July 2018 - Tales of the Aggronaut

Seeking Screenshot Tool

July 31, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I am going to go in a different direction… and ask the Blaugust community with assistance on something. For years I have been a loyal FRAPS user for the purpose of recording game screenshots. I have a legally registered copy… that happens to have personal information in the registration details screen so I have mosaic’d it out. There are an awful lot of pirated copies floating about but I happily plunked down my $40 and have been using it for over a decade at this point. It has always simply worked as intended and given me the ability to record screenshots without fail. This changed however when Destiny 2 made the weird decision to block any form of an overlay for “security reasons” there by making it so that FRAPS could not record anything successfully.

First I feel like I need to start off with why I use FRAPS rather than in game screenshot tools. It all comes down to the fact that I like posting a significant number of screenshots in my morning posts… and that I am lazy. I cannot remember what the directory MMO number 376 that I have installed on my system uses for screenshot storage. As a result I like having everything dumped into the same directory where I can filter through them quickly, and eventually archive them off to my network attached storage. I have a truly nonsense number of screenshots stored out there at this point.

Ultimately what I am looking for feature wise…

ability to capture fullscreen, borderless and windows screenshots without capturing the window frame or my desktop
ability to save to the format of choice… I tend to dump things to JPG because my blog gets grumpy if I upload PNGs anymore
ability to work flawlessly without having to constantly check to see if its on
ability to change the target directory and dump everything to one place
ability to bind whatever it is to work off of PrtScrn button because its habit

For years FRAPS did all of these things but one of the recent Windows 10 updates seems to have changed that. Now any time I launch a game I need to kill FRAPS and relaunch it to get the overlay to work properly. This means that it is now a fiddly mess and it makes me grumpy. So what I am asking you my community is… is there a hidden gem out there for screen capture that I am unaware of? Now I am going to talk about some of the alternatives that I have used.

GeForce Experience

This one seemed like a no brainer given that I run Nvidia based cards and this ends up installing to your system regardless if you want it to. It isn’t a flawless system but it was the only reliable way that I seemed to have to be able to record Destiny 2 given that the overlay is hardware based and not something executing at a software level. Its major flaws were the fact that it would not dump to a single directory, but instead a series of directories named off of what the game executable thinks it is. This causes some weirdness when the game developers don’t actually go back and fix the name of their executable… for example the Quake Champions screenshots I have are in a directory called “PC” or Dauntless for whatever reason shows up as “Archon” which was maybe an early name for the game?

Another flaw is that you cannot change what format the screenshots are dumped in as it always saves to PNG, which involved me going through a morning ritual of converting all of the screenshots that I was going to upload to JPG to bypass the nonsense size limit. Lastly and quite possibly the most damning problem is when I happen to be running a game in windowed mode… it records my entire desktop like the above screenshot. This means I either need to drop it in photoshop and cut out the window or just live with the fact I am posting a postage stamp for a screenshot. Not ideal to say the least given that when I am streaming I occasionally run things windowed so I can see what is going on in stream etc.

Dxtory

Another screenshot software that has been recommended to me numerous times is Dxtory by ExKode which is I believe a Japanese based software house. It is also in the 30-40 dollar range price wise and does a really good job of capturing both images and video. The problem is… it would occasionally just stop working and not give any indication of this. I would be playing along thinking everything was working as intended… I would still have an overlay in game indicating that the software is active… then when I sit down to write a blog post the next morning I would have zero screenshots to show for the previous nights play time. The unreliable nature and the fact that this was not an every night occurrence made me move away from it. Some times it would go for three or four nights without flaking out on me… and other times it would happen multiple times in the same night. I was not able to find any sort of pattern around it. Whatever the case however it was unreliable and I opted to move away from it.

Greenshot

This is an open source software mostly designed to capture regions of an image much like windows clipping tool. However it does in fact have an unattended screenshot mode and as a result I attempted to use it as my software of choice for awhile. The problem is that when running Windowed Borderless… it would intermittently alternate between taking a screenshot of my desktop and taking a screenshot of the game. This became problematic given that I was missing a bunch of screenshots and again… maybe had nothing to show for my night of gaming come blog post time.

The core problem is that most of the screenshot tools don’t really do the thing that I want them to do given that they are largely focused on capturing video… and not capturing still images. I have StreamLabs OBS for those moments when I want to capture video so I have that covered. However what I want instead is just a reliable screenshot tool that I can use with literally every game I play, so the images don’t get lost somewhere on my hard drive. I may give Dxtory another spin because it has been numerous years since I last tried it. Ultimately however what I really want… is FRAPS to stop being a butt and just work again. In the meantime however, I would love to hear some of your suggestions for screenshotting games? Do you still rely on the in game screenshot tools, or have you consolidated to using some tool other than the ones I have mentioned?

