Game Tools Revisited

This is likely a post that very few people will care about, but I am making it nonetheless. Some years back I completely reworked the way my menu structure functioned, and among several tweaks was adding the “Game Tools” menu. Something you need to know about me is that I do not use bookmarks, and instead largely rely on the browser remembering sites I hit frequently when I start typing the name into the search bar. The end result is that I have near total recall while actively playing a game, but rapidly forget what sites I had been using when I go on one of my long breaks from a specific title. I wanted a way of keeping track of these resources that I regularly use while playing games that I often cycle back and forth between. The added benefit of the Game Tools menu is that it allowed me to easily share those same resources with anyone else interested in playing the game.

WordPress has this really neat functionality to nigh infinitely nest menus under one another, and I thought this to be a really cool way of creating a structure for links. The only problem here is that once a menu gets too large it becomes ridiculously cumbersome to manage. As a result any time I changed anything it would seemingly take a progressively longer amount of time to actually save the edit. I’ve even had the save fail completely and cause it to lose an entire submenu in the structure. This only served to cause me to not really want to touch the links at all and leave them more or less in an “as is” state. None of this made me happy, and like so many things in my life, I eventually reach a critical breaking point that brings me to action.

So instead of trying to come up with a clever way of handling this, I am legitimately rolling back to one of the earliest constructs of the internet… a static page. Right now I am in the process of converting all of the nested menu structures into a single landing page. This does a few things that are beneficial, namely, it reduces menu bloat but also serves to give me a place to make some commentary about each resource. At the time of writing this Guild Wars 2, Final Fantasy V, New World, and Diablo 3 have been converted to this new structure. The rest will follow as I have time to take my contorted menu structure and rework it into something that makes sense in page form. I’m attempting group links a bit more than I have in the menu, but each game page is ending up a little bit different. I might roll some additional information on each page, like where you can actually find me in that game and maybe a link to that category of posts on the blog.

This is just one of several changes that have been a long time coming. Another thing that is really bothering me right now is the sidebar so I figure once I sort out my menus, that is probably going to be my next renovation. I’ve been consistently blogging on the same website for over thirteen years now, and I feel like I need to uproot a few things and move them around a bit. I still largely like the central column with sidebar format, because that is ultimately what feels the most blog-like for me personally. I’ve always felt like blogs are best experienced in the structural context of the chosen layout of the author, but I have to admit some of the more pictorial tumblr/instagram style formats drive me up a wall.

Again I am not sure anyone cares because I am not entirely certain anyone has actually used that “Game Tools” menu to access the resources contained within. However, I use it… and it will make things a little less fiddly to update.