Howdy Interwebs!

Now that’s some pretty considerable down time, even by our standards. GDMNW has always been a relatively quiet blog, at least compared to the big guns of our part of the Blogosphere (3++, Faeit 212, Colonel Schofer, YTTH and of course the ever huge BOLS) but this is something special.

Now that we’re back we’d like to start out thanking the many of you who stop by from time to time to see if anything’s changed. Our apologies for the site’s inertia over the last few months, but we’ve not found too much to get excited about. Some of Games Workshop’s releases really weren’t that great, and despite the anticipation the Dark Angel codex just didn’t deliver what we were looking for. The buzz that surrounded the release of sixth edition was better, but the box itself was something of a disappointment. Perhaps it’s us, but some of the magic just wasn’t there. Rather than rushing out to buy new miniatures and blogging about them we found ourselves bagging up some of our half finished projects to sell on eBay and elsewhere.

I’m sure our local gaming club, the excellent Cross Gaming Club, think our throats have been cut and our purses slit. The masterful minusT, who happens to be on the club committee, has painted a new GDMNW.com marine for us and we’ve not so much as made a move to collect the thing. Despite the great job he’s done with it.

In addition, new friends, new social activities (boardgames!) and new family members have all taken their toll on our hobby time and, consequently, on how much time has been spent on the blog. Gareth, our lead writer, also turned 30, and to everyone’s surprise decided that this would be a good time to review what he was doing with his life. Can you say mid-life crisis? That said, the fires are out, the ash has settled and we’ve made some very reasonable estimates of how much time everyone needs to to invest and what we’re most excited about investing it in. Here’s what we’ve come up with!

What’s on the bench?

We really are selling off a bunch of stuff. The to-paint piles around the place are frankly ridiculous! We remember when we first found out that Ron over at the near legendary From the Warp owned only a very small collection of miniatures and other gubbins. Suddenly, a whole new world of sensible miniature ownership was open to our view. The Collection Edit was on! Rather than owning dozens of armies and teams which would never see the light of day we decided to clear out the cupboards. Essentially quit and sell up, buying back in to the stuff that made us most excited to do what we’re all about. Open.Clean.Assemble.Paint.

Therefore, GDMNW.com is going to go back to its routes as a hobby and editorial blog. We’re going to keep it simple with a straightforward mix of hobby and gaming articles, with the occasional battle report, along with our trademark editorials. We’ve also decided to bring back the Wargamer’s Wife series here at GDMNW.com.

As you can see we’re going to revise the site’s appearance, you can expect a stream of steady changes over the next month as we make everything ship shape and worthy for combat!

The most notable change is that we are going to close the GDMNW.com BlogDex. But never fear, we have news. Big News!

The New Mystery website!

To a certain extent the GDMNW.com BlogDex was a victim of it’s own success. The 40k Blog list, for example, contained more than two hundred blogs which were loaded as a simple vertical list. Each had a thumbnail and the name of the site, but that was about it. You might find something new but you’d have to persevere to do so and blogs with names at the start of the alphabet got a huge amount of attention compared to those at the end!

We have been thinking about how we can make the BlogDex better since we put it together. It was always meant to be an alternative to Blogrolls which heavily favour regular updating. That meant that quality blogs which didn’t produce content regularly were easily lost in the blaze of updates made at the big sites. You’d find the same top five on most of the blogrolls out there, and that just doesn’t reflect the quality or variety of the content that’s being written by amazing people, all over the world, every day.

We’ve been busy behind the scenes, we’ve added a review structure, live thumbnails, gallery style presentation, and a star rating system. The new site will be dedicated to collecting reviews of blogs big and small from around the world. We’re also considering sections for Forums, retailers, and artists.

Best Bits!

There are two things we’re really excited about. The first is the opportunity for the community to participate in the review process. We’re working to develop a scheme for those who wish to write short reviews of the blogs they find. We’re looking at providing rewards to those who contribute regularly, or provide a certain number of reviews.

The second ‘Best Bit’ is search and filter. The new BlogDex will be indexed and searchable. Sites will be tagged according to their content, systems, language etc and so users of the BlogDex will be able to search for the things that interest them most. We think this is going to be incredibly useful. If you want sites about 40k then filter for that and only see the sites you’re interested in!

What can we say? Sorry it’s taken so long; we’re back!