Because Rocks

July 30, 2018 by Belghast

While we are still very much in Blaugust prep week, I am going to take the morning off and talk about some non-Blaugust stuff. First off the above embedded video is the YouTube version of this weeks Podcast where we talk at length about our feelings regarding Battle for Azeroth. Of the crew Grace and I are the only two that are really still connected to World of Warcraft in any major way, and the show itself became a bit of an extended version of the feelings we are both having. This weekend I spent a good deal of time prepping characters for the expansion since I had not really done that yet, and can abuse the event that is happening as a way to get some reasonable gear easily.

Unfortunately I made the decision to main Horde this expansion before I experienced the nonsense War of the Thorns quests… but as part of that decision I have been prepping my Warrior, Deathknight, Demon Hunter, Warlock and have been pushing up my Paladin. Now it had been awhile since I had done one of the class order hall missions, and I was immediately struck by now good tone wise it felt to be gathering up the paladins on either side of the fence to work together towards the goal of saving Azeroth. I am not sure how we got to this point where all of the past gains of the Legion expansion are out the window and we are back to a forced Red vs Blue narrative.

One of the things we talk at length about in the podcast is just how bad the Advertising campaign feels. Firstly we are divided as a nation and as a world by so many serious issues right now that it just feels irresponsible to be pushing more of that for the sake of selling your product. Secondly… in our experience World of Warcraft isn’t a dividing line but instead something that brings people together with the stupid artificial boundary between Horde and Alliance just being an inconvenience that maybe keeps you from playing with some of your friends. I tell this tale in the podcast but I figured I would talk a little bit about it in person.

When I went to take my ITIL training and eventually take the test, there was a significant amount of waiting around because of a scheduling mistake. This meant me and the trainer of the class had to sit around and hang out for a bit while waiting on my online time slot. During this we realized that we both had played World of Warcraft and were both raiders back in the day… but on opposite sides of the fence. Instead of it becoming a discussion about Horde vs Alliance… it became a discussion about our shared experiences leading guilds and raids and all of the weird things we had encountered in the process of doing that. We both immediately realized we had more in common in our experiences than different and focused in on those things… rather than some nonsensical artificial rivalry.

So as I find myself prepping for the launch of this expansion I end up thinking about the expansion that could have been. Had we continued the class fantasy and kept moving forward towards a unified Azeroth it could have been so amazing. Legion was probably the strongest World of Warcraft content to date and in part it was so strong… because the Horde and Alliance factored so little into it. There is a sequence in Stormheim that feels awful as you are forced back into the shoes of Red and Blue but everything else feels so good as you are working side by side with the other faction to face bigger evils. That is the World of Warcraft I want, where we take on things bigger than ourselves as we face what will be the obvious resurgence of the Old Gods.

I feel like Battle for Azeroth is the expansion that no one wanted, and I have arrived at this point by listening to my social media feed made up of a bunch of long time WoW players. Sure there are a few people I know who were excited for the War Mode… but only because they rolled on a PVP server to be with friends and don’t want any part of that nonsense and will be turning it off completely. It just seems like a weird gamble to triple down on the faction versus faction thing, when it felt so amazing to get away from it completely. I keep hoping that maybe they will throw us for a loop and that the factional nonsense is short lived, but I somehow doubt that.

I will be there with my hordelings hanging out with that side of my gaming family, but I am not going to be super pumped about it especially with the way that the early questing has gone so far. We are fighting a war “because rocks” and that we don’t want the other side to get any of these macguffins of ultimate power. Here is hoping that things get better from here.

Syndication and Social Media

July 27, 2018 by Belghast

This morning I have struggled a bit to get off the ground and coalesce into writing something that might be valuable to someone else. One of the things you see a lot with my blog is me attempting to be honest with my readers. This isn’t really the point of this mornings post but i would say if you are struggling with something… let them in on it. I’ve said before that blogging is therapeutic and at the same time lowering your guard a bit is too. Now I am not saying that I recommend this practice for everyone, because it does in fact give trolls an attack vector.

The thing I wanted to talk to this morning is the interwoven relationship between blogging and social media. I can say without hyperbole that almost every one of my social media accounts exists because of this blog as I sussed it out as another possible syndication venue for my content. It is not a coincidence that both my twitter account and my blog both started in April of 2009, because twitter has long been the vehicle that bloggers get together to talk to one another. This is why I asked for twitter handle as part of the sign up instead of other social media options.

