Monday, January 03, 2005

The biggest project I've been working on for the past six months is relaunching my videogame webzine Gamingredients, which we finally got around to doing on the last possible date: New Year's Eve. I had promised the community a December relaunch, and I'd damn well achieve it too, even if it meant working over Christmas and essentially coming across as antisocial during the end of the year's activities.

Meanwhile, a lot of challenges we faced had to be put down like rabid dogs or pushed aside to tackle later on. Several of our most innovative features didn't make the cut, nor did the initial requirement of integrating the user community with the website. But in practice, all that doesn't matter: we achieved what we planned to, which was launch the site. Minimal features or not, the site is up and it's a motivator for my staff and my community, which was a responsibility I didn't intend to overlook.

It may seem overexaggerated to be spending so much time on something as fragile as a videogame journalism website (and certainly something as nerdy), but there are many things to consider. Most notable is probably the fact that the entire relaunch project essentially counts towards obtaining my college degree, and as such isn't wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Somehow managing to combine my personal hobbies with the requirements for this course was one of the greatest achievements of 2004. I also learned a great deal about managing staff through transitional phases, implementing user-friendly workflow management systems, and combining open source programming with my own. And alongside all that, I completed the Europrix project as an official part of my college curriculum, received half the experience points I need to be able to graduate, and managed to compile this website.

So all in all, 2004 was a success in the field of producing real work and real results, both in college and in the realm of responsibility I've built for myself since I initially created Gamingredients in 2002.

Now to at least double these achievements in 2005. I hope I can. I'm sure I can.

Welcome to 2005, and coincidentally, my new weblog, the Hypertext Markup Sandwich. As required during the last two years of my university course (of which I am now in the final semester), I'll be updating whomever reads this on the status of my current projects, experiences, and insights relating to my work and my hobbies, web development and the games industry.