Greased Issues

Issue #15 November 6th, 2015 Volume 1

Azure
Edition

Greased: The Nerd Bacon Newsletter (Logo)

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Oct 23 - Nov 5

Badges Earned

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  • ZB
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  • Justicescooby
  • Sarus Vakarian
  • The Cubist

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  • The Watchman

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  • Justicescooby

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  • Doc Croc

Sledgehammer Suit (Manager (Twitch))Sledgehammer Suit Badge

  • InfiniteKnife

Badges 4.0 is Here!

Get ready for a set of 15 (ish) new badges to add to your collection! There's only one catch: they're all "secret badges," meaning the requirements to earn them won't be known until after you've met them! These badges have no time limit, so there's no reason to rush to figure them out or earn them. There might just be a clue hidden in here somewhere! Please keep in mind that secret badges aren't only relegated to reviewing; they can be earned through other means such as on-site activity and participation with social networks that Nerd Bacon is involved with. No doubt that some of you have already earned some of these through your regular involvement with us and I will be going through everyone's records shortly (if not already) to award them. Clues will drop every now and then - we may not outright give you the answers, but if you think you're on to something, let me know and I might just tell you whether you're right or wrong! Here are 3 of them to whet your appetite...

Mix Flower Lucky Bell Light Box
The Mix Flower Lucky Bell The Light Box

Good luck!

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Drop by the Members Area any time to checkup on the latest site developments, a comment, or just to say hi!

Oct 23 - Nov 5

Articles

Exclamation Block

HTML Tips & Tricks

Lists

Are you in the midst of creating a column with specialized needs? Or maybe you just want a little more control over the look of your content? Either way, consider reading through this brief tutorial on HTML lists to give your work that extra edge. For a more detailed explanation with many more examples, please refer to the accompanying 1.15.1 Appendix on Lists. The segment below covers much of what you can do, but I break it down a little more in the appendix with more examples showing you exactly how to do it!

Most of you are probably familiar with lists and have used them at one time or another during your reviews. You can easily create a list in WordPress by clicking on a couple of icons up on toolbar; one will yield a numbered list (ordered list) and the other a list without numbers (unordered list). These options should suffice for the most part, but there are a couple of simple modifications that may come in handy from time to time.

Remember, to use these tips and tricks, click on the "Text" tab at the top right of the editing box. Don't touch HTML that you aren't 100% confident with, and also be sure to save your work beforehand and preview the changes until you feel comfortable editing the raw markup. It is all too easy to create a formatting disasterpiece with even the erroneous deletion (or addition) of a single character. Follow these instructions, modify only what's mentioned, and you should be fine!

Creating a list is pretty simple, and you can even use the toolbar icons to do most of the hard work for you. In fact, I'd recommend deciding whether your list needs to be ordered or unordered and then constructing it within the "Visual" editor, and then going into the "Text" editor to make any additional modifications. After you've made a list and switched into the Text editor, you should notice that the entire list is preceded with either<ol> or <ul>. The "ol" stands for ordered list (the kind with numbers/letters) and "ul" denotes an unordered list, the type with simple bullet points.

Unfortunately there's not much that we can do when it comes to the unordered lists. Well, technically there are ways to change the shape of the bullet points, but the site-wide CSS will override any of these actions thus rendering them useless. But no big deal, right? A list of bullet points is always just a list of bullet points. (These are covered in the 1.15.1 Appendix but so far I am at a loss as to how to make these work within WP.)

However, we do have a few things we can do when it comes to ordered lists, such as changing the number or lettering scheme as well as the values of these numbers. First, let's look at what a raw list looks like. The following is something you might see on a finished webpage:

  1. Crimson
  2. Turquoise
  3. Amber
  4. Violet
  5. Vermilion

If you were to look at the raw HTML (as in WordPress' Text editor), you'd see this:

<ol>
<li>Crimson</li>
<li>Turquoise</li>
<li>Amber</li>
<li>Violet</li>
<li>Vermilion</li>
</ol>

The "li" tag stands for list item. If you recall from previous HTML Tips & Tricks, each expression within the arrowheads is a "tag" and "tags" must be opened and closed, including the list itself ("ol") and each item on the list ("li"). First, let's discuss how to change the value of the numbers themselves, which you'll notice are inserted by default. There are actually a couple of different ways to do this, but I'm only going to cover what I consider to be both the most intuitive and the most versatile.

