Blog Roll

You might notice my blog roll is gone.
I am attempting to fix it and add the new blogs I am following and maybe even arrange them in some sort of order.

Random updates, links and posts

Hey.  It's been a crazy couple of weeks with home, work and stuff.  I have been neglecting you, my blog audience and that is not fair.

But don't expect it change yet today. ;)
I am though posting some half baked posts I have started over the last two weeks into one big random update. Might not be the best post ever, but it lets you know I am still here.

• First up my friend Elizabeth J. Kolodziej has a kickstarter up for her new book.  She is the author of the "The Last Witch" series and I reviewed the first book here a year ago today.  Kickstarter seems to be the way to go these days for starting authors.
http://www.facebook.com/events/200302106741659/
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1960643778/help-publish-the-last-witch-series

• Need a demon? Demonicpedia then is the internet's version of the Demoniomicon of Iggwilv.
http://www.demonicpedia.com/
It is still a little new and not very full yet, but like all -pedias out there based on the media wiki software this one can be edited by you.  My readers here are diverse, but horror is something most of you have in common.  So I see you all as being more contributor types than just passive readers.

• A couple years back I got a book of Sherlock Holmes stories from my friend Greg Littlejohn.  I am finally getting around to reading it and I am enjoying the hell of it.  Watch out Ghosts of Albion players my mind is boiling over with ideas!

• Thanks to the recent GMs day sale at DriveThruRPG I bought a bunch of stock art for my upcoming books.  Now I just need to make enough money off of these to cover all the costs!

• Speaking of Kickstarters and ongoing works in progress. The Player's Companion to Adventure Conqueror King is underway.  I can confirm now I did a little bit of work on the Witch class.  The author of the class also drew on my 3.0 witch as inspiration.  The ACKS Witch is very different from either my withes in "The Witch" or from "Eldritch Witchery" but all three are largely compatible.  Once all three are out expect a post.

More soon!

Blogroll broken

Like many of you, my blogroll seems to be broken.

I can't add or remove blogs from it.  Shame really, I had found some new blogs I hoped would be nice additions.   Anyone figure out how to fix it yet?

Sorry for the interuption

Been kind of a bad week you know.
Thanks to everyone that posted here, G+ and Facebook about my brother Mike.  The world certainly is a poorer place with out him in it.

I have some posts to get back too; I have had the Blog on auto-pilot this week. Well sorta, the post from last night was supposed to post today.

What do I know?

Well. My Basic Era witch book "The Witch" is done.  I just need to get all the art in.

I am doing the A to Z challenge in April.  More on that soon.

The new hotness right now is the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game from MWP.
I have it, I have read parts of it, but I am no where near ready for a review yet.

White Dwarf Wednesday

Hello all.

No White Dwarf Wednesday today.  I am out of town on a family emergency and I am not back yet.

You can read about it here.
http://www.buchanancody.com/fh/obituaries/obituary.cfm?o_id=1399499&fh_id=12328

Back when I can.

Random Updates

A couple of updates this morning.

Like Victorian era RPGs?  Don't forget about my Victorian Gamers Association on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/groups/117617184004/

There is a winner for the "I'll Tumble 4 Ya" contest!
Bob correctly identified Stevie Nicks as my big 80's (and 90s...) crush.
His 10 dollar gift code for DriveThruRPG has been sent out.

I picked up a couple of new horror games that I hope to have reviews up for soon.

Post 1000!

This marks my 1000th post here at the Other Side.

That's a lot of text. ;)

I hope you all have been enjoying this as much as I have.

This has been a great ride and more emotionally satisfying than I would have thought it could have been.  So here is to my next 1000 posts!  I hope they are every bit as fun to do and I hope you enjoy them as much.

Zatannurday: Year One

I was not feeling so well last week and totally missed out on my one year anniversary of Zatannurday!  Though I guess this one year since it became a regular posting here at The Other Side.

So what can we say one year later?  Well we saw one Zatanna comic wrap-up (her self-titled series) and another come up (Justice League Dark).  Her TV portrayals were limited to cartoons (though she was mentioned in the last season of Smallville) with here Silver Age counterpart appearing in  "Batman The Brave in the Bold" and a younger version in "Young Justice".

My most popular post was the one on Adam Hughes, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2011/03/zatannurday-adam-hughes.html  but I think that is entirely due to the art on the page and image searches.

