Announcing the Tabletop Gaming News Blog Network

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[pixelgeek]

Tabletop Gaming News is proud to announce the opening of the TGN Blog Network.

The Tabletop Gaming News Blog Network aims to be a central location to find interesting gaming material and articles from a selection of the many wargaming and painting blogs on the internet.

The Blog Network aggregates feeds from numerous blogs and puts the content into a central location that you can search and browse conveniently. All links lead back to the original sites so when you want to read articles on comment on them you do so there and not on this site. Full articles are not available on this site. The idea is to use the TGN Blog Network as a portal to new content but that the original blogs still receive the traffic and recognition for their work.

This site is currently in its first version and there are plans to expand the ability to search content and tags amongst other features.

If you would like to add your blog to the network please check out our requirements.

If you have any questions or comments about the site please use the contact form on TGN to send them or contact me via PM or email here.

[Mad Doc Morris]

Nice idea, and I'm always willing to encourage community building. Only two questions:
1) The "one posting per month" seems rather harsh, if you don't want to bother visitors with just WIP shots and casual chat - at least, not on a regular basis . Recently life (and the heat wave, of course!) have substantially limited my output, so no new entries in a while. That's a possibility now and then. So would that necessarily disqualify me from taking part?
2) How does the TGN network differ from, say, La Figoblogotheque? There are already many more blog collections out there, and just another one would in my opinion lead to further dispersion.

[Steve F]

See also Steve Blease's "Blogs of War" meta-blog:

http://wargamesblogs.blogspot.com/

(Warning: loads very slowly)

[pixelgeek]

1) The "one posting per month" seems rather harsh

There has to be minimum standards for posts. Most of the blogs on the site have at least weekly updates and I don't think its unreasonable to ask that blogs that get included have a regular enough schedule of posts.

2) How does the TGN network differ from, say, La Figoblogotheque?

Its has the ability to view posts from a specific site and you can search based on tags and author name. I'm working on adding boolean tag searches so you can do things like search for posts that have 15mm and Napeolonic

Its also easier to read. As much as I like Figoblogotheque it is pretty cramped and difficult to read. You also can't see any of the past content from a blog on his site. It only displays one post at a time and none of the material appears to be in a chronological order or contains any tags to help "drill down" into material you might be interested in.

I like sites that are easy to read and provide some ability to explore the content available on/via them. This new site does that and I will be adding more features to help search and customize the content available.

There are already many more blog collections out there, and just another one would in my opinion lead to further dispersion.

I'm always curious why people think this is an issue. Seems like an odd thing to bring up as a critique.

[pixelgeek]

See also Steve Blease's "Blogs of War" meta-blog:

(Warning: loads very slowly)

That is a problem with Figoblogotheque as well. Both sites don't appear to store the content they parse. The TGN Blog Network reads in the RSS feeds and then stores excerpts of the stories and the tags used to describe the content.

All of that is searchable and viewable on the TGN site.

[pixelgeek]

Just to give an example of what I was saying.

You can view the last 15 posts from any blog. In this instance its the last 15 from the Bleaseworld blog

http://blogs.tabletopgamingnews.com/sites/22/

You can also view all the posts by author. Steve writes for two blogs and you can see all the posts he makes in both blogs here

http://blogs.tabletopgamingnews.com/author/steve/

If you want you can also also look at all of the posts tagged "Doctor Who"

http://blogs.tabletopgamingnews.com/tag/doctor-who/

Each of those pages also has an RSS feed so you could, if you wanted to, get an RSS feed for all posts tagged "15mm" and just follow that

[Mad Doc Morris]

Okay, the word "just" obviously wasn't clear enough, since I didn't mean to criticise your effort 'from scratch'. As mentioned before, any kind of community building is welcome to me. I simply wanted to know what's new about your approach compared to existing communities, and I seem to understand it now.

Anyway, my blog doesn't seem to qualify. So, good luck with your venture.

[pixelgeek]

Anyway, my blog doesn't seem to qualify. So, good luck with your venture.

You should write more often. The material you have is really good and you have some interesting photos :-)

[Mad Doc Morris]

Simply don't have the time for regular painting currently (as it happens now and then), and I don't want to bridge that with too many 'casual chat' entries. I've seen quite a few blogs going down that road, ending in irrelevance.

That's maybe another point for your project: I enjoy other blogs as sources of inspiration, provided by photos, reviews and illustrated game reports. So, with blog lists, it's a lot nicer to have previews on the actual content of the new entries, not just headlines and a first sentence. That's what I like e.g. about the Figoblogotheque.

[pixelgeek]

That's maybe another point for your project: I enjoy other blogs as sources of inspiration, provided by photos, reviews and illustrated game reports. So, with blog lists, it's a lot nicer to have previews on the actual content of the new entries, not just headlines and a first sentence. That's what I like e.g. about the Figoblogotheque.

The ability to do this depends on the data in the RSS feed. Some sites only publish an excerpt and some publish the full article.

Full articles don't necessarily contain valid HTML so to be careful about providing previews you need to actually parse the data you have to make sure it is valid HTML and won't end up causing problems when you try to display it.

Its something that I a looking into doing.

[Ray Rivers]

Well...

I've been checking out the TGN Blog Network each day now.

I think it is an excellent feature.

[Ray Rivers]

BTW...

I've been experiencing some connection issues with the site recently.

What's with that?

[BigLee]

I've had connection problems today as well... too many visitors?

[Alfrik]

Site seems to be down atm.

[pixelgeek]

The server crashed at 3am and its been rebooted now