I guess I decided to take a longer break than I intended. Partially this is due to my very limited gaming time (even video gaming) such that it took me almost three months to complete Assassin’s Creed II. But I should have a recap up shortly. In the meantime I direct you to this page detailing the differences between the original TI99-4A Tunnels of Doom theme and the reworked version from the ToD Reboot project. Pretty cool stuff.
Apologies for the meta post but I thought I should outline a few relatively minor changes to Tunnels of Doom. Obviously since a hiatus a few months ago I’ve gotten back into the swing of updating at least the Gaming Weekend column. It is seeming though that Gaming Weekend has become and indeed has been for some time the core feature of the site. It’s also increasingly misnamed so going forward Gaming Weekend will no longer be an active category nor will it be labeled as a specific named column. Instead Tunnels of Doom itself will be updated roughly weekly (my aim to to have them posted by Tuesday each week) with the gaming report that has been known to this point as Gaming Weekend.
I will maintain the post title “… Edition” convention and in fact the posts will be under the Edition category going forward. The rationale for this is simply to avoid the artificial column construct when the blog itself has become that column. ToD has always been a bit of an experiment to me, coming from my desire to write about games but no longer wishing to clog my personal site with the topic. My initial concept for the site was different from what it has become, and it’s fair to say that I’ll make further changes if they become warranted.
The one other small format adjustment is that I intend to try to improve the visual appeal of the site by including post images (like the one for this post). It’s probably not a huge change but ideally it will make the site look a little more interesting. And finally, the last change for now is that it will no longer be required to be a reigstered user to post a comment however, all comments will need to pass an approval step before being published. I get a lot of spam comments on ToD already and while I want to foster more conversation (and hopefully open commenting will allow that) I don’t have any desire to have to hand-prune spam comments that clutter the pages, I’d rather stop them before they become visible. This is actually the same as it has always been, but the lifted barrier to posting will hopefully mean once in a while I’ll actually approve a comment rather than just spam-mark an endless stream of bot account posted garbage.
The very few readers here have been gradually warning me of mysterious error messages appearing when they try to access Tunnels of Doom. Unable to replicate the problem, I assumed it was either a user error or someone else’s responsibility until it became clear that my problem-free interaction with the site was in the minority.
I tried to pinpoint the original source of the issue but was unable to do so, although I did find enough evidence of a security breach to convince me that a simple link prune would not do the trick. So I essentially dumped the database and re-built the site from backups in a fresh, clean server location. Please, if you find your browser kicking back any further error messages, notify me as soon as you can. I have also re-submitted the site for review at Google and hopefully that will give a clearer picture of how effective my efforts have been.
In the meantime I also took the opportunity to do some housekeeping: I’ve re-visited all the old stories with the following goals:
Unfortunately that means it’s possible I’ve introduced some (or a lot) of link rot where old references now return 404s from deleted or moved entries. As a matter of fact, I believe the new URL structure will completely ruin any old links. I don’t know of many incoming links anyway, but if you have linked anywhere other than the home page, you may want to bear that in mind.
Thanks for the patience; now back to your regularly scheduled programming.