Okay, so, why does this site exist again? :-)

Yesterday, on a whim, I changed the site’s theme to Coral Dark. I mainly wanted to change the functionality of the comments field to use the WordPress standard provided by the Jetpack plugin, as opposed to the Disqus plugin I had been using. So far, I’ve been pretty happy with it; I haven’t needed to make any changes to the theme coding itself to fit it with the site, and the theme has built-in mobile support that looks better than the theme provided by the mobile site plugin I had been using. I also changed the “lightbox” plugin I had been using to display images to something that looked better and was still being updated.

It seems like a lot of work for a site I rarely post to and not many people read. :-)

Really, I never kept the site alive because I thought I had an actual audience. I simply like the challenge of keeping such a site operational and maintained. I consider it a good exercise to keep the site up to date and using the latest technologies, especially from a sysadmin perspective.

I admit that I had considered returning back to doing something a bit more along the lines of Mortal Kombat Online. I had retired from there because I had burned out on doing Mortal Kombat related news, but I didn’t mind the actual writing. I simply couldn’t think of a niche that already wasn’t well-covered that I thought I could bring a unique perspective to. Of course, I could have returned back to doing Mortal Kombat, but the community these days seems more focused on tournaments and technical aspects that, as a casual player, I feel too ill-equipped to speak on.

I also admit that I was also intrigued by the concept of doing video blogs or streaming gameplay. That also brings a set of challenges. Again, I don’t know if anyone really wants to hear what I have to say. More importantly, though, is that I am completely unsuited for radio or video, as it were. I tend to stutter and my mouth tends to run before my brain has considered what needs to be said. The best evidence of that are my video interviews for Mortal Kombat Online; of the three interviews I gave, the only one that doesn’t make me cringe with absolute embarrassment is the interview I did with Ed Boon at the media event where Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe was first announced. They’re just painful to watch. Streaming gameplay would have the same challenges, with the additional problem that I’m simply not that great of a player. :-)

As an aside, there were plans for a Mortal Kombat Online podcast, and a couple of episodes were actually recorded before the entire project was scrapped. The guy who did the editing was pretty up-front that he had to do a lot of work to make my contribution usable, thanks to my stutter et al.

Needless to say, I think I’m much more valuable in front of a keyboard than I am in front of a microphone or a camera. :-)

All of that being said, I’m pretty fine with how things are. Like I said before, this site was never anything more than something to occupy my time and hone my sysadmin skills, while posting about things that I wanted to get off of my chest. In addition, it looks better than a standard Apache default page or an “under construction” page, the latter of which actually WAS my site for several years. I honestly don’t think I have the time to create something that would take as much effort and resources as Mortal Kombat Online, anyway.

Still, I’m definitely open to suggestions regarding content. If there IS an audience, I’d be willing to branch out if anyone has any good ideas. I like working on the site, and it’s nice to be able to stretch my writing chops every once in a while.

We’ll see how things go, but for now, I’m okay with my site and where it sits in the grand scheme. :-)