Temporary domain name issues

My apologies if you were trying to hit Barts News and found yourself redirected to Blogger. I am in the process of changing my domain name host and this can result in some hiccups. Hopefully will pass through it soon enough.

Stay tuned for incoming posts!

256 Posts

Just a quick heads up – Barts News has just crossed the magical boundary of 256 posts. Celebrating 100 posts is for noobs, in here we think in Hex. Now, if you just started counting those posts, don’t be surprised if you see less of them – some are still in production, but the overall post counter (including draft ones) has just risen over the 8bit threshold.

What has happened during these two and a half years it took me to produce these posts?

I have been to Tokyo Game Show as official representative of CD-Action magazine, met Jessica Chobot and grabbed a beer with Kotaku’s two Brians. Maciej Miąsik noticed my post on his old XLand games and port of Heartlight PC to PSP, so did Avi Munchuk from Aviary (even though he did not reply to my comment). I got linked to from some more popular blogs and websites.

How did it all begin?

I originally started Barts News as a therapeutic kind of thing: I was very ill at the time and could not do anything more active. It turned out to work just fine and I am happy to announce that I feel fine enough to train martial arts, dance salsa, work, study Japanese and lead a normal life on my own. Running blog turned out to be so much fun I actually opened another one, this time on old books.

How many visits do you usually get?

On the best day I’ve had about 3,500 visits and on average day pageloads vary between one and two hundreds. It’s not that much, seeing how the site has been around for more than two years now, but it’s not too bad either. At least someone is reading the damn thing.

What do people search on your blog?

Most popular post has been the one on little programs to help you with Japanese and most popular searches usually are related to PSP, especially PDF on PSP and Bookr. Strangely enough, the posts I am most proud of somehow don’t get that much appreciation, except maybe the one on Wipeout Pure and in-game ads. Also, short referral fun for you to see some of the weird searches that apparently lead to my site:

how to sacrifice Ubuntu – with obsidian dagger, of course!
nazi girls – not here, my friend… oh, wait
how are Greek and Japanese goddesses similar? – they have breasts
spank Chobot – some do realize this fantasy in the real world, not me though
gameboy games for girls in firefox – my imagination just switched off
how to be strong enough to finish “dungeon siege” – I suggest doing push-ups and taking cold showers, if these don’t help, then face it: perhaps you are just too weak to finish Dungeon Siege

Any final thoughts?

There is a little box on the right that says Follow This Blog Barts’ Minions – I would be very grateful if you clicked it, it will boost my ego and show the world that you are following this blog. Thanks!

First post in the New Year

Welcome in 2009 everybody!

I am so sorry for the silence on this blog during Christmas period and until the end of 2008. A lot has been happening in my life, some of it very pleasant, but a good deal of it not at all (unfortunately). I’ll spare you the details, because this should be the place where you come back to read some news on games and technology, not some private rants. So without further ado, let’s get back on geeky topics.

2008 Wrap-up

Last year saw Barts News change quite a bit, both on the graphical side of things and content-wise. I have finally gotten around to updating page template and so the look of the site has finally moved away from default Blogger templates.

As for content, I have decided to write less posts but more juicy ones – so instead of barely reporting the news or fun stuff I have found on different gaming pages, I try now to focus on writing comparisons or features that you would not see elsewhere. Also, since I have less time for playing games but instead dabble in programming, graphics and other non-entertainment activity, I began adding posts on useful programs or interesting services found in the meantime. We’ll see where this takes us, so far the only immediate result is that the number of visitors dwindled again. :/

Speaking of which, this post dating back to 2007 has generated the majority of traffic on Barts News last year (Pareto rule in action, I guess). Ironic, isn’t it?

2009 Perspective

What’s coming up in 2009? Well, there will definitely be some changes. I am considering moving to some new platform ever since struggling with pains of updating site template. This will also be the opportunity to update graphical side of things once again and maybe finish that damn log once and for all…

There are some large posts waiting in the line (sneak-peek: my personal history of Final Fantasy VI and its remakes, and comprehensive list of cultural references in oldschool shoot’em up game Blood – among other things) and I definitely intend to wrap them up. Yes, I know I have promised you post on Blood last year already, but it’s already in the making. I have made the mistake of writing too many posts at once in December, so there is a lot of unfinished writing pushed back due to lack of time, but they will appear on Barts News soon.

Speaking on incoming posts, I have also wasted good couple hours on Kotaku contest, which then turned out to be a random drawing – I will use the writing from the contest here, in order for it not to prove totally useless.

Also, the commenting has been reopened for anonymous accounts – Dhoine drawn my attention to this and I have decided to give it a try. If the site gets overflowed with spam, I will have to revert to what it was before.

So there you go – you know now that I am not dead, you know that there’s a bunch of posts in making, you can expect some changes, possibly for the better. Hopefully you’ll still visit this blog from time to time. As always, I am waiting for your comments, impressions, suggestions, advices and insults.

All the best in 2009!

Design update

As you can see, I was not entirely joking when I said that Barts News needs a bit of rehash. Yes, I have been toying with the idea of changing the look of the site for quite some time already, the persistent lack of free time preventing me from actually ever doing it, however. But following the launch of my other new blog (don’t get excited though, it’s in Polish and about forgotten books), and some poll concerning possible templates, I dived head first into template editing and whatnot and you can see the result around.

Granted, it’s still a little rough around the edges: links went all bye-bye (apparently saving blogger template XML doesn’t not save all of it, thanks a lot Google!), so if the link to your page is not out there, please wait patiently until I readd it anytime soon, placement of some widgets is random (and some others went to the place were good widgets go after they die, thanks again Google), I cannot force some scripts to work, there is no cool logo (working on it) and blah, blah, blah. You don’t care anyways, do you?

Still, the design update was definitely needed (how long can you use default Blogger template anyways?), so bear with me a while and I’ll iron all the details out. If anything looks weird in your browser, please let me know via comments. If the link to your website doesn’t reappear in about a week, put some meaningful coughing in the comments. If there’s anything else you might wanna let me know about, for example impressions after change, feel free to. I’m waiting for your opinions here!

Here we go…

Hi,

Over the web I go under a nickname of Barts or Barts_706 (when Barts is already taken…). I am a software developer around thirty and a devoted gamer since ’89, when I accidentally found a computer magazine and read a walkthrough for “Three weeks in paradise”. Ever since then I have been drawn into the world of electronic fun, finished a masters degree in computer science and telecommunications, cooperated with biggest games magazine in Poland, CD Action, and generally enjoyed every second of my time in front of the screen.

I have never owned a blog before, yet I have decided to use this medium in order to share my reflections on different aspects of digital entertainment. I hope you will find my perspective interesting. After all, about twenty years of experience in gaming is something. Therefore after a few years of posting game reviews and comments in different places over the net, I thought I might centralize it in one place.

You will find here game reviews but also mentions of different software, technological gadgets, news of the games’ world as well as other things – maybe a couple of book reviews, too, maybe a photo or interesting link, maybe my program or game. We’ll see.

Well, enough talking – let’s kick it off then!