Category Archives: Misc

Things miscellaneous or otherwise not neatly sorted into other categories.

Asides, Misc

The “Salute Bump”

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We track basic visitor stats here at the Warbard, as most websites do. What people are reading, which links they’re following, the usual stuff, including how people find this site – what inbound links they’re following, and (to some extent) what search terms they’re using to find us. We use the open-source web app Piwik for most stats, and the built-in WordPress Stats for a few details.

Over on Flickr, both Corey and I can track views on our accounts in a similar fashion, which photos are being looked at and what search terms people are using.

We’ve both noticed, this year and last (in other words, since we rebuilt Warbard in it’s current format) a mildly amusing thing: every year after the huge Salute wargaming show in London, over the water and far away in the United Kingdom, we get a big jump in viewership stats. The reason? About a month before the world-famous Salute show, we have the Trumpeter Salute show in this part of the world, and for four of the last five years, I’ve been there, taken lots of pictures that’re up on Flickr, and for the last two years, posted here about it as well.

So gamers hit Google looking for eyecandy from Salute, and get our blog and our Flickr photos because of the similarity in event names. Oops.

Trumpeter Salute is a great convention, the highlight of my gaming year in many ways, but it’s not the immense and justly famous show in London, which I got to in 2000 and badly want to go back to one of these years! If you’ve come looking for Salute pics, sorry to disappoint you! But have a look around, you might find something else of interest, and thanks for the bump in traffic and the minor amusement!

Misc

Pardon Our Outages

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We’ve had two outages in the last week here on the Warbard, where our normally-reliable WordPress backend takes a dump and decides to stop working. Given that the entire site (and five others…) run on this WordPress install, that’s a bit of an issue.

I know what the fix is (reinstall the theme used here via FTP, which is easy enough) but this is a classic bandaid solution, because I don’t know why it’s breaking in the first place, as the error message appears to reference a line that doesn’t exist in the file it’s referring to, which is amusing…

I have to say that this morning’s quick repair job on the site (while on my coffee break at work) wouldn’t have been possible without PortableApps – I have both Filezilla Portable and Firefox, Portable Edition on a USB key, so I can securely carry around all the accesses I need for site maintenance without having to install stuff on the machines at work or other random Windows computers!

Anyway, hopefully it won’t happen again. Any WordPress gurus in the audience know what is going on? The WordPress help forums and a general Google search turned up nothing terribly useful…

Misc

Paint It Black

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This is a wargaming website run by a pair of Canadians. It’s hosted on a Canadian server (a very deliberate decision, I should point out). So why is this post about American politics?

Because SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) and it’s evil twin PIPA (the Protect IP Act) currently being debated by American legislators are so mind-bogglingly stupid, badly thought out and vile, frankly.

And because, especially under our current Conservative government up here, Canada has a bad habit of following our giant southern neighbour happily over whatever stupid policy cliff it’s just launched itself. SOPA/PIPA is a really, really big cliff. One that could wind up with the wreckage of much of the Internet as we know it splattered at the base of it.

Michael Giest has a great article on Why Canadians Should Participate in the SOPA/PIPA Protest. Read it before he blacks out his site.

I also know from the site stats we keep here that significant number of our visitors are American. Unlike those of us from overseas, who just have to watch in horrified astonishment and make what protests we can, our American visitors have Senate and Congressional Representatives they can, and should, be contacting to hammer home just what bad laws SOPA/PIPA are.

Wikipedia is going black. So are WordPress.org, BoingBoing, Reddit and a host of tech and geeky sites. Closer to wargaming, TGN and parent site CMON are going black.

We”ll be blacking out Warbard in solidarity from 0800-2000 PST Wednesday the 18th.

We’ll be back that evening, and so will all those much, much larger sites I mentioned above. But if SOPA/PIPA are rammed through, huge swathes of the Internet as we presently know it could wind up black for good, wrecked by bad laws passed by idiots.

Misc

A 2011 Review

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Happy New Year! Just back from a week away from my computer and my workbench, spent visiting the folks inland, and counting down the hours until it’s back to work and such.

Although this website has been around on various hosts and under other names since 1998, 2011 was our first full year in this relaunched blog format, powered by the awesome WordPress and a renewed and expanding interest in wargaming! So how did that first year go, anyway?

Random Stats of Possible Interest

We started rebuilding the site back in September 2010, officially relaunched in January 2011, and we’ve been going steadily since then! According to the web statistics package we run, there were just under 17,000 visits to the site, with just over 20,000 pageviews (just over 1 page per visit, in other words). Most of our visitors are from (top 5, in order) the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

April 2011 was the busiest month we’ve had so far, with just under 2,000 visits.

