Incomplete Gamer

No one care what I had for lunch. So says Maggie Mason, author of No One Cares What you Had for Lunch: 100 Ideas for Your Blog. Who am I to argue. Maggie’s a published author. Sure, her tally is only one book but at the time of writing, that’s one more than me. No..really, Maggie is the real deal. She’s a successful blogger with an established and loyal readership. One of Maggie’s sites, was even named one of Time Magazine’s Top 50 Cool Sites of the Year. Here at TIG, we once read 50 issues of Time, but that’s about as close as we can get to Maggie’s claim to fame.

Maggie’s sage advice is to make your blog of interest to your reader, if you want to expand your readership beyond its current exclusive numbers (“Hi Mum, hope it stopped raining in Surfers“). Makes sense. No one really cares what you had for lunch unless perhaps your a restaurant reviewer in which case this book’s advice won’t do much for your career.

Now I haven’t read the book – instead choosing to read a handful of the reviews at Amazon. From my random survey of 5 Amazon readers I established that Maggie Mason’s book was either, ‘on par with War and Peace’ (if War and Peace had been written in the form of a Top 100 List with 1350 less pages) or less favourably, ‘pointless drivel’. Chief among the criticism (or at least, chief among the 5 readers reviews I skimmed, was the concern that Maggie was guilty of not practicing what she preached.

Lacking the book, I took a quick peek at Maggie’s Mighty Girl blog to put the criticism to the test. I soon came across a recent post, Listen Up Universe, about the day a bug fell out of her hair and onto her keyboard. Which might be a great post if you’re blogging to a readership hungry for such stories. Lice & Locks perhaps? Or Hairy Scary (don’t bother, I’ve just registered the domains)? But she’s not, as far as I can tell, and at only 98 words there’s really not much more to the post than the aforementioned bug falling onto the keyboard.

Which is all a long-winded way of telling you that I will in fact be telling you what I had for lunch. Well, not that exactly, but if you must know, I had a bacon and egg jaffle from a funky cafe in Chifley, a suburb of Canberra where you’d least expect to find anything remotely funky at all.

What I will be telling you is that The Incomplete Gamer is back in business. Well not business exactly ’cause that would be in breach of TIG’s new hosting arrangements (a personal account) with Jumba But back in business in the sense that TIG has found a new more comfortable home, with newer plumbing and cheaper rent to boot. Now the fear of eviction has subsided and we’ve settled into our new digs, we look forward to posting on a regular basis. The switch to a new hosting company wasn’t all smooth sailing. The WordPress site and database were duly backed up, but unfortunately the original WordPress application was out of date (my bad) and as such the TIG backups couldn’t be uploaded successfully to the new Jumba servers. The original posts were manually cut and re-posted and with the exception of few precious comments I had attracted over the last twelve months, everything is now back in it’s place.

The lesson in all of this. Keep your WordPress Installations up-to-date, back-up your site and databases regularly, bacon and egg jaffles from funky cafes in the burbs are good, and The Incomplete Gamer, while still incomplete is back online!

3 Responses to “No one cares what I had for lunch…but I'm going to tell you anyway”