My most linked to post was the one where I mentioned she was going to be in Young Justice, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2011/10/zatannurday-its-in-cards.html

The most commented one was the posting of Christie Zulo art, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/2011/04/zatannurday-z-is-for-zatanna-and-zullo.html
This was also the last posting I did for the A to Z challenge and the one that convinced me that the A to Z challenge was worth doing. The first post actually got more comments, but those were comments about the whole idea and less about post itself.

I am very pleased with how all these posts turned out.  Plus it has given me something to look forward to each week and give people something new on Saturdays, a day that had been pretty dead on the ole Other Side.

So here is to another year and plenty of magical Zatannurday posts!

New Year, New Look

I am going to be working on the look of the Other Side here for a bit.  New Year and all.

If you are reading this in a reader, can you please stop by and let me know what you think.
This gives me readability feedback AND helps me check to make sure I put the Google Analytics codes in right.

Thanks!

2011 by the Numbers

In my corner of the world it is now 2012.  Which means it is 2012 where you are too. But before I move on to 2012 and the all things new, here is a run down of the numbers here at the Other Side.

511 total posts in 2011.

According to Google Analytics here are some visitor stats.
92,225 people visited this site
127,168 Visits
92,225 Unique Visitors
191,473 Pageviews
1.51 Pages/Visit
00:01:07 Avg. Time on Site
71.16% Bounce Rate
71.65% % New Visits

The top 5 countries were
USA 67,909 visits
UK 9,104 visits
Canada 7,760 visits
Australia 3,538 visits
Germany 3,506

Not counting my root page, my most visited pages in 2011 were:
Xena and Gabrielle  31,114 views
Elzabeth Bathory 10,756 views
Zatnnurday, Adam Hughes 2,845 views
Hex Girls, 2,839 views
T is for Trogdor, 2,797 views
Willow & Tara, Macho Women with Guns, 2,198 views
More races of Mystoerth Goblins, 2,135 views
New Hex Girls, 1,827 views
Willow and Tara Page, 1,642 views
Demons Run, when chased by Madame Vastra and Jenny, 1,571 views

Top 10 search words to get to my site:
Xena
Trogdor
Dracula
Hex Girls
Elizabeth Bathory
Zatanna Young Justice
Adam Hughes
Goblins
Witch Hunter Robin
Wikipwdia (note the typo.  That stupid typo gave me 317 extra hits last year)

Top 10 Sources of page hits (not counting search engines)
RPGBloggers
The Underdark Gazette (may it rest in peace. forget that, just update the link)
Risus Monkey
Hero Press/I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters
RPG.Net Forums
The Hex Girls coven
Our Valued Customers (make one pot joke and the hits go through the roof)
Eternal Keep
Grognardia
Destination Unknown

My most visited period was between July 24 and October 31 where I was averaging 200 unique visitors a day. Lately, I have dropped to about 100. Don't know why yet.

My most commented pages were:
All Fun and Games, 31 comments
More OSRIC Player's Guide woes, 28 comments
But, shouldn't we aspire to be the  Hero?, 27 comments
There goes my last shred of OSR-ness, 18 comments
Worst Movies Ever, 17 comments
Should WotC support ALL D&D?, 17 comments
Question for my Readers, 16 comments
Skills in D&D, 15 comments
Product Changes at WotC: no more Minis, 14 comments
My collection is now complete, 12 comments

What did 2011 give us?
Well, we saw more OSR products than ever and finally something more than just another retro-clone.
Back in Gen Con 2010 people kept telling me about the death of 4e in 2011, it never happened, but it also didn't sell enough compared to Pathfinder.
Ghosts of Albion saw print! I also got paid for my first official D&D writing gig.  Though I didn't get "The Witch" out when I wanted.
My Zatannurday posts were a huge success in my mind (and according to the stats) so I am hoping for more this year.
My number of followers nearly doubled, most of them were from outside of the RPG and OSR circles, so that is nice.
I joined a bunch of blogfests which was fun and got me a bunch of hits and new followers and exposed the Other Side to a much wider audience.  I would suggest that other OSR blogs do the same, we tend to get into a rut to be honest.

Now. On to 2012!!

