I cannot seem to free myself from the past, and with this Google Plus esq blogspot theme, you don't have to either!
Google Plus was a big deal for me, and I will always look with fondness on those early halcyon days as the RPG blog writers got hoovered up into its ecosystem. But now, in the ashes of the RPG internet that has come and gone, it only exists in the memories of those who were there, like the Forge or the rpg-net webring.
The fact Google Plus failed to achieve the hubristic goal of its creators (dethrone Facebook), and yet proved to be so nice for small groups of indie-creators and artists (the photography circles were huge from what I could tell) until its untimely demise, feels so...right in some ways.
Old School role playing games are about the lost valleys, not the populated ones. They're about finding and recovering the pieces of the past that are worth recovering. From physical treasures, to pieces of wisdom that might, one day, help usher in a Renaissance.
Web design and graphic design are pretty "durable" things. Fashions and tastes change, but an arrangement of boxes in a grid is an arrangement of boxes in a grid. And I really loved the G+ interface. The wall of multiple posts always scratched that hunter gatherer itch when I plucked out a quality post from the stream.
So, not being a programmer myself, I had one of the demons-in-a-jar (GPT), thaumaturgize up a blogspot template that echoes the design of the site I loved.
You can grab the PlusWall template on GitHub: https://github.com/swordfishislands/pluswall/
All you need to do it back up your existing blog theme, paste in the xml from github as your custom HTML, and then wipe away a single tear of memberberries nostalgia.
I believe there can also be up to 100 authors on a blog, so if you're really feeling froggy, and have an OSR blog post sloshing around in your head, perhaps we could roleplay like it's 2015 for a day, and get multiple authors in "the feed".
Comments
Post a Comment