I think the reason for this is that twitter is better than any platform at the quick distribution of a blog link. You have enough characters to provide a quick summary, a link and an image enticing your readers to click through and visit your post. The retweet culture allows someone to pass your information on… without passing too much of themselves in the process and I think that simply leads to more folks passing more information around than on other platforms. Granted in the era of the quoted retweet that changed a bit, but I still feel like that platform is the best place to quickly distribute content.

The thing is… I don’t just think this I know this from the statistics. I’ve been running google analytics since day one and that has given me a lot of information about what works and what doesn’t work for the purpose of spreading my blog. If I had utilized this more fluently rather than the generally lazy way that I do… I could be a hell of a lot more popular than I actually am. However it does tell me things about which platforms work and which do not. Let’s talk for a moment about the content I share and where it gets consumed.

Direct Traffic and RSS

First off one of the things you need to know is that the majority of your readers are probably still to this day going to be consuming your content through an RSS Feed Reader. Before sitting down to write my post I ran some numbers for the past year of usage and only 14% of my traffic comes from any referral source. This means the majority of my readers are either coming in directly or through an RSS feed reader. There are some other statistics that I have through WordPress that tell me that the majority of my readers are in fact coming in through RSS.

I don’t want to necessarily talk about the numbers because I have a larger audience than some folks and a much smaller audience than others. I use analytics for the purpose of learning about the data not necessarily as creating a benchmark to judge my success on and I highly suggest if you decide to go down that road you adopt a similar stance. The big thing I want as a takeaway however is that RSS is in fact not dead and you are going to see a large number of your users that are not accessing your content directly. As a result I highly suggest you check your own blog out in a news reader and make sure it looks like you want it to look. Since I am not trying to drive ad venue I syndicate my entire blog out over RSS instead of snippets… your mileage may vary here.

Social Media

In the above bit I mentioned that only 14% of my readers come as referrals from any other source and that also includes social media. As it stands right now I syndicate my content in the places that are built into WordPress, so that when I hit publish it also sends my content out there as well. Here is a rundown of where all said content goes…

Twitter – This is my primary social network
Facebook – At some point along the line I created a Facebook account just for the blog. I don’t use this network much.
Google Plus – Hold out from that era when we thought Google Plus would rule the world and a lot of us bloggers started hanging out here.
GPlus “Page” – Similar hold out where I thought it was a good idea to create a Tales of the Aggronaut page.
Tumblr – I don’t even know why I do this, but it was an option in WordPress so might as well.

These are effectively the places that I can push to each day when I hit publish without further interaction. The only publish option that I am not utilizing is Path… which if I am being completely honest I don’t know what the hell it actually is. It’s seems to be an iPhone thing and since I am not an iDevice user I have never actually encountered it. Now since only 14% of my traffic comes in through referrals… I could make an argument that syndication doesn’t actually matter. However I feel like putting your stuff in front of as many eyeballs as possible is always going to be a generally good idea.

Let’s talk a bit about where that referral content is coming from.

25% – Twitter – this is my primary platform for engagement so it probably isn’t shocking that the vast majority of my click-through’s come from it. It probably says way more about my willingness to engage with it than the actual power of the platform. My tweets don’t really go viral so it isn’t like I am getting a crushing number of hits this way.
12% – Bhagpuss.blogspot.com – That is right… my appearance in the Inventory Full blog roll is quite literally beating every social media platform but twitter. Thanks Bhagpuss!
9% – Facebook – this shows up as a few different addresses but combined together it equates to a little less than 10% of the referral traffic.
2.5% – Google Plus – There are still folks actively using this platform in spite of the fact that I am not. At one point I had a nonsense number of people following me so there may be some residuals from that?
1.3% – Reddit – Not something I actively engage with but a handful of my blog posts have made their way to Reddit where they got significant action. Getting anything on Reddit means you are going to have a constant trickle of users from there clicking on the links as people search.
.32% – Tumblr – I mean it makes a lot of sense given that my posts are not exactly formatted in the Tumblr way and I don’t spend any time engaged with that platform other than occasionally going on a reblog bender reposting cool comic book art.

Now as an academic experiment I extended out my timeframe and looked at all traffic I have ever gotten to my blog. At that point a bunch of data points change… namely my referral rate goes up to 26% of my traffic and the influence of twitter drops to only 11% of that… with WoW.com coming in second at a little over 8% showing the sheer influence of being part of the World of Warcraft blogging community used to be. To round out the top five… you have Google Plus at number three, Facebook at number four, and Reddit at number five. It is funny how things change over time.

