So, a few months ago, responding to Google’s admission that yes, they’re evil, I moved the blog on over here to WordPress and vowed to divorce Google as much as possible.

I haven’t been especially successful, I’m afraid.

Reader’s been replaced (obviously).  I’m using NewsBlur, which has been steadily getting better and better. Other folks I know’ve moved to Feed.ly and The Old Reader, but I’ve been happiest with NewsBlur.

Semi-obvious: I’ve dumped Blogger for this here WordPress installation.  You know I did this for Warpstone Pile over three months ago.  What you might or might not have known is that I had a little-used RPG-oriented blog, Owlbear Stabbings, that I pulled into this blog last week.  I think it makes more sense to just have everything here. That means you’ll start sporadically seeing RPG-related posts here, intermingled with the hobby stuff. Sorry ’bout that.

And… that’s about it.

I can’t dump Google Authenticator. Heck, I’ve added sites to it.

I still haven’t moved out of Google Docs Drive into Office. I blame inertia.

I gave dumping Chrome for (first) Firefox and (then) IE. I couldn’t do it. IE doesn’t deserve the hate it gets, but ‘cmon. Firefox was shockingly just not comparable. Please, someone make a browser that’s, like, 85% as good as Chrome so I can dump it?

Gmail is similarly undumped, more due to inertia than to hotmail or whatever not working out.

I really need to change my default search engine to Bing. In fact, I’m doing it this instant. Boom.

Google Plus, the font of all misery, remains something I don’t really use. What’s vexing is that many/most of the RPG folks I’m interested in post there and not in the cacophony that is Twitter (for reasons that likely sound good to them). Ideally, I’d just add an RSS to their comments to NewBlur but, oh, wait. Bastardos.

I really need to find a free, angry weekend where I can write a script to parse my posts for images hosted on Picasa, move them into WordPress, and update the references.  I’m confident such a thing is possible, but fuck, I don’t have the bandwidth to fiddle with it.  For the time being, nothing new’s gone in there.

I could have, probably should have done much better in moving out of the Googleplex over the past few months…  but I’ve made some progress. And, considering how much the last couple of months have kicked my butt and how little free time I’ve had, I guess I shouldn’t be terribly ashamed. (Just a little ashamed.  A healthy amount of ashamed.)

IF YOU ENABLE GOOGLE+ COMMENTS ON YOUR BLOG

Google’s made it so you can use Google+ to handle your comments on Blogger.

Except, whoops, when you do that ONLY people with Google+ accounts can comment on your blog. So, enabling that feature locks out anyone who doesn’t want to use Google+.

So, don’t do that.

Until, of course, they make it mandatory.

(Very glad I shifted to WordPress.)

I used to use OneNote, desultorily, to keep some notes and, like, format them and stuff. Nothing aggressive in terms of data capture; just kind of a place that I’d sometimes into which I’d put data and sometimes out of I’d pull data.

About a month ago, I dropped OneNote for Evernote and started aggressively dumping anything and everything I thought I might want to return to into it.   This is entirely a side-effect of it being so much easier to put information, meaningfully, into Evernote.  Because it’s so easy, I’ve been that much more aggressive.

I’ve felt pretty dang good about this.

“Interesting? Bam– saved!  Save it all, Search knows its own.”

Why is this relevant to the blog and interesting to you?

Today, I saw this post by Old School Terminator.

Old School Terminator is going into the pyre alongside our community page, about 150 of our old posts, a few smaller features and (for the time being) our other authors.

Although I totally grok burnout, I don’t really understand the decision to go back and delete content that you’ve previously released. It’s out there, it’d done: I fail to see how the decision to stop writing correlates to the decision to remove what one’s already written.

It’s not my content, though, so I don’t really get an opinion, I suppose.  It’s a shame, because OST and DFG has really been a solid blog full of neat stuff over the years.

Where I’m going with this is: when you see something you think might be useful, save it.  Don’t bookmark it.  Don’t assume you’ll be able to Google it up later. Just capture that info in a tool (OneNote, Evernote, PDFs, whatever).

Links aren’t for forever.

So, obviously, the move from Blogger to WordPress has gone very smoothly.

Content was pulled over without a hitch.

I’ve clearly got a lot of layout & look-and-feel stuff that I still need to do, but that’s just a matter of sitting down and powering through tweaking the CSS.

Need to find a good slideshow plugin. Also, a good blogroll plugin.

In a perfect world, I’d love to find a utility that would parse through all of my posts, download the images from Picasa Web, then upload them to my blog, updating the image references. Such a thing should be technically feasible, but I certainly don’t know enough about WP (yet) to know how to do something like it. Am I the first person to want to do this?  Does such a tool exist?

Also, I’ll have to ping out to blogrolls to make sure they have my updated feed.

Then: Blogger goes down and gets a redirect to here.

In not-mini-related news, Google is killing off Google Reader on July 1. Reader’s a key tool in how I use the internet (in the past I’ve asserted that if you don’t use Reader, “You’re doing the Internet wrong”), so I’m pretty steamed about it.

I’ll get over the BLINDING RAGE this news inspires in me, but what I hope I don’t get over is the lesson this represents: do not over-rely on a single service that might be arbitrarily dropped. This is why Lifehacker suggests you get your own personal domain for e-mail; sure, people can reach me at gmail.com, but what if something happens to Gmail? I can point rushputin.com to whatever I want it to.

