I noticed that we have two recent defections from Gamedev Developer Journals (what blogs used to be called before they were called blogs) to greener pastures (aka Wordpress). And I do understand that. While the Gamedev journals are a good way to give your project a little exposure, it's really let RSS technology pass it by.

Also gamedev has performance and stability problems that may or may not be fixed in the near term.

That's why I've been lobbying for at least a year for a revamp of gamedev's blog system. It'll require three steps.

1. Change the name of "Developer Journals" to "Member Blogs". The word "blog" is now the de-facto standard, and I know the journals have been around since before the word was standard (heck, mine's been around since before the word was even coined), but we do need to keep up with the times.

2. Replacement of the Developer Journals Page with a real blog aggregator. There are plenty out there, but I always use fullasagoog as an example because it's popular and it's well done. Basically it's just a list of hand-picked blogs (in this case about RIA development with Adobe tools). Those feeds are periodically scanned, and updated feeds are added to the top along with a short bit of text. Especially nice is the ability to have a "meta-feed" of all of the feeds (click on the RSS button in your address-bar on the site for an example).

How we actually display this content is really up to us. We could either jump to the blog in question, put the blog in an iframe, or just display the text in gamedev itself. Pretty-much every blog nowadays publishes all of the text in the RSS feed (with the notable exception being. . .us), so making external blogs look like ours (so we could still serve ads) wouldn't be a problem.

3. In the Gamedev control panel, give the user the option to use gamedev's internal blog system (the existing one) or to link your account to an external feed via a URL field.



I implore you to work with me on making this change happen. I really think it'll help gamedev by driving more traffic to the site (by being able to link to well-entrenched but not gamedev-hosted blogs of gamedev pals like DavidRM), lightening up on our bandwidth (by allowing hosting and possibly rendering of blogs elsewhere), and supporting well-entrenched RSS standards so that we could interact better with cool stuff like Yahoo Pipes.