Let's say your list didn't start at "number 1" for some reason, but instead began at "45." Within the first <li> tag, we can specify a value like this: <li value="45">. The remaining items will follow in sequential order, so you'll only need to use the value attribute once. Here's an example of the raw HTML followed by the end result:

<ol>
<li value="45">Crimson</li>
<li>Turquoise</li>
<li>Amber</li>
<li>Violet</li>
<li>Vermilion</li>
</ol>

  1. Crimson
  2. Turquoise
  3. Amber
  4. Violet
  5. Vermilion

You can also set the value for any number of items individually, for instance if you were listing an incomplete collection of cards or something similar. Whatever number is used for value is what will appear; for any list items without the value attribute, numbers will follow in sequence. Similarly, you can create a descending list by using the reversed attribute within the ol tag. You could then combine this with setting the value! In the example above, if I simply reverse the order, it will start at 5 and descend to 1. By setting the value, we can change this to whatever we want. To see a working example, please refer to the 1.15.1 Appendix on the web.Let's keep "45" but reverse the list. Here's the HTML followed by the result:

<ol reversed>
<li value="45">Crimson</li>
<li>Turquoise</li>
<li>Amber</li>
<li>Violet</li>
<li>Vermilion</li>
</ol>

  1. Crimson
  2. Turquoise
  3. Amber
  4. Violet
  5. Vermilion

Now we can also change how the list is "numbered." There are lots of options here, accounting for the alphanumeric characters of several languages, but I'm only going to cover the more common ones. Within the ol tag, we can use the style attribute followed by the list-style-type CSS property to define many numbering/lettering systems. The ones we'll be concerned with are numerical (1, 2, 3), uppercase Roman numerals (I, II, III), lowercase Roman numbers (i, ii, iii), uppercase letters (A, B, C), lowercase letters (a, b, c), and to a lesser extent leading zeros (01, 02, 03) and lowercase Greek letters (α, β, γ). Although this can be useful on its own for stylistic purposes, it is best used when creating lists inside of lists, like an outline or index; especially if you're listing steps for DIY project.

Here's an example of a list within a list, both using a different ordering scheme. The higher level uses uppercase Roman numerals while the sub-level uses lowercase Greek. Again, raw HTML first, then the final product.

<ol style="list-style-type: upper-roman;">
<li>Crimson
<ol style="list-style-type: lower-greek;">
<li>Turquoise</li>
<li>Amber</li>
</ol>
</li>
<li>Violet</li>
<li>Vermilion</li>
</ol>

  1. Crimson
    1. Turquoise
    2. Amber
  2. Violet
  3. Vermilion

For the other schemes, use the values lower-alpha for lowercase letters, upper-alpha for uppercase letters, lower-roman for lowercase Roman numerals, decimal-leading-zero for leading zeros, and decimal for regular numbers (this is also the default) in place of where you see upper-roman and/or lower-greek above. For a more thorough example and more information on creating lists within lists (you can also create lists within lists in the Visual editor and have WP do most of the work for you), see the 1.15.1 Appendix on Lists. You can also combine setting values with various numbering schemes! For example, value="45" in a lower-roman list will yield xlv; or in upper-alpha, the result would be AS.

Confusing? I hope not. Just pay careful attention to the syntax and all the little parentheses, semi-colons, etc. and you should be fine. There's also no harm in constructing the lists using the Visual editor, and as long as you know what you're looking at when you move over to the Text editor, making the necessary adjustments should be quick and easy. You won't use these features every day (or even on every list), but they can definitely come in handy when you want the uniformity and simplicity of a list yet need it tailored beyond the standard 1, 2, 3, ... setup. For more in-depth explanation and several more examples, please refer to the 1.15.1 Appendix.

Twitch IconUpcoming Twitch Events

 

Nerd Bacon Plays!

with InfiniteKnife @ 7pm EDT

Nerd Bacon Plays! has temporarily moved to Tuesday nights for a while; don't miss it! InfiniteKnife will be returning to Wednesdays in the near future, so stay tuned.