Engagement

Ultimately my take away from all of this is that social media syndication is worth it… but only if you plan to engage with those communities. I feel like my numbers don’t really point out that Twitter is the most superior platform but instead that it is the only platform I am willing to actively engage with. It is the place where people know my name and respond to the things I say… and on the other platforms I am just a weird guy that refuses to use his real name or picture. Granted my real name is pretty freaking easy to find and I have tweeted out my picture a few times… so it is a personal choice thing not like a witness protection program thing. Ultimately I feel like you get out of social media what you put into it as far as blogging goes. I still feel like it is my favorite way to link up with other bloggers, but especially now that we have the discord and how active it has been… maybe that could shift into being that primary vehicle of communication for the community.

Regardless don’t feel like you have to do social media if you are not comfortable doing it. My engagement brings me in some hits but in the grand scheme of things it accounts for a very small percentage of my total users. The effect that is impossible to capture however is where people found out about my site in the first place. I have a sneaking suspicion that if you somehow managed to factor that into the equation… then social media would have far more weight in the equation that it appears to have. I choose to put my stuff out there and over time have built a community of regular readers, and if you do the same you will build your own circle of readers as well.

Choosing a Platform

July 26, 2018 by Belghast

Yesterday I talked a bit about the name of your blog and why I felt like it was probably the single most important decision you made starting out. Today I am going to talk about a very close second… which is what platform you are going to be doing your blogging on. There are a bunch of competing software packages and hosting scenarios out there, but I am going to attempt to do my best to work through them with you this morning… or at least the major options. For the sake of transparency I myself use WordPress in a hosted environment and have for a very long time. There are pluses and negatives with that kind of set up, but a lot of the other options I have played with at one point or another.

Hosting vs SaaS

Ultimately your first real decision point is going to be… are you going to be using a cloud/software as a service (SaaS) model for your site or are you going to procure your own hosting environment and maintain the site yourself. This really is a question of how technical do you feel comfortable being? Sure most hosting providers give you the option of installing something like WordPress or Drupal from the web based back end with the click of a few buttons. However there will come a time at some point when you need to get your hands dirty in the innards of your software. So ultimately you need to ask yourself if you are comfortable having to do that.

Ultimately the big thing that hosting the software does is give you the freedom to be able to try out any new plugins or themes that come out, because you can effectively re-roll your site as often as you like because you have the tools to do so. Traditionally in a more SaaS model you are paying them to maintain the software where they give you a few configuration options but greatly limit your ability to install custom code. For example if I were not as lazy as I am… I could create a wordpress plugin to maintain all of the nonsense that we end up keeping track of with Blaugust. When we were utilizing Anook quite a bit within the blogging community there was one of the folks that created a custom integration that would allow you to have an auto updating version of your Anook feed in your blog sidebar.

In a SaaS model that sort of thing really isn’t possible because the software company is maintaining the risk of hosting your content. That means they need to make sure nothing that is happening on your blog will potentially negatively impact the other people on that platform. What this means is generally speaking you will not have to worry quite so much about attack vectors and making sure things are patched to the latest versions, and in truth are probably going to have a much more stress free blogging experience. However if you like to tinker with things… you will similarly likely never be happy with the constraints placed upon you by a blog provider.

Self Hosting

So when you decide to host your own blog you are going to need two things… a hosting provider and some blogging software. The first part of that I don’t have a lot of advice with. The service that I used to recommend hands down has gotten significantly less grand as time has gone on. The service that I contemplated moving to… is no longer open to new customers because it seems like it is ramping down. So you are left with a minefield of options… many of which I have heard both positive and negative things about. InMotion I have some decent experience with in the past and they offer a WordPress hosting option for $8.99 a month (that goes down if you pay for multiple months in a row) that offers some hack/malware protection software along with the package. Please note though I am not actively using them myself so I can’t really give it a full fledged thumbs up endorsement.

Once you have trudged through the hinterlands and decided where you are going to host your site, you need to pick a software package. This is also a deluge of choice because as many people as there are out there… there seem to be options for blog software. Some of the more common options are WordPress, Ghost, Jekyll and Movable Type. If you want more than just a blog you can look at things like Drupal or Joomla… but having had plenty of bad work experience with both I am not super fond of either. That said there are a ton of folks who love them and swear by them, so your mileage may vary. I would suggest that you look at pretty much all of the options, but in reality you are more than likely going to end up using WordPress. The reason being that there is simply more support from that community for blog-centric needs… and if you can think of it, there is likely already a plugin written to do the thing you want to do.