In terms of posting, this post is the 149th posted to Warbard, with the vast majority — roughly 130 — being from 2011, giving us a rough average time between posts of under 3 days. Not bad!

The most popular single article was the review of .45 Adventure 2nd Edition, with various terrain articles and gallery posts filling most of the rest of the top ten. We talked about Inkscape quite a bit, lots of pulp adventure, and more recently the Russian Civil War.

Going into 2012, expect more RCW, more pulp, more terrain & buildings, and of course the two main gaming conventions locally are rapidly approaching in February and March/April 2012! 2011 was a great year, and I expect 2012 to be even better!

Inspiration, Links, Misc

Links of Interest, 9th Dec 2011

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If you haven’t already read Sidney Roundwood’s excellent 29 Ways to (try to) Stay Creative: A Wargamer’s List yet, you really do need to. The accompanying short video is not wargaming specific, but still has good advice. Do you know where your notebook is?

Incidentally, there’s a great collection of links to blogs, podcasts and other inspiration in that post of Sidney’s. Among other things, it’s introduced me to Porky’s Expanse, an entertainingly wide-ranging blog nominally centred on gaming, and suggested a bunch of podcasts I’m going to have to try out. I prefer music while painting, usually, but podcasts are perfect for figure prepping and basing sessions, I’ve found, and with more RCW Russians in the pipeline I’ve have a couple of long prep sessions coming up!

The always-excellent Make Magazine website now as a Tabletop Wargaming section. Not a lot there now, but this could become a very interesting repository for the hobby and also a source of some publicity, as Make has a very broad readership.

Seen anything interesting lately?

Historicals, Misc

Pearl Harbor, 70 Years Ago Today

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Today is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, and this year marks the 70th anniversary of that attack.

I was on Maui for a vacation about 18 months ago, in the spring of 2010, and my brother and I spent a day at the Pearl Harbor memorial sites, the USS Arizona Memorial, USS Missouri, and the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbour. I highly recommend the visit if you find yourself on Maui.

The Aviation Museum was recently opened when we were there, and it will be exciting to see it expand and develop over the years. They don’t have a huge collection of aircraft, but the quality of the displays is very high and the collection is tightly focused on the attack on Pearl Harbor and the early war in the Pacific so far.

Arizona & Missouri

Guarding Arizona

The rest of my Maui 2010 photos are over on Flickr.

Misc

Nov. 11, 2011

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Adding Poppies

Went down to our main Cenotaph on the Legislature lawn this morning for the Remembrance Day ceremony, as I almost always do. Good turnout despite the threatening weather, and while it rained off and on through the ceremony and marchpast it had at least stopped bucketing down like it was earlier in the morning.

I’ve always thought those of us who study war for recreational purposes should pay extra attention to Remembrance Day or the local equivalent. It’s not always lead soldiers and dice, after all.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them.

I’ve got a few more photos from our ceremony over on Flickr.

Conventions, Misc

BottosCon

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Off overseas (ie, to Vancouver) Friday afternoon to spend the weekend at one of the area boardgame conventions, BottosCon.

Boardgames? It’s likely to be a pewter-deficient gaming event, true, but it’s mostly an excuse to get out of town for the weekend and hang out with an old friend who has recently moved back to Vancouver. Who knows, I may see some familiar faces from Trumpeter Salute, and I may even sell a few more t-shirts. We shall see.

If you happen to read this and are going to be at BottosCon this weekend, leave a comment below, the magic of smartphones means not being cut off despite being away from our computers!

Regular pewter-based gaming content will resume next week, no worries. There’s a huge crowd of 28mm Russians on my painting desk wondering when I’m planning on telling the world about them…

Misc

13 Years of This Nonsense!

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Sometime in November 1998 I sat down in the computer lab at the college I was going to at the time, signed up to Geocities (remember them?), and got busy creating what is now, 13 years later, this website.

The glory years of that first version of the website were roughly 1998-2003, with content for most of the Ground Zero Games science fiction rules as well as 15mm fantasy gaming. I still own all those figures and rules, although some of them haven’t had an outing in longer than I care to think about…

I did very, very little gaming from about 2003/2004 to 2008, although I did maintain the site, and moved it to the current warbard.ca URL in August 2004. I knew people were using the site, I’d get a couple of emails a month about it, so it wasn’t going anywhere, but I wasn’t adding to it.

In 2008 I got myself over to Trumpeter Salute 2008 in Vancouver, discovered 28mm pulp adventure gaming, and was back into gaming with a bang! The site had to wait a bit longer for a proper revival, though, being rebuilt in the fall of 2010 in it’s current WordPress-based form, and “officially” reopened in January 2011.

(More about the site can, if you really want to read it, be found over on our About page.)

So, here’s to many more years of this nonsense, in whatever form it takes!