3 Years And Counting, AmigaGuru’s Gamerblog Still Going Strong

Better late than never, Happy Birthday to AmigaGuru’s Gamer blog. This article was supposed to have been released on the 20th October but as always it had to be postponed a bit due to me being busy with other things.

It all started back in March 2012 with a very basic and crap blog design and what not, the site struggled with speed and connection issues. It did not take long before I stopped with the blog and decided that it wasn’t a good idea to continue.

In October 2012 a new blog design and provider happened, the blog became popular very quickly and exceeded all expectations, this gave me the inspiration to continue and of course, update the code and design to find a good final design.

The visitor numbers went up and down for the next 2 years, some articles were clearly much better than others and it was hard (and still is) to find the proper style needed to attract stable numbers of returning visitors and at the same time get new ones too.

I released a new blog design and just about everything possible was changed and updated 10 months ago (Feburary 2015), it all looked good and the future design was set in stone.  After a few hours of uptime the whole site fell to shit, the reason was some plugins causing problems and in the end, it managed to destroy over 2000(?) images/data.  Data I had backups of, well most of it…

Now 10 months later I still have not fixed all posts as it has to be done manually, very time consuming sadly.

The blog’s activity has exploded the last 10 months, over 3 MILLION hits by the end of this month for certain, the provider has contacted me several times asking for their service and speed etc and they just recently bumped my site up to 200GB storage and 50% speed upgrade for the same price that I have always paid.

Today the blog stand at 512 articles, this will be number 513.

Over 4000 Facebook likes (on this site) since March 2015 (i like to think it matters).

Over 2000 comments (including old and new site).

Look!, it is me! and so many wonderful games too, OutRun, Bloodborne, Mr Nutz, Lemmings, Metal Gear Solid, Jim Power, WipEout and Great Giana Sisters.

One of many things that you readers may not know is how much work it can be to hold the blog active, lots of updates have had to be done and there is way too many bad API and plugins out there that do just about anything they can to crash/bug the site.

For instance, the email notification system, Facebook, Instagram and even the youtube stuff has proven to be a challenge and some of them still are although I have had to turn to simpler versions of them instead of full integration stuff.

I started adding a new gallery (in the blog menu look for Games Gallery tab)last month and my goal (for now) is to let that one turn into the collection site, all games and lists will end up in the gallery. It will take a lot of time to add it all but I do hope to have it all up very soon (so far about 1000 games have been added).

Other new features are that there will be social media pages soon, these will be linked here with the “likes” and “posts”, I have a friend working hard on this integration right now.

There are many plugins that I have used and some I still use today, I have not forgotten about them and I will continue to support them with donations if possible.

Ok, this is all for now, lots of articles on the way and a lot of goodies too, I have various things planned like merchandise and even small compos with game-related loot.

Thanks to all g0blin and all my/our readers, running this blog would never have been possible without you guys.

The story behind this picture is that g0blin sent me a picture of himself being bitten at the Lucca show, good stuff I thought.  A few days later I got this evil plan to mess with the picture, the result is what you see above.

His blood is needed here and it has been more than once where he saved the blog, you can question yourself if this picture is based on a real story and if this really happened now or in 2013 when he joined the blog as a guest writer (co-editor soon after that).

Ok, that’s all, for now, guys, stay tuned.

The pictures in this post were done by my good friend Roar Tjørhom, thank you Roar!.