* finish the design of this blog, it got stuck halfway through a redesign
* catch up with all the stuff i didnt post that i should have
* clean up the content
* figure out something smart around books
* change the structure of the homepage to be more topical
* start that professional blog
* get some appropriate affiliate links in a clean and clever way (not these awful amazon carousels I just put on for fun)

Check the official site and find something fun near you (if you are lucky)

Get some help on youtube

Enjoy!

I have covered the early beginning of this site as the hugely embarrassing imagisphere with the great provider list in a previous entry.

The focus changed to games in the winter of 98-99, when I fell into the game half life. Now I had always been an enthusiastic (but non hard core, they are just games!) gamer, but with half life I fell into online multiplayer gaming and a great community. I think I hung out in the newsgroup AGHL from 1998 to 2004, and still pop in it now and then to this day. But with this community came a lot of people equally enthusiastic and curious about games, games design and more, and a whole lot of debate around the matter.

At the time there was no concept of a weblog, but by today’s definition for about 4 years the site was a weblog about pc games, with a very personal filter. There were a lot of sites covering games news, but 80% of the coverage was of hyped high profile titles. I was usually interested in games that got a lot less coverage, and I wanted to get others in my circle interested in those, so I would link to any coverage, following about 15 news sites. It gave me a way to track things for myself and also somewhere to point people at when I mentioned a game and they went “uh?”.

I was still silly ambitious about side projects with no audience back then, so built a site which would list news and excerpts of coverage for (over time) several hundred games, and would allow cross navigation by game, developer, publisher, genre, and whether the game was published, unpublished or (alas) cancelled. It was rather ambitious so wrote a small set of perl scripts and templates (even though the site moved many times the scripts are still there in the file tree, and rather embarrassing). The admin was a simple set of lists and forms. The first version might have used msql, but that is lost in the mists of history. By 1999 it was on mysql, then postgresql, then back to mysql today (purely because when i moved it to a third party product they didnt support postreql).

Interestingly enough when I worked for a regional press group for 2 years between 2000 and 2002, I reused several of the perl modules I had created for this site. They were extended and grown into a full multi-site CMS and editorial system (called editorial2, highly original) and a small but fast ecommerce shop system (called simply v2) - these powered 12 city portals and over 1000 websites at their heyday. Sounds crazy, eh? What can I say, I am all for reuse! Editorial2 was abandoned when the company was bought, but v2 went on to a new life at the web agency we created as a follow up, and lived till 2007. I think at least one simple “pronouncable but never rude”* password generation routine was later moved to our next generation CMS (php) and to our Zope-based CMS, and probably lives to this day. Perhaps it will be my longest lasting technical legacy, a suitably ironic and modest one.

*(we had one report over all these years from one of our ecommerce client that one of their customers had complained about it generating a rude word. Although when we asked our client to enquire as to what it was, she came back to us saying she couldnt make heads or tails of the word -and neither could we- it was rude in some very foreign language.)

The wayback machine has quite a few snaps under iphi.net and iphi.com from 2000 onwards. Check your own site, it is a blast from the past.

All the time I have had this site, from 1997 onwards, I have been involved in building websites and web technology apps during the day, but when it came to having a personal site I had a problem (especially later once I was running a web agency). If I tried to do a site using my own code and technology, and under my own name, people would find it, expect it to be about the industry, or at the very least expect it to uphold standards and be a showcase. I would get so stuck into perfection I would spend more time on that than on content. I got enough of that from 6am to 8pm every day, I didn’t need more.

Even when I decided I should continue to have my old site, less about games and more about the stay-in-touch kind of things, me-and-my-toys.

I didn’t want it to be like work, or about work (this was probably a mistake for my own career, really). If I was going to spend more web time in my evening it would not involve coding, it would not involve design and I would not mess with it. It would be about content - content that interested just me, and that was fine with me.

And for a very long time I kept it totally separated from anything in my real life, nickname, no links, no real name, and nothing about work. I didn’t want to have to watch what I said or did. So I could get away with it.

Then the web changed, and the work-life boundaries blurred for everyone, and I decided it was silly to have that barrier. Now people turn up here knowing me from my professional persona, and I fear I cannot get away with this site anymore.

By blogging standards, it does everything wrong, it lacks focus and consistency, it has a very candid and direct tone, I might post 10 things one day then nothing for months, and, horror! a “sorry I havent posted anything” post. It jumps all over the place. No strategy, no coherence. I didn’t care, I’m not a blogger. This is for me and my 10 occasional readers, a “me and my stuff site” of the worst kind. Followed by about 20 friends on and off, when they wondered “What’s happened to iphi lately?”.  And usable for me when I need to send a link about a game nobody has heard about, because I watched it and collected links and quotes.

And on the side of technology and building it, I have gone for the frankenstein method - I messed with it live. The results shows entropy as applied to websites, a dozen half finished reorganisations and design changes, bits hanging out, bits fixed with staples. But it’s alive, even if all it can say is “gaaaah”.

Anyway, I will clean it up, and apologies to the 5 people who liked the old site fine as it was.