GENERAL: What's it all about, pilgrim?

Last time around I examined my painting habits in 2008 and looked forward to 2009. Today I want to look at my blogging in general.

Stat Attack
In 2008 I blogged 138 times on my main lone pilgrim blog and made 83 entries on my lone pilgrim battle reports. I also launched a third blog, the Old Albion Premier League, and made 23 entries. That comes to a grand total of 244 blog posts, a creditable number. In 2007 I made a total of 279 posts so I'm roughly on a par. I plan to continue blogging at a rate of one post every other day for 2009.

I want to rescue all of my old battle reports from my defunct website and get them published on my battle reports blog by the middle of 2009. That will free me up to concentrate on playing and writing up my current battle reports. These things take a great deal of time to create so I hope people enjoy reading them. I know I get a lot from reading them back, especially the really old ones which I had all but forgotten about. I really want to play some more campaigns as I think they are the pinnacle of miniature wargaming. In particular I'd like to paint up my Mighty Empire tiles and play a Warhammer campaign between my Warriors of Chaos and Gary's Dark Elves.

Once I'm up to date with the reports I plan to go through them all and compile lots of statistics such as win loss ratios with each army and my record against certain players. It's the sort of thing that really appeals to my inner geek.

It's just not cricket
On the Old Albion Premier League front I have lots of blogging up my sleeve. Most importantly Gary and I need to get back to playing the current season. We abandoned this halfway through when we got the chance to compete in the 40k Gauntlet tournament and we still haven't gotten back to this. Once that is done I have five past seasons of games and results to post up. If my Blood Bowl blog isn't well past 100 blog entries by the end of the year I will be very disappointed.

Meat and potatoes
I also want to address my main lone pilgrim blog too. I want to ensure a regular stream of decent content posts without the blog eating into my gaming life too much. There is a tension between actually doing the hobby (playing games, painting, making terrain, developing background) and blogging about it. I don't want my blogging to replace my gaming, I want my blogging to reflect it and enhance it.

Now that I've hived off my battle reports and blood bowl games to their own blogs that means the focus on lone pilgrim will be narrower. In 2009 I plan to blog more about my painting, I want to show some love to terrain making and I want to go back to bringing you news and rumours. Of course there are many websites, forums (fora?) and blogs that cover Games Workshop news but I want to take a slightly different approach and present a weekly round up of news and rumours in one easy to read bulletin. I'll try and pull together everything I read across the net in a single weekly blog.

I also want to inject a bit more opinion into my blog. I do have strong opinions about things like pre-painted armies, Win At All Costs players, luck and lazy gamers but I never seem to get around to blogging them. I will in 2009!

Another thing I need to address is photographing my miniatures. I'm currently reorganising all of my photos digitally - not just of my models but holiday photos, friends, family - everything. Once I've finished that I'll need to work out how to put the photos of my models into my blog. At the moment I think I might add a whole separate blog for finished photos and then use lone pilgrim for works in progress. Again I haven't made a final decision about this just yet.

One thing I won't be blogging on lone pilgrim, which I have in the past, is army background, particularly regarding the Skolarii Sector. I want to put all this type of content on it's own blog. If this happens it will be much later in 2009 so watch this space.

You switch if you want to
At the moment all of my blogs are hosted from my own web domain at lonepilgrim.co.uk. This is something I'm considering changing in 2009 due to the cost. I'm with 1and1 at the moment and pay them £60 per year to manage my domains and give me webspace. With the credit crunch looming and money tight I could switch back to a free blogger account and save all that cash. Of course it would mean changing my blog addresses which is hassle for everyone but needs must. I'll be sure to keep you all informed when and if this happens.

Wow, this turned into a massive post. Bring on the rest of the year!

Double team
Following my game against Wayne's Space Wolves we teamed up to take on some Iron Warriors Chaos Space Marines and Dark Eldar in a 2000 pointer. Check out the after action report here.