Late Night Nerd Bacon

with The Cubist @ 11pm or later EDT

Make sure to follow us on Twitch and sign up for email alerts so that you'll be notified when these casual (and sometimes completely bizarre) streams pop up! A Halo 5: Guardians stream will be happening in the near future!

Nerd Bacon By Request

with The Watchman

Tune in on November 23rd for The Watchman's next stream, celebrating Mario along with the rest of NB. The polls are open so click here to vote now for which Mario game you'd like to see!

http://twitch.tv/nerdbacon/

Question Mark

Have You Earned...

The Letter (from Old Man to Old Woman) Badge?

Letter Badge

Have you earned our Letter (from Old Man to Old Woman) badge yet? Don't worry, not many have! This rare piece of regalia can only be obtained by bringing us a Nerd Bacon exclusive! This can be in the form of an interview, coverage of promotional material directly intended for NB or yourself, or coverage of a local event. This doesn't include editorial or analytical pieces (although we're happy to host them in certain amounts) but rather a piece of news or time-sensitive material coming directly from you that won't be found anywhere else, or at least not quite in the way you've presented it. One of the easiest ways to earn it is by personally attending an event. It can be as formal as a convention or something simple like a local gaming tournament. Tell us what's going on in your area! Another way to grab the Letter is by conducting an interview with someone relevant to the industry. It doesn't have to be a big name, just someone, somewhere, who's involved with the creation of a widely distributed game. If you're ever out there hunting down indie developers, why not see if you can snag an email interview while you're at it?

This ain't an easy badge to earn and you've got to have some real dedication and/or interest to go out and do what it takes, but for those of you willing, you'll be in the company of a proud few. If you ever have any other ideas about a piece that might qualify as an exclusive let us know!

Nerd Bacon News: November (1)

October got off to a slow-ish start, but wow, you guys really picked up the pace during the last week or so and flooded us with a lot of great "October-ish" reviews and some great news as well. Nearly everyone participated by submitting at least one Halloween-themed article and many of you submitted multiple reviews. We'll have to take a look at the numbers to see just what sort of impact this may have had, but regardless, all of you did a wonderful job. You can thank NerdBerry for most of the content in this issue of Greased as I have been heavily pre-occupied with making a "guide" of sorts on how to create your own menus for those of you feeling adventurous. I'll touch on this a little later as well.

Now let's get in gear for November! A few of 2015's most anticipated titles have already started filling the shelves and there's more to come. We'd love to have reviews of as many of these new releases as possible. Also keep in mind the consumer aspect of the coming months - fill us in on Black Friday sales or what must-haves should be on every gamer's Christmas wishlist. There's a ton of both content and news to be mined from the industry for the next couple of months, so go out there and bring some of it home to the The Bacon!

Please note that there will be another draft purge on or about December 1st. For some reason the previous purge didn't clear up as much clutter as we'd hoped...I have a feeling a few too many articles were hastily updated and saved to avoid deletion without due consideration. More details to follow under "Site Developments."

The Bacon Celebrates 30 Years of Mario

Maybe you're aware and maybe you're not, but 2015 marks the 30th Anniversary of Mario! (I guess they don't count his earlier Donkey Kong appearances, maybe because he was "Jumpman" back then...?) We're paying homage in the best way we know how: reviews! Similar to the challenge issued back in August for NB's second birthday, we're challenging members to review 5 Mario games within 3 months! Lots of details were included in the announcement that went out a few days ago. If you don't know what's going on, check your inbox for Issue #14-S or just click here to be taken directly to the web version.

