Newbie Blogger Initiative

May is now the month of Newbie Blogger Initiative, which is an awesome program created by Syp, of Biobreak and Massively fame, to get new people to try blogging. There are over 70 "sponsor blogs" taking part in the NBI, Roll one hundred included, so expect to see a lot of NBI-related posts from several gaming bloggers during May. We'll be posting tips and tools and tricks to help people get started with blogging, find inspiration and get connected with other bloggers.


Where did Roll one hundred start from?

I think my very first blogging attempts were in 2003, when I was very active in the Finnish anime fandom. I remember I had just a little HTML and CSS skills and I was so proud of making my own blog layouts - for a very long time I just hated taking ready-made layouts and graphics, I thought I had to do everything myself to stand out. I think I was using a very early version of Wordpress back then, which I had just managed to install on my web hotel on my own. Good times.

Since then I've probably created and abandoned a dozen blog projects - mostly art and gaming blogs that I didn't have the energy or motivation to maintain. I often tend to go a bit over the top with my fandom projects, so I think I've had a Guild Wars blog, a Lotro blog and a zillion art/sketch blogs. However, around 2009-2009 I had some real-life issues that made it so I pretty much withdrew from the public internet, stopped posting on my Livejournal and deviantArt and dropped all blog projects. I'm a bit of a closet nerd, so the thought of relatives and people I didn't like reading my blogs and looking at my drawings really made me want to quit the internetz for a while.


I tried finding pictures of my ancient blog projects, but only found a Paintchat doodle of my Lotro Minstrel :)

Roll one hundred was born in February 2009, and it started as a screenshot blog for Lord of the Rings Online. I just wanted an easy way to publish screens from various guild activities, so I went with Blogger, which is nicely integrated to Google (easy access to Analytics), and comes with some nice premade layouts that also work great on mobiles. I didn't expect I'd stick with it, but here we are now, 3 years later, and my little roll100 has a nice steady stream of traffic. Sure I've had some quiet periods (I'm currently recovering from the longest one so far - I think Rift really swept me away and I didn't even have time to blog because it was so much fun), but now with the Newbie Blogger Initiative I really want to post more and also connect better with fellow bloggers.

Now in hindsight I think I put way too much pressure on myself in regards to blogging, and I think I've now found a platform and format that works for me - namely picture heavy, low maintenance. I'm a terrible writer, even in my native language, so I prefer to spam a ton of pictures and just add a lil flavour text — I think the only time I actually write something is when I have something to complain about – that's typical Finnish.

Anyway, I'm looking forward to this exciting month and hope to see many new blogs soon! And if you already have a blog but haven't posted in a while... now's a good time to stop hibernating and get back to blogging!