What if something similar happened to Blogger? I’m fast approaching my fifth year of blogging on WarpstonePile; it would be devastating for that to just vanish in a cloud of smoke one day.

Now, you might never expect them to kill Blogger; but then, I certainly never expected them to kill Reader… and with Blogger, there’s an active movement within some groups (the OSR) to shift discussion out of blogs and into Google+ (which I’ve never thought wise).

So, it’s a good thing I own WarpstonePile.com. You are accessing this via WarpstonePile.com and not WarpstonePile.Blogger.com, right? One is future-proof, the other, very not-so-much.

So: over the next few months, I’m going to try to transition as much as I can out of the Google world and into something else. I’ve been a .NET developer for what’s fast approaching a decade: I’m already dependent on Microsoft to meet my technical needs: why shouldn’t I rely on them for e-mail, for example?

I doubt I’ll be wholly successful: I don’t know of an alternative to Authenticator (which everyone should use for everything they can use it for). I’m already getting heartburn from trying to move to Firefox out of Chrome.  I’m going to try, though, and in doing so mitigate the risk inherent in overly relying on a company with a proven record of taking things that work away.

This is important: as a result, I fully expect to transition both this blog and my considerably less active RPG-focused OwlbearStabbings out of Blogger and into WordPress over the next few months.

• This could get a little dicey around here. They might look bad, they might go up or down, or not work correctly. There might be a wagonload of broken image links. Bear with me on all of that.
• Make sure your links, etc, all refer to WarpstonePile.com and not anything with Blogger or BlogSpot in the address. My domain will go to wherever this blog’s new home is. The Google-centric URL will continue to point to Blogger, which will eventually get a “Hey, I’ve moved!” and nothing more.
• I really appreciate your patience in this.

I’m a week or two late on this; that’s okay, right?

I generally don’t do this sort of thing, but this “Are you a proper wargamer?” (by way of The Wargaming Site) looks like fun… so here goes:

Spent at least £500 on figures / tanks – and you get extra kudos for every £500 you’ve spent

Without getting out the calculator or looking up the £/$ conversion rate… a comfortable, disconcerting yes.  Let’s leave it at that and not let Mrs. Rush learn how many extra kudos I get.

Pricked your finger or thumb on a pike block – several times

Yes.  And that’s far from the most grievous hobby injury I’ve sustained.  (This guy sent me to the emergency room.)

Tried at least 10 different rule sets and vowed never to play half of them ever again

This is a tough call: I just barely eke in, but I have to count prepainted game systems to hit the magic 10, and I definitely hatehate a good handful of those.

Bought an army off EBay

Nope, I haven’t.  And, after some recent poor transactions involving already assembled minis, I will likely never do this.

Sold an army on EBay

This, I have done.  A few times.  Cygnar, Circle Orboros, Outcasts, Fallen Kingdoms.  This reminds me I have a few Guild minis I need to unload.

Spent months painting an army – then used it in anger once

I certainly dumped a lot of effort into putting together a bitchin’ Fallen Kingdoms army, only to learn that I hatehatehate War of the Ring.  It took me a bit more than one game, but certainly less than thirty? Twenty?

Tried several different periods and genres

I expect this is intended to mean “historical” periods, but I’m going to count science fiction, fantasy, and horror and call this a “yes.”

Dropped a box of figures on the floor from a great height

… Yes.  It’s happened a couple of times: most recently with my Daemons.  I dropped them over a year ago, and it was so traumatic I still have yet to repair them.

Lost a battle on the last throw of the dice

Who hasn’t this happened to?  The best of games are this close.

Made at least one enemy for life

“Enemy” is an extremely strong (and inappropriate) term, but I’ve certainly learned a great deal about several people’s character through this hobby.  I’ve met a lot of really Good People through this hobby, but I’ve also met my share of people of low character through it as well.

Fortunately, despite club drama being inescapable when clubs (of any sort) are involved, that’s universally sorted itself out into temporary bickering… and not grudges.

Had a proper, stand up argument over a wargamers table

Again: who hasn’t this happened to?

Thrown a dice across a room

I don’t think I’ve done this.  If I have, it’s been in mock rage.  I’m really good about keeping myself from doing something like that when I’m legitimately pissed at my dice.

Rebased an army for a different rule set

This, I have not done.

Inflicted a whopping defeat on an opponent

This, I have.  Many times.  (Probably as many times as I’ve had a whopping defeat visited on me.)

Suffered an embarrassing defeat due to a stupid tactical decision

Yep.  Less often now, but it still happens.

Joined a wargamers club

Gaming clubs are the foundation of how I grok the hobby.  I can’t imagine not participating in one.  They’re imperfect institutions, but they’re a great way of ensuring that you get to play a lot of games against a lot of different people.  That’s healthy!

Bought a ton of lead that remains unpainted

Plastic, but tragically, yes.  Too much.

Been to a wargamers show

Assuming Games Day counts: yes.  I keep meaning to make it out to one of the historical events, but it’s never worked out.

Have more dice than is logical or necessary to own – and have used most of them

Yes, but that’s a gamer thing, not just a wargamer thing.

Have taken boxes of troops down to a club just to show them off to your mates

“Boxes” is a stretch, but I’ve certainly brought minis to the store simply to show off, not field.