I’ve received the following feedback from multiple visitors: “There’s a lot of good content, and plenty of variety – but as a new reader that can also be a problem. It would simply take too much time to find what I missed that’s applicable to my situation and interests.”
Blogging, by its nature, prioritizes material by recency, and archives past content into groups based on the date/month written. That makes sense for websites about current events, but for the type of material I post here, over time at least, that’s a little arbitrary.
In the short-term, keeping the newest material on top does help visitors that return regularly, so I have no plans to restructure everything into a more book-like order. Besides: every reader would want a different order and subset of the content; many readers are just Getting Started (perhaps looking for Level Design, Sample Code, or posts about Early Career), some visitors come here for Theory / Experimental Gameplay / Value of Videogames material, while others are interested in Industry and Business posts.
Though HobbyGameDev has included standard tag functionality since Ryan Burrell redesigned this site last year, until today the tag navigation has not been featured prominently. I’ve now bumped it to the top of the sidebar.
See? Look over there! ——————————————————————————————>
(If you’re reading via RSS feed, the arrow makes more sense on the site.)
My hope is that the Topic links will become a common way to browse the site’s content, helping new and returning visitors alike discover posts matching their (your!) interests, no matter whether the post was originally written 2 months or 2 years ago. My perspectives have changed over that time, but the relevance of the content mostly hasn’t.
As part of this update, I have gone back and reviewed every tag on every post, trimming back redundancy and generally trying to improve their usefulness. I have also introduced a new tag, Popular Entry, to highlight those entries that have received (and in many cases continue to receive) the majority of incoming non-subscriber traffic.
Anyhow, don’t stop reading here – click on one of those Topic tags to the right!
Permalink: http://www.hobbygamedev.com/spx/browse-hobbygamedev-by-topic-tag/