Beyond Bacon - Bacon Bebop
by NerdBerry

Many of you may have noticed Bacon Bebop, the newest addition to our ever-growing Beyond Bacon section. This is a red-hot concept on Nerd Bacon's myriad pages, (Editor's Note: NerdBerry just used "myriad" correctly - take note! I see it used incorrectly a lot...) evidenced by the great feedback we've received from Baconeers and social medias. ChronoSloth, Bacon Bebop's creator, has stated his desire for this project to be open for all Baconeers to contribute! We think it's a fantastic idea and yet another platform for you to share your video gaming fervor with the world. So, the rules go as follows:

  1. Roughly 400 to 600 words minimum, but probably shouldn't exceed 800 words if possible.
  2. Choose 1 song (track/composition) from 1 game.
  3. While not a requirement, you should do everything possible to track down the song title and the composer(s). Please fact check your own work! Wikipedia is not the best source for accurate information.
  4. The general guideline is to detail what makes them special as a composition, what the song's significance is in the game (and its particular moments when applicable), and the emotions it evokes.
  5. Include YouTube video sample. Not a video of the song but a video of the moment in the game where the song is used.
  6. Include song sample. (You can upload an .mp3 or other common audio file directly to NB
  7. All other necessary technical information applies: tags, category, SEO, excerpt, etc.

Generally, that's it! Feel free to elaborate in any other particular area, but bullet #4 above should be your main go-to source for outline and structure. If you have further questions, like how to find and utilize audio sample, please send all inquiries to ChronoSloth@NerdBacon.com.

Bacon Bebop Banner

Baconeers: Get Tech Savvy!CSS Icon

One of the great things that has made Nerd Bacon possible is WordPress - this is the whole system of logging in, creating and editing your articles, and pretty much anything you do on the site. It allows most members to focus minimally on the technical side of contributing to a website and does most of the hard work for us! Without it, you all would either need to learn how to "code" your own articles or submit them to us who would have the manually code them, and this would be one hell of a slow process. Luckily the average member doesn't need to know how to do any of that! But hey, that doesn't mean our members can't pick up a trick or two along the way, does it? Good writing is good writing and that always comes first, but a good writer who can manipulate the medium we're using is even more valuable.

Hopefully you've noticed the "HTML Tips & Tricks" section accompanying some issues of Greased. I don't always have a tip that's easy enough or practical enough to elaborate on, but sometimes I think, "hey, anyone could this if I just told them how!" This brings us to my latest HTML "trick," involving manipulating lists beyond what's possible in the WordPress toolbar. I cover some of the basics over in a box on the right side of this newsletter, but there's way too much content to fit! This issue contains extensive web-only supplemental material that'll help those of you interest learn new and interesting ways to change up how a simple list looks. More specifically I go into creating simple menus out of list and encourage all of you to at least give it a quick look. Yes, some of it can get kind of advanced, but I at least want to make you all aware of what's possible when we push beyond the limitations of the toolbar.

One of the biggest potential improvements that's always on our minds is, "how do we increase connectivity across articles?" The specialized menus help for the larger franchises, but there are so many articles that could be linked to so many other articles; we just need a simple and effective way of doing so. This extra material will hopefully give you what you need to embark on your own menu-building experiments. If you run across anything you like or think might work for our purposes, share it with us! It's a lot to take in but if you make it to the end you should be imbued with a whole new set of skills. Go ahead and run through the basics on the right, then head over to the appendix, followed by an advanced lesson in making menus from lists, then an explanation of the styling. Once you've finished, go look at doing the same thing with tables and then finally check out several different examples of these menus in action to see how versatile they were. There's even a quick reference page for the basic stuff so you can use this knowledge without having to memorize lots of abstract material and syntax.

So clear your head, sit back, and give this stuff a chance! I know it won't be everyone's cup of bacon, but I also know that some of you already have working knowledge of CSS/HTML. I think I wrote this stuff so that anyone can follow it, so don't be scaredto give it a shot! If I have time between now and the next cycle, I'll be discussing borders next, which is actually a lot simpler than what I'm pointing you towards today.

Authors: Keep Up with Your Column and Blogs!

Just a quick reminder to those of you with blogs and/or columns: don't forget to keep them active! We welcome the addition of such eclectic material to the site, yet we also want to justify its existence with timely inclusions. Writing a total of 5 articles for a column will net you the Screwattack Badge. I've also noticed many of you have been regularly updating your blogs; this is the sort of personal flavor we love to weave throughout the site in whatever ways possible. Keep on updating them and you'll soon earn yourself a Green Leaf Badge!

