• Mood: unusually productive

There needs to be a UK puzzle hobby web site: part II

I have recently taken on a new Project. Having ranted in late December that there needs to be a UK puzzle hobby web site, I have started one, about four weeks ago. Nominally it's about exit games (also known as escape games or locked room games; there isn't really a great generic term for "things like HintHunt and ClueQuest", but there are currently seven others in the UK and one in Ireland) but the thinking is that they're very popular and can be used as a hook to get people interested in all sorts of other puzzle-related topics. It's an "as and when" blog, but I've written a couple of dozen entries over the course of a month or so. In theory I'm trying to be happy with entries as short as 200 words or so, plus an appropriate picture, but in practice they're working out longer than that.

The site hasn't really caught fire yet, but not many things ever do in the first month, which is really all about getting a baseline down and gaining credibility, which I can use to make contacts and then things will get easier. I reckon I'm not actually far off the point where just writing about news will make for an adequate blog, though there are some rather more background-y and 101-ish articles to start with.

Nevertheless, if you want to read about my UK and Irish puzzle-related writing, the best way is to follow the RSS feed (which happens to be syndicated to LiveJournal as exit_games_uk) or to follow the site Twitter which, so far, has been used in a similar way in practice. (If you want to do me a favour, please like the Facebook page, whether you're ever going to follow the site or not - a few dozen more "Like"s would help. Thank you!)

I'm still going to keep writing here from time to time, especially longer and more personal pieces, but this will always have the "personal blog" sort of arguably negative slant to it that an independent Wordpress site will hopefully not. Nevertheless, I am going to demonstrate some sort of discipline by concluding this post here and starting a different one for a different, but related, topic.

Please redirect any comments here, using OpenID or (identified, ideally) anonymous posting; there are comments to the post already. Thank you!