Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015! #NBI2015 #NBI2015Safari #HeroesorVillains

It's that time of year again for people who are thinking of starting up a blog, are currently blogging, or have lapsed in blogging to hop in to / continue to ride / or get back in the saddle and join the Newbie Blogger Initiative 2015! Despite the name it's actually open for all ranges of blog experience as one of its main purposes is to create a community for game bloggers / vloggers / podcasters / and the like to interact and support each other.

Personally speaking, it's also a great way to get an injection of traffic on your site plus you get to find many other blogs (new and old) to link to for reading purposes. To that end I'm lifting my usually strict cut-off point in my blogroll this month to welcome all the new blood, wayward sheep, or new found veterans to reinforce my current count of 59 links. This also means you can also expect out of the blue oddities like hashtags in the title apparently.

If you want to get involved simply do any or all of the following (which I totally stole from Syp @ Bio Break):

• Stay in touch with the official NBI Twitter account!
• Read the latest announcements on the NBI forum.
• If you’re a new or lapsed blogger, then you’ll want to register on the newbie blogger check-in. We use this forum to keep track and promote blogs, so having your link on it is incredibly important.
• Sponsors (veterans) have a sign-in as well, and if so desired they can put themselves out there to be a direct mentor.

One of the neat things I've always liked about the NBI are the events that the sponsor bloggers come up with, and Murf has wasted no time in getting the ball rolling with his #NBI2015Safari, a simple screenshot contest. Since this post is technically interrupting my Neverwinter Online Vigilance Quest tutorial I thought I'd get in early in the "Heroes or Villains" category with a pic from that game - featuring the only enemy that actually requires 25 players to work in synchronized tandem within a time limit to achieve victory.

Tiamat!

Lastly, I just realized that Contains Moderate Peril is offering a chance for up to four newbie bloggers to guest post on his site! For people new to the whole blogging thing believe me that's pretty good - try not to let that opportunity slip by! (For other sponsor blogs, please advertise this too).

NBI: Why I Support the NBI

I've been blogging for awhile now and like many I started as a lone island with no bridges coming or going from other sites. This was fine for me for a few years, but getting the motivation and drive to actually post stuff can be very daunting when you are pretty much just yelling into the infinite void of the internet, with no comments coming in and a very low page view count.

The solution was pretty simple of course, I just had to actually introduce myself to the blog community and boy was I surprised when a great number of them suddenly decided to put up links to my humble blog! Suddenly people were actually reading and commenting on some of my posts and I must say that's a pretty good, motivational feeling.

If you are a blogger new or old who doesn't yet introduced themselves then I highly recommend you do so, and perhaps the best way to do that is to sign up to the Newbie Blogger Initiative (aka NBI) as I did last year because not only will it improve all those statistics you are not supposed to care about (*cough*) but because you will gain a wealth of knowledge, a slew more ideas to blog about or counter blog about, and perhaps even a few more friends. ^_^

What the NBI did for my page views last year.

And hey, if it's not for you then you can easily burn all those bridges after you try it out. You don't really lose anything by giving it a go.

Today I Smiled Challenge

This is inspired by my friend Teresa who almost daily posts something that made her smile that day, and often times it gets me smiling too! I think having some funny, inspirational or motivational posts than can make others happy is a good idea. A small positive force in the world. Anyone who has read my blog will know it could use some of that!

I'm inviting all the other bloggers who happen to read this to give it a try too, even only just once. Doing it daily would be overkill for me, so I'm just going to try every two weeks, maybe less. There's no set format and no set boundaries so you can go as conserved or as crazy as you like. Maybe post something you found that you think others will find funny or a story from your past or an experience from in-game? Whatever it is let's try make people smile, or at the very least smirk. :P

Newbie Blogger Initiative

Decided to sign up for this Newbie Blogger Initiative that is starting up in October. I keep hearing good things about it from the dozens of other bloggers that support it so I'll see for myself (as a newbie!) what it's all about. Are you thinking of starting up a blog of your own? MMO based (to begin with anyway)? Then maybe you should have a look too. There are some useful articles up already on their site, and the thing hasn't even started yet. At the bare minimum it will lead a few more people to your page anyway so give it a look see! :P

Blogspot Header Issues

For some reason it seems blogger / BlogSpot has been screwing around with people's headers lately (mine included). If yours decided to do some funky things like, vanish, display vertically, or have a really slim width causing words to wrap then this fix (found on the help forums) will probably sort you out:

1 - Go to "Template Designer"
2 - Click 'Advanced'
3 - Scroll down to 'Add CSS' then in the box put the code below and hit return:

#header-inner {
    width: 1000px !important;
}

4- Save Changes (if it doesn't let you, add a space or press enter somewhere for the save button to activate).

Your header should then be back to normal, or at least closer to normal than it was previously! :)