Yeah, it’s an issue with the Javascript that the anti-spam plugin uses to place the field. We’ll have to look into how to fix it one of these days.

Michael Phillipss last blog post..remembered one of the things I’d intended to say.

FYI, you need to change the tab order of the fields in the comment form. It jumps to the Anti-spam word instead of Website after the Email field.

Of course, now that I have conflicting points of view regarding how nerdy the banner’s tagline should be (not a big controversy!)… I can live with that.

@John: I would not have written the post the same way if the review was unasked for and took that tack…

The boys over at Men With Pens are good at what they do. They know what works and what doesn’t when it comes to blog design. Are all of their suggestions and observations useful? Nope. Are some right on the mark? Yep.

It’s nice to have an unbiased set of eyes look at your blog. They did a drive-by on my writing blog here and I used some of the advice and dropped other parts.

Phil, you’ve got a good thing going here. Making some small suggested changes can only improve what you’re doing and strengthen your brand. Good form for handling the constructive criticism from Harry and James so well!

Bob at DnDReviewss last blog post..How To Kill Your D&D Game Without Really Trying

I did ask them to do it… I expected to be told that most of it was fine… and it is for my needs (and my perceived needs of the readers). What counts is that we will focus on the suggestions that make sense to implement like easier to see RSS buttons and the Comment button that was copied to appear at the bottom of a post now.

eh.

Now, if you asked them to do it, then it is an ENTIRELY different story.

One thing we never got around to implement is that there’s supposed to be another chat bubble sitting in the empty space left of Cartoon Chatty where I would be able to post Twitter like one liners.

That’s where I want to put all the nerd stuff!!!

And I will… as soon as we get it up and find either a randomizer script or a way I can edit it without breaking the theme’s template with my clumsy non-coder fingers and absent CSS skills.

(Honestly? I think that your blog’s main title is informative enough for anyone with the specialized skill set to benefit from the majority of this blog.)

Heh, time for weekly “dive into shaky metaphor” minute.
Sometimes it is a good idea to clarify and make a product more generally accessible.

Hum. I was at 500 words and the metaphor wasn’t done. Delete.

2nd edition AD&D was sort of random, often internally inconsistent, and a fairly arcane set of rules to learn. This, of course, made it hugely popular among those of us who like arcane rules sets. (Well I liked them better back in the early 90s than I do now, but…) It also made it hard to sell the game to the general public, even the parts of the general public that would be interested in fantasy role playing. All it had going for it was a big player base and the fact that it was less insanely complicated and nonsensical than most of its competitors.
3rd edition and 3.5 simplified the rules, got rid of the vast majority of subsystems and special rule3s (much like 2nd ed did to its own predecessor, 1st edition) and made the game more approachable for the newbie. This is a case of positive appeal broadening.

On the other hand, let’s say that you have a product like, I don’t know, the Dev C++ IDE. It is a specialist tool for people with a decent amount of knowledge in a specialist field. It is also reasonably user friendly (sort of like AD&D 2 vs AD&D1) But it is much less intuitive than say MS Word. By the time you need an IDE, you should be familiar enough with computers to not need or particularly want it to behave like software for the general computer user. Broadening its user appeal? Probably not a great idea. The people who need it are likely already attracted to its features and interface, and the people who don’t need it aren’t going to want it no matter how pretty and easy to use you make it.

Your case doesn’t map to either of these situations of course. Metaphor never works like that (well I have a few friends from the old Philosophy department who would say that all language is metaphor and there are thus metaphors that work with nearly one to one correlation with the real world. Things like “The dog is brown.” But that’s a nitpicky silly point.) I think that your tag line might be more like Dev C++ than AD&D 2nd edition.

Michael Phillipss last blog post..