Review Spotlight

Proofreading
by NerdBerry

Proofreading your review has never been a strict requirement for writers, but perhaps it should be. Our editor-in-chief has enough on her hands handling a massive pending queue while also coaching our newer writers in ways to be a better writer. So what can we do to help her? Proofread! I know how good it feels to finally finish a review and the only thing you want to do is submit it to pending and move onto the next. But before you do that, you must proofread. Why? By proofreading, you increase your chances of spotting typos, grammar issues, and other errors that you may not have noticed while you were typing. Furthermore, use proofreading to make your articles even better! How? Don't think of proofreading as "scanning for errors." Instead, take your fingers off the keyboard for a few minutes and read it from the perspective of an new audience member. When you do that, take note of how the review flows, how it sounds, etc. Ask yourself:

This is a great opportunity for you to see your review from a new perspective. Tip from the Pros: Once you've proofread your review once, and you think it's solid, step away. Maybe let it sit as a draft overnight and come back to it the next morning or night. The more time you can spend away from your "final" product, the better. This gives you time to forget the tiny details, so when you proofread your review, it'll be more distant, and you'll truly be reading it as a reader/audience member. Haven't you ever gone back to read a review you wrote months ago and noticed how many things sucked about it? I know I have! So, step away for a bit and come back to proofread / perform a final edit.

Thoughts from The Cubist:
Lots of good advice above, and I also want to take the opportunity to throw in my $0.02 as a writer who's often prone to typos. If you're a relatively proficient typist, sometimes your brain can start moving faster than your fingers. Happens to me all the time and it's generally what leads to most of my simple errors. Is there any way to combat this? I don't know, and my creative side would encourage you to just let your brain continue on a roll and worry about the mistakes later. However, sometimes when I go back through my work, I tend to still miss things. Like NerdBerry said, stepping away from you work for even an hour or so can help you spot those errors more easily. Another thing I like to do is read over it in "Preview" mode instead of in the editor. The differing presentation forces me to read what I wrote and not what I think I wrote in much the same way that stepping away for a little while can.

Proofreading also serves another valuable purpose alluded to above: assessing the length of your article. Ultimately reviews are about information and too much information is almost always better than not enough, but it's important to remember that reviews are not indiscriminate collections of information about a game. We'd prefer that you write too much as opposed to too little, but we'd really like it if you can find that happy medium in between. It can be hard to gauge just how long your article is going to "feel" while you're writing it. Once you go back and look at it as a whole though, it's easier to spot extraneous information. Start thinking about the length as you're reading - are you getting bored or tired? Are you digging too much into tangential material like minor plot points, detailed mechanics, or overly complex explanations of gameplay? Don't be afraid to cull material if you need to. Does listing all 12 starting classes along with their base stats and initial inventory really drive your review forward? Does the reader really need to know that elves, dwarves, gnomes, brownies, hobbits, leprechauns, clurichans, fairies, pixies, and sprites are all playable? Does this exhaustive listing of diminutive creatures actually speak to the quality of the game? I see quite a few reviews with a paragraph or two dedicated to scenarios like the above which are essentially lists in sentence form. Cut it. Just say that, "the player can choose to take on the role of one of several diminutive folkloric creatures including common creatures like elves and dwarves along with more exotic selections like the clurichaun." If you're uncomfortable wiping out entire paragraphs, at least try to condense it a little; don't be afraid to leave out specifics.

It's important to remember that the purpose of a review is about assessing the quality of the game. Is it good? Why? Is it bad? Why? While we do encourge "in-depth reviewing," we want our writers to go into detail about the right things. In-depth reviewing is not necessarily listing out each of the 33 swords in Symphony of the Night along with their attack boosts; it's about telling the reader why these 33 swords make for a better (or perhaps worse) gaming experience. Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference, and we do want some context present so that the reader knows what's going on, just try to ask yourself, "Am I describing the game, or am I explaining why this asepct is good/bad?" As a general rule, exposition should make up about one third of your review, while commentary should make up the other two thirds.

Lightning Bolt BadgeGet Greasy!

