goes policy, allowing things outside the core vision for the site. We don't filter based on age or experience, but rather just based on what articles fit the site guidelines

Julien-san,

Welcome back! Leveling up is fantastic. I'm looking forward to your posts and seeing what you've learned

new questions:

0) is there a better medium than email that we can have this discussion? Although my time/energy/desire to keep up with something like a slack thread is precisely zero

1) I think it would be fun to record this conversation for posterity, and make it public, so that anyone who wonders why certain articles are accepted/rejected can see the process we went through to arrive at the guidelines

2019年3月10日(日) 18:23 James Mitchell <ja...@jmitchell.id.au>:

[Michael A. Carr-Robb-John]

Seconded, that’s a great idea. 

[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

Hey all.

This really blew up!

I really miss doing ADBAD - the slight background pressure of knowing people are expecting you to post at some point was actually very motivational for me - I've been meaning to re-post all the stuff I did on medium & finish off the series I was doing on C/C++ disassembly etc. but without the people around me I just haven't gotten around to it...

I'd second, third, & fourth the general sentiment that the inclusivity of ADBAD getting perhaps a little too generous was a factor in my slowly petering out.

I think peer review rather than moderation is defo the way to go.

I used to write all my stuff straight into the wordpress wysiwyg UI thing which wasn't a million miles away from markdown (in fact I had to manually correct formatting quite a lot using the raw text view). 

I'm not entirely against using some sort of static site generator thing as long as we don't have to use markdown and it's all managed through a web interface - I also don't want to me using git for this stuff ;)

I guess what we want is somewhere between a wiki and wordpress?

A lot of off-the-shelf wikis have user access management and editorial control features so people could write and share post with other authors, get feedback, and then make the page publicly visible. They also usually have not entirely awful wysiswyg editors, or accept cut&paste from a google doc / word without freaking out too badly...

I'm also down with splitting the whole thing into topics right from the start.

Whilst I'd agree that the industry's changed a lot I think the change from "this is how we hand-rolled some super clever thing" to "here's how we coerced this commercial engine into behaving how we wanted" is fine - and there's a lot of unshared wisdom out there - I'm not taking about "hey look at my unity tutorial..." more stuff like "how do you get unity / unreal to behave in a way which allows you to actually make a game with it"; and making and sharing interesting shaders / related stuff is a lot easier if the people reading your posts can use the exact same tools that you're using.

I'd love to be involved again....

Alex

[Simon Cooke]

Both drupal and wordpress are pretty simple to use these days, and they have all kinds of role/account management and workflow tools (including a flow for editorial moderation + drafts etc). Drupal is a bit more involved in terms of set-up, but it's also more flexible. No need for wikis/anything else - about the only thing I'd say that's a hard requirement is to run it on a Linux box because Windows/IIS's support for PHP (and your ability to futz with that on most hosting sites) is so far behind the current state of the art that it's a non-starter. 

I'd be very wary of any plan that involves building some kind of arcane publishing software process - it should be nearly entirely unnecessary to do so when getting up and running. The existing CMSes do a great job here.

About the only thing I'd really recommend is that people keep archive copies of everything they write (or resyndicate on their own blogs) so that if the site goes down you have the material still. It's still non-trivial today to migrate content across hosts, so everything you can do to make sure that you don't get blindsided by losing the content is a good thing.

Categories/topics from the start is also a good thing. 

Back to the editing/moderation - bear in mind that some of us don't want to do heavy editing/rewriting cycles for what's effectively off-the-clock work. (I used to write for actual dead-tree magazines... if I wanted to do proper editing, I'd go write for a mag and at least get paid :) ). So light feedback would be great, but if it gets too heavily involved, people might balk - this isn't the day job.

Which means that I suspect unless we turn this into an actual magazine, it'll be a matter of inviting people to write who can be trusted to provide insightful content. If someone's new and untested, they get to write a synopsis or write their article without any guarantee it will be published, and have that heavily edited. (Kind of like print magazines do with untested writers).

Si

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[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

On Monday, 11 March 2019 16:28:55 UTC, Simon Cooke wrote:

Back to the editing/moderation - bear in mind that some of us don't want to do heavy editing/rewriting cycles for what's effectively off-the-clock work. (I used to write for actual dead-tree magazines... if I wanted to do proper editing, I'd go write for a mag and at least get paid :) ). So light feedback would be great, but if it gets too heavily involved, people might balk - this isn't the day job.

Which means that I suspect unless we turn this into an actual magazine, it'll be a matter of inviting people to write who can be trusted to provide insightful content. If someone's new and untested, they get to write a synopsis or write their article without any guarantee it will be published, and have that heavily edited. (Kind of like print magazines do with untested writers).

Yeah, I was also meaning to suggest something broadly like this.

I think the main thing I'd be keen to see is a vibe where want to solicit peer feedback (rather than peer review) before posting stuff - like a lot of really subtle stuff (minor & not so minor technical inaccuracies; relevant related info I'd missed out or decided to leave out etc.) got pointed out to me by various people in the adbad days and it made my posts loads better IMO.

Alex

[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

Yep. Totally up for this. Sounds like fun.

(sorry I keep replying to days old stuff, just catching up on all the replies still!)

[Simon Cooke]

I love this "stump the panel" kind of idea :)

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[Oscar Clark]

Always interested in writing (time allowing) - wondering if it would make sense to do a podcast - different writers getting on a skype (or such) chat each week and recording a debate on a topic. Maybe turn conversation into an article too?