Once you have chosen something… you need to install it… which again is going to vary wildly based on the package that you choose. I said before that more than likely a few of these options are going to show up in the auto configuration tools that your web host will likely have. That said… automated WordPress installs in my experience often have issues. My preference is to just use the normal web based installer process in setting it up that involves you creating your own MySQL database (also through a web based tool your provider will give you like PHPMySQL) and then feeding that information into the web GUI to set everything up. If this sounds frustrating to you, then maybe the self hosting route is not your jam. Granted there are a bunch of us in the Blaugust community that are going to be more than happy to help you sort these sort of things out.

SaaS / Cloud Platforms

If you checked the hell out of the last sequence of paragraphs then maybe your best option is to go with a feature-lite but also stress-lite blogging platform. Here you have a wealth of options that are at your disposal. I have my preferences but I am going to talk about a long list of options that range from completely free, to “freemium”, to paid only. Quite honestly you can in theory blog with social media like Facebook or Google Plus… but that is very much not my jam. There is just too much platform rivalry and for every person like me that hates Facebook with a passion, there is someone else out there that hates some other platform with similar fury. One of the options I am talking about is in the more social space, but it makes for a pretty reasonable blog option as well. Essentially I am going to talk through some of these options as I view them. Take anything I say with a grain of salt.

WordPress.com – This is the fully hosted version of WordPress and lives in a halfway state between free and paid. Essentially you can roll a site within moments for free and have a something.wordpress.com address to send your readers to. They also offer a few premium features that you can pay for that get you closer to the WordPress.org self hosted experience, but you will never quite get that level of freedom. This is going to be the best option if you want to start out small but at some point down the line want to move to hosting your own blog, because it is trivial to move content from a wordpress.com install to a wordpress.org self hosted scenario. There is a really good mobile client for WordPress and for both self hosted and SaaS you can get in and write very solid posts with full picture and theme support from a phone/tablet without needing to rely on the web interface.
Blogger.com – This is the other big popular option for a quick and free blog. I’ve used this in the past at length and my very first blog existed here… and no I will never link it ever ever because it is embarrassing as hell. In many ways Blogger feels like it at some point got locked in the dotcom boom look and feel and never really evolved out of it. It still today feels very much as it did when it was competing with Live Journal and Xanga, and never really grew out of that era. There are folks however that completely swear by it.. and it has hands down the very best implementation of a blogroll out there. It also has very easy integration with google advertising if you plan on making money with your postings. The biggest issue is… every few years it feels like Google is about ready to kick it to the curb since they would really love you to use Google Plus as your blogging platform.
SquareSpace.com – This is a platform I have never used but have heard a lot of great things about especially in the customer service and site uptime departments. The reason why I have never used it is because there is no free option. This is paid software and you are essentially given two tiers of access… Personal for $16 a month or Business for $26 a month… with obvious price breaks for paying a year at a time. I hear they have a lot of really cool toys behind the scenes and a library full of resources to build your site out in a web based drag and drop editor. That said once again I have no personal experience with this and as a result can’t give a proper endorsement.
Tumblr.com – This one lives in a weird space between social media and blogging platform, and what you end up with instead is an option that is really good at relatively short posts with lots of media file support. There are folks who love Tumblr as a community, but I have never been super impressed with its often times hyperbolic nature. That said I syndicate out to Tumblr and often get readers that come in from it so there is at least some traction there… giving me a shocking number of followers on a platform I never really engage with. What Tumblr really has going for it is that it is extremely simple to use, has a great mobile friendly web client and is one of your more hands off options. You can do some pretty basic styling of a Tumblr blog but you will never really be able to do anything super crazy with it. I appreciate it for its simplicity and the fact that it lends itself to relatively short posts that I can quickly consume. Image Meme Tumblr is a thing and you are going to run into a lot of blogs that are nothing but reposts from fandoms… similarly NEVER EVER EVER EVER search for something on Tumblr that you love without the safe search filters on.

Many Important Decisions

The long and short of this is that you are going to be asked to make a lot of decisions that you may or may not know the full ramifications of at this point. I would suggest that you lead on the Blaugust community for support here because we each have our blogging platform of choice and some very valid reasons why we ended up that way. I am going to largely push folks towards WordPress because it gives you more options, however I am sure there is someone out there that just hates it and would send you off a completely different path. Ultimately there are ways to move content between providers, some of which are easier than others… but what I am telling you is that you are not necessarily locked into a decision right now that you will use for the rest of your life. I know my long time friend Calamity Jess has re-rolled her blog three or four times since our days in the WoW Blogging Community… and that is okay. The readers that really matter will follow you wherever you happen to be hanging your hat, and ultimately you have to make the decisions that make you happy.