Help us fill Greased with the things that you want to know about the site! What do you want us to talk about regularly? What kind of updates are you hoping for? What sort of information would inspire you to be even more productive? Let us know how we can make Greased yours and we will do our best. Don't hesitate to share any tips or tricks you may wish to share as well. We'd love to have more of you guys' and girls' input. We'd also love to field any questions that you guys and girls may have: questions about grammar, spelling, or punctuation? Maybe an ambiguous piece of policy you want clarification on? Or maybe there's a technical aspect that you've seen in another article or on another site that you're interested in using? Chances are that if you have a question so does someone else, so please, speak up and ask us! If you submit something that we use in a future issue of Greased, you'll earn yourself a Lightning Bolt Badge!

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Administration

  • NerdBerry -
    NerdBerry@NerdBacon.com -
    Owner/Founder
    Promotion, advertising, funding, events, social networking, editing, concept & direction.
  • The Cubist -
    TheCubist@NerdBacon.com -
    Owner/Founder
    Tech support, maintenance (badges, newsletter, membership management, etc.), graphics, editing, concept & direction.
  • Doc Croc -
    DocCroc@NerdBacon.com -
    Associate Site Director
    Editing, publication, and scheduling.

Management

Staff

Small Changes in the Twitch Schedule

I think we've covered all of these points recently, but here's a reminder about some minor changes in the Twitch schedule:

Nerd Bacon By Request: Keep your eyes on the "Upcoming Twitch Events" box on the right side of each newsletter for updates on when The Watchman will be hosting his monthly stream. This month he'll be honoring our Mario celebration on November 23rd with a fine selection of Mario games - click here to vote now! Remember that voting is not only open to members but all other attendees as well! I know we have a few regulars from outside the site who join us. If you know how to contact them or if you see them at a future stream, be sure to pass the URL on to them so that they may vote as well - http://nerdbacon.com/by-request/ . Those of you who promote NB on social networks may also want to encourage people to vote in the week or so leading up to the event. Don't forget that we do this every month!

Nerd Bacon Plays!: As mentioned in Issue #13.1, InfiniteKnife will temporarily be moving his stream to Tuesday nights instead of the usual Wednesday. This change is not permanent, but will persist for a few weeks. We'll let you know when the show moves back to Wednesdays.

Related to this rescheduling, we're looking for anyone who may wish to guest host a stream on the Wednesdays to come. Please do not commit to a date and time unless you're relatively sure you can stick to it. Anyone is free to host, just let me (The Cubist) know as soon as you can. We will need to account for at least 6 weeks worth of Wednesdays, possibly more, so multiple volunteers will be needed. If you've already hosted a stream before, all I'll need from you is a date and time. If you've never hosted a stream before, you're perfectly welcome to do so. However, you will need to schedule a trial run with us first! This shouldn't take longer than about 30 minutes or so, and it's just to make sure we can hear you, see you, evaluate your setup, etc. Also note that scheduling a trial run is not the same thing as sending me an email telling me that you'll be live in 2 hours. We will need to agree on a time where either myself, NerdBerry, or Doc Croc can be there to see it. As much notice as possible is preferred, though we will do our best to accommodate whatever time(s) you are available. Hosting a Twitch stream earns you the Gold Leaf Badge! (And attending one earns you the Statue Leaf!)

Don't Forget About the NB Clean-Up Crew!

In Issue #13 we discussed an upcoming project for the New Year - an attempt to systematically work through The Bacon's older articles in order to fix things like missing SEO and excerpts, improperly sized featured images, and whatever else we might need to do to bring these early articles up to current standards. We will need a small team of volunteers to complete this task, made up of members who are comfortable working within WordPress. We don't want to get in the way of your holiday reviewing or Mario Challenge (at least not too much so) so we're going to wait until sometime in January to get started. Your help will be very much appreciated (possibly rewarded ...?) so if you're interested, go ahead and let me know.

Site DevelopmentSite Developments

Site colors are back to normal after our month-long celebration, though we've idly considered changing the color scheme for other occassions as well. I thought about a Mario color scheme at one point, but his most distinctive colors are red and blue, and I feel like a red and blue site would come off looking more like an homage to the American flag than Mario himself!