Just a thought

Oscar Clark

Co-Founder 

Rocket Lolly Games Ltd

Mob: +447782325668

Twitter: @Athanateus

Skype: Athanateus

[Keith Judge]

That's a pretty good idea. I remember I was in one (might not have been for ADBAD) with Paul Evans and a couple of others discussing the morals and business of DLC (probably horrendously naively, in hindsight).

---

From: altdev...@googlegroups.com <altdev...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Oscar Clark <os...@rocketlolly.com>
Sent: 12 March 2019 13:39
To: altdev...@googlegroups.com

Subject: Re: Resurrecting AltDevBlog? Any interest?

[Oscar Clark]

Well I've done a lot of hosting of such things (e.g. Digital Jam) and would be happy to set something up - if there was enough interest

[ケスラ-・ジェイミン]

I’d be in for a podcast as well. I remember making articles taking actual weeks of work, with all the creation of diagrams and images, and writing all the text. I’d much prefer an occasional podcast from time to time. It’s a different kind of stressful, but at least I won’t have to ignore my cats and wife for weeks to do one

iPadから送信

2019/03/12 6:43、Oscar Clark <os...@rocketlolly.com>のメール:

[Oscar Clark]

So there is a bunch of things needed in terms of hosting/editing/etc perhaps we should do a call and work out the details from there - Perhaps even do a test run.  

[Simon Cooke]

I've got the equipment to record podcasts if folks are local to Seattle and want to do them that way? :D Only two people at a time tho.

[Oscar Clark]

I've had some reasonably decent results with Skype and Zoom doing it remotely. It's not the best quality of course and depends on reliable internet connection as much as each person having fairly decent microphones but usually good enough for most cases. 

[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

Yes Oscar! What a funny place to bump into you!

I think podcast (or even a stream like the kids do these days?) is a great idea too, we'd just need a bunch of topics to discuss / argue about and maybe a core of us who are able to hop on if the roster is a little empty.

Unsure how anyone else feels about streams, but the lack of a requirement to record and then edit seems appealing to me - Oscar and I did a 24h live stream talking about industry stuff for charity a couple of years back and it was really fun, though we didn't really do any talks about technical stuff but I guess there's no reason why we couldn't; with a stream people could even just do a live powerpoint or whatever if they needed visual aids...

Alex

[Oscar Clark]

Yeah as Alex was saying getting a format that needs little/no editing is best

We could pull together a google sheet with a schedule of talks/topics.speakers and create a bunch before releasing

How about we set up a call to discuss?

I'm out at GDC from Friday - perhaps we can do a call after I get back?

Oscar 

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[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

Yeah dude, count me in & have fun and/or good luck at GDC :)

[Ben Carter]

On 07/03/2019 00:10, Simon Cooke wrote:
> Count me in, as long as I can find useful stuff to write about :)

A little late to the party here, but I'd be up for writing some more
stuff if there's a place to put it!

--
Ben Carter

[Alex 'darbotron' Darby]

I actually just had a thought... wouldn't the simplest thing to resurrect ADBAD be to make some sort of syndicated "best of curated links" type thing where we allow people access based on the criteria we've been discussing? i.e. the general thing should be "let people on unless we have a good reason not to"

I'm always looking for great old articles which I failed to bookmark and I think it'd be awesome if there were a place I could just go to find them and know they'd be there...

I'm not saying medium is the best choice, but I know it works & has this feature - we could set up an altdevblogaday medium publication and then if people want to syndicate their stuff there we could get them to post their links in here and if the concensus is "yeah that's coll/interesting/etc." we can allow them access to syndicate their posts to the ADBAD publication - it's super painless & even keeps attribution for the original URL etc.

https://contentwriters.com/blog/syndicate-content-medium/

I managed to scrape all my old ADBAD posts out of the internet archive & I'm going to re-post mine on my company's medium publication.

A lot of the snapshots on there seem to have missed the images but some do if you hunting about you should be able to find a snapshot with your stuff intact...

Here's one which has all mine with working images etc.: https://web.archive.org/web/20140328114757/http://www.altdevblogaday.com/

Also: here's a pre-publication preview link to the auto-imported version of one of my posts for your perusal: https://medium.com/@darbotron/a-low-level-curriculum-for-c-and-c-f1df2c73ba14

Anyway, just a thought...

Alex

[Amir Ebrahimi]

Super cool how easy that looks to get content back again that works well on mobile!

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[Simon Cooke]

My only worry about medium - as mercenary as this is - is that it's great if you're an unknown writer looking for exposure. ADBAD doesn't quite come under that bucket - it's established, it has people who are "names" (as much as that happens in our industry unless you're one of the celebrity debs), and it has a great hook (useful industry expert knowledge not serviced by any other venue).

I feel like we're doing ourselves a disservice if we don't host it and (ideally) monetize it. Or at a minimum set things up so that we could do that in the future.

I can host if anyone wants to pitch in and help with setting up Drupal? (I've got a turbo a2hosting account I'm paying for that I'm not fullymigrated onto yet for my own sites). The only thing I really desperately want is rock-solid logging so that we can measure audience, and potentially tie that back to revenue sharing/advertising. 

On Mon, Mar 18, 2019 at 2:30 AM Alex 'darbotron' Darby <darb...@darbotron.com> wrote:

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[James Mitchell]

I think we can avoid the complexity and maintenance of hosting by using something like WordPress.com which is reasonably cheap and unlimited traffic.