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I Can Help!

A Year Retrospective

This is the last day of 2009 so I thought I might take a moment to collect my thoughts on the site and talk about what is happening behind the scenes as well as what is happening on the DM Sketchpad.

Thanks

1. Readers/Users I get next to no feedback on the site and that is a shame but I can tell from the traffic numbers that people are coming to the site and reading it. I’m glad that so many gamers are finding it useful.
2. Publishers I want to thank all the publishers have had the courage to be supporters of the Grand OGL Wiki. It is only through their generous support that we are able to continue to bring more and more content to the OGC by Book page. Please if you don’t have time to provide me with feedback to this site, drop by the publishers web pages and thank them for helping us or and pick up something new from them. At one time I thought, resistant publishers who benefited from the OGL would come around and support this project but I do not believe that will happen anymore, so I think it is very important to financially support those that have supported us.
3. Content Pullers I want to thank John Whamond and Chris Sakkas who continue to pull content from Publishers to add to the OGC by Book page.
4. Sketchpad Contributors Thanks to Shane, Chris, Zach, Stefen, Steve, Ken, Charles, Mark and absolutely everyone that I’ve missed. You have made it possible for this to continue for over nine months now.
5. Sponsors I would like to thank the unnamed sponsors who have made donations to the Grand OGL Wiki site that have paid for our hosting costs and removed some of the financial costs of me running the site. I appreciate it.

The Experiments

1. Maps by Kristian I saw Kristian Richard’s maps on EnWorld and asked if he would be willing to provide me with a map for the DM Sketchpad each month. He has faithfully done that each month and has even provided adventure tiles for many of the maps. I view this addition as a success, and as long as Kristian keeps sending me maps I will continue to add them to the DM Sketchpad.
2. Adventures by Mark As Kristian has sent over maps, I’ve clumsily tried to add plot to them. My attempts to plot modules in Kristian’s maps have been awful. I always leave them to the end of the month and it is always a bit of a hack-job. I need to either find a volunteer to write a good module or rethink what I’m doing on this entry. I’m not happy with the feel of my adventures, the format of my adventure or even how they come together. I also receive no feedback on the adventures so I don’t know if anyone actually uses the adventures for anything.
3. RSS Feed I started an RSS feed on the site forums, so if you don’t want to check the DM Sketchpad daily then you can add the DM Sketchpad to your feed aggregator and it will let you know when a new entry has been written. This has not added much additional work to my life and I know it is being used by some so I think it has been a successful addition to the site.
4. PDF Compilations I started doing PDF compilations of the DM Sketchpad in May of 2009 and they have occurred as monthly or bimonthly issues since then. Building a compilation usually takes me a Saturday or a Saturday and a bit of Sunday if my technology is working right (currently my Acrobat is screwed and I need to get a new copy of 9 or maybe a subscription to Acrobat.com). Although time consuming, I like having a final PDF copy of the DM Sketchpad so I think this will continue as well.
5. Monthly Themes It was suggested to me that if the DM Sketchpad had a theme each month then potential content donators might have a guide on what to write about. I’ve done themes in November and December and in both months there has been a decline in the number of donated content or concerns from donators that I have XXXX but it wouldn’t fit the theme. Obviously, I’ve indicated to them that material doesn’t need to fit the theme but it seems to have mentally added an additional barrier. So for the time being I’m going to suspend theme for January and February and return the DM Sketchpad to the strange chaotic collection of ideas. I think we will do themes once every three months to allow build-up time (March is Dragon month).

The Statistics

• In the year that was 2009, we had over 42,000 unique visitors come to site and have eaten up 13.35 GB of band width.
• 81.2% of the GOW users are coming to us on Windows, 8% on Mac and the rest from Linix, Unix, Symbian OS, Blackberry, Sony PSP and Java.
• Firefox has a good lead on Internet Explorer and Chrome is just squeezing out Safari.
• The zip back-up of the site is 49.85 MB and contain over 3400 pages and files.
• There are 62 subscribers to the DM Sketchpad compilation.

The Struggles

1. Content on the Grand OGL Wiki As I’ve developed the DM Sketchpad as a companion piece to the Grand OGL Wiki, the amount of content that I am pulling from publishers has slowed dramatically. I have been criticised by some people for this because the GOW was originally meant to be a storehouse of OGC. In my view that hasn’t changed, with the addition of the DM Sketchpad we are now a collection of both older content and new content. Instead of a museum to past work of publishers we are a growing site of changing and living material, an exploratorium of OGL games. That said I will try to add two more books of OGC to the Grand OGL Wiki personally each month. My OGC book days for January are the 9th and the 23rd.
2. Gaming I am not gaming enough. I need to have a regular gaming group that I meet with once a week or once every two weeks. I will need to get on the phone to Kent or Patrick or check out the flatland gamers days in Regina. My PBEM game is going slowly but it just isn’t working as well as I want it to. I wonder if a PBEM game would work on a blog. So as DM I would post material to the blog and players would call actions or respond via comments. Has anyone tried this?
3. Hobbylancing I’m currently working on a hobbylancing project with Stefen Styrsky and he’s doing most of the heavy lifting on this one and I need to pick up my end. I think for the next while I will need to designate some time on M, W, F, S to hobbylancing. That will likely result in shorter DM Sketchpad entries but I’ve made a commitment to this 3P Pathfinder project and it need to work on it constructively.
4. Work I teach high school mathematics and science if you didn’t already know. We work on a Copernican system so in roughly 38 days, I need two teach two classes in their entirety, assess students constantly, provide feedback to parents and students and be ready to roll with change at a moment’s notice. As such my work always has to get priority, because I don’t have the luxury of a five-month course like in a regular two semester system. So if you see the DM Sketchpad says Jan 14th and it is the 28th, most likely work has thrown me a curve and I will update as soon as I can (or now would be a good time for contributors to submit  ).
5. Life My life seems to be what I’m doing when everything else is done. It seems to occupy that time after school when I make supper and just before bed. That doesn’t seem right to me, so I will need to examine things and reprioritize things as I move into January and Block 3 of the school year.