Lately I have been experiencing some very real problems in trying to access the areas that make the sidebars tick; to do so requires a convoluted method and most troublesome of all, eschews my ability to set the individual visibility of certain parts of the sidebar - these are the boxes that give us our individual menus on pages where we have several reviews within a franchise. This doesn't really have anything to do with any activity from any of you, I just wanted to put it out there for anyone making any potential navigation requests. I will make every attempt to keep currently existing menus up to date, but we may have to find a creative work around before any further ones are added.

On a related note, a ton of site plugins have been updated as of a few days ago (17 plugins, if I'm not mistaken). As I always I've done some spot checking to make sure everything is working normally, but I could've easily missed something. If you notice any strange behavior on the site - whether editing/reviewing or reading - please let me know right away. Pinpointing the issue can take some time and I want to fix any problems as quickly as possible.

At the beginning of this issue I mentioned that there will be another draft purge in about 3 weeks. I think most of you know what this means now, but for those that don't, it's where we (the admins) go through and delete drafts that haven't been touched in a while in order to clean up clutter. Normally we only need to do one of these twice a year or so, but the previous purge proved ineffective at ridding ourselves of clutter. We will not insist that a draft of yours be deleted, however, if it's been a while since you've touched it, please consider letting it go rather than updating it to avoid deletion. The cut-off date will be October 1st - drafts with a "Last Modified" date of earlier than October 1st will be deleted. If you have something older than this that you would like to save, simply enter the document, make a small change, and save it. Again though, please be cognizant of what you are saving. Ask yourself, am I going to finish this within the next month? How long has it been since I actually played this? Am I going to be able to pick up where I left off or start all over? Everyone is entitled to have 1 or 2 unfinished documents floating around, and we don't want to scare anyone off from having a draft or 2 floating around, but we also want to discourage against unfinished documents that continually go untouched.

Site Statistics

Our traffic is still in need of a serious boost, but we have seen some decent improvement over last month. During the last couple of years we've seen our biggest surges in traffic in the months from October to December. We've still got a chance to make that happen! With enough new releases and some serious vigilance on the part of both members and those of you managing our social media activities, we can make the next 2 months a success. It's going to take some work, but we can definitely pull it off. Let's put as many of our articles out there as possible on both Facebook and Twitter, and I'll do the same to manage us on Google+ and Tumblr until someone else finds themselves up to the task.

There is a nugget of really great news tucked away in this month's stats though, in both the Pages Per Session and Session Duration numbers. October saw us with an average pages per session of 6.14, one of our highest numbers ever in this regard! It may not seem like much, though it is a 12% increase over September's average. The other admirable increase comes with average session duration; I know I have expressed by hesitance towards taking these numbers seriously, but even so, large increases (or decreases) can still be seen as important. October saw an average duration of 3 minutes and 16 seconds, a 15% jump over September. This is one of the largest jumps we've ever seen in this area, even compared to times where our number of raw hits rapidly increased.

These two numbers and a smaller bounce rate tend to point towards a trend of greater quality visits even amid the declining quantity. In fact our numbers have been showing such leanings for quite a while now, so hopefully these higher qualiy visits mean that more people are actually seeing more of our material. Still, serious effort on our part to put our name out there and keep it out there will be much appreciated.

Visits - October 2015
  TOTAL UNIQUE
Hits 4,906 4,015
% Increase Over September + 8% + 5%
Average Per Day 158 130
 
Page Views
Total 30,278
% Increase + 21%
Average Per Day 976

Until Next Time...

That's all folks! We've got a lot going on the next couple of months - new stuff, the holiday season, the end of the year, our Mario Challenge, new secret badges - but I'm sure you guys and gals can keep up! Two other things we'd really like to focus on if possible are bringing in new recruits and increasing traffic! Knowing that the quality of our hits is increasing is very good news, though we know it's possible to pull in roughly twice as many visitors 'cause we've done it before. Social media is key. Whether you're a member or one of our Social Media Managers, we need your help in pumping each and every Nerd Bacon article. The focus on productivity lately has been amazing but we really want those visits to pile up as well!

Issue #15 November 6th, 2015 Volume 1