Looking Forward to 2012: Reviews

In 2011 I wanted to get 400 new reviews done and up at DriveThru RPG.
The trouble is that 400 products take a long time to do.  I did get about 200 in all said and told.

So this year I'd like to get some more reviews up.  I want to share what I like with you all and hope that you return the favor and tell me what you like, or don't like.  Sometimes this is the best way to learn of a new product.

Most of my reviews, the vast majority really, will be on DriveThruRPG / RPGNow.  Though I'll continue doing longer reviews for RPG Net and Amazon.

Updated pages

I am going to be making some mostly cosmetic changes to the old Other Side here for the new year.
Not changing scope or posts or anything like that.

I am though working on how information is organized and how things look.

So yesterday I started with the Pages.  Those are the links above, just under the banner.

I added a new Mystoerth page which details my *D&D campaign world. There are a lot of internal links to material I have written here and links to outside sources that I also like to use.  If you know of a blog or website that should be linked here, let me know.

I combined the "About Me" and "My Books" page into one About Me page.

My Links Page is still the same, I might add the awards I have gotten though since those are to be linked back to other blogs.

I have added a few new builds to my Willow & Tara page and my Characters page.

Ghosts of Albion still gets it's own page.  As does my OGL declaration.

Half a millon hits

Sometime, maybe about an hour ago I reached 500,000 page views.

Not too bad really.

Thanks everyone for the interest!

One last test

I know.  Messing with your Reader notifications.

One last test of Blogger and Google+.

Just another text of Google+ Blogger

This is just another test of Google+ and Blogger.

So far it look like this will be posted to my Google+ page and people can comment on Blogger or Google+.  So two places I'll need to check on to keep track of the conversation.

I'll keep an eye on the stats to see how many people are coming here from Google+ to see if it is worth it.

Here are some links.

First you need to be using "Blogger in Draft"
http://draft.blogger.com/

And here are the specifics
http://buzz.blogger.com/2011/12/connect-to-google.html
http://bloggerindraft.blogspot.com/2011/10/use-your-google-profile-with-your.html

Hope this helps!

Blogger+ integration

I see you can now integrate Blogger and Google+ now.  This move has been coming for some time I think.
Not sure what it means for me or even your the reader, but I have them all connected now.

I know quite a few people in the OSR and Gaming blogs are doing this, so I guess this means it is a good thing.  I have been looking for ways to use Google+ more.

Happy Thanksgiving!

To all all my American readers, happy Thanksgiving!

To everyone else, Happy Thursday!

Giving the Gift of Adventure: Patriot Edition

I was dropping off some donations today at a local women's charity; toys and the like really.

While grabbing some old kids games from my basement I could not help but think that a good way to help others out this holiday season and spread the word about gaming would be to give out some gaming sets; 4e, Pathfinder, OSR, didn't matter, just as long as someone who needed it got it.

But giving is only half the issue really, with kids you need to be able to game with them and it is a not a cheap hobby.  I know myself better, I can't donate time really, not working full time with kids of my own.  So giving to these places would not have the full impact I would like.  So I'll keep donating clothes and toys to needy charities, but my desire to spread the word about gaming though still needs to be addressed.

While unloading I think I came up with it.

Donate new RPG games to our men and women in service overseas.

I'd pick up a couple of boxed sets of something a donate, but I don't want to be alone and I don't exactly know where to give these things.

So help me out.  How can we do this this year?  Give the gift of gaming AND let the men and women that serve for us know we still care?

Thanks to Stuffer Shack!

With the end of August nigh (gods, I used"nigh") I'll no longer be the site of the month over at Stuffer Shack!
http://stuffershack.com/portfolio-item/favorite-site-of-the-month-august2011/

It has been great fun and I am looking forward to seeing which site is the site of the month for September.
http://stuffershack.com/

Lack of brain

There were a lot of things I wanted to post over the last week or so, but my brain is mush.

To top everything of I worked 14 hours today to get ready for the Fall term that starts next week.
I am still not done.

So what do I know?

Well DriveThru is celebrating H. P. Lovecraft's birthday with some sales on Lovecraft inspired games.

Not sure if I am going to get to play Pathfinder next week cause of all the work I still have to do.

I did the math the other day and the DragonSlayers don't have enough gear, spells or HP to take on Tiamat yet.  Especially if I play her right.

I have about 12 started, but unfinished posts.  I hope to get some of them out to you all soon.