Greetings!
Welcome to the PBM Blog, the official blog of Play By Mail, and the latest and (potentially) greatest thing to be brought to you by PlayByMail.Net. If you haven’t visited the PlayByMail.Net Facebook page, yet, then be sure to do so, as soon as you get a chance. Odds are, though, that you came to here from there, and if that’s the case, you may be wondering why our Facebook page wasn’t sufficient. So, let me take a stab at trying to explain why I opted to have both.
Search Engine Placement
Recently, I removed an old Blogger blog from the front page of the PlayByMail.Net website. This had the end effect, it seems, of wiping out PlayByMail.Net from search engine results on or near Page One for several different search terms related to PBM games and PBM gaming. No one had posted on that old Blogger blog in while – which may leave you wondering why even bother putting up a new blog? After all, if we quit posting to the old one, what makes anyone thing that we’ll bother posting to the new one? If that were the intention, though, then I wouldn’t have bothered putting this new WordPress blog up. I am hopeful that some routine posting here on the new blog site will help us to recover some of those now-missing search results that PlayByMail.Net brought to PBM gaming.
Out With The Old And In With The New
Sometimes, something new and fresh can motivate one to action, even where something stale can’t. What do we have to lose by trying? I think that this new PBM Blog looks better than the old one. I’m no expert when it comes to WordPress, certainly, but as with many different pieces of software that I have brought to bear in my PBM efforts over the year, I think that I can succeed at using WordPress to promote PBM gaming. I’ve spent many hours over the course of the last several days trying to familiarize myself with WordPress functions, and searching for a theme for this site that I like and think looks pretty good. Hopefully, you’ll like it, too!
Seeking To Find A Better Way
If there’s anything that I have learned in all of the years that I have spent trying to promote Play By Mail gaming through website and the like, it’s that there is no one, perfect solution to compiling and presently the diverse range of PBM-related information that exists. Everybody doesn’t like the same thing, and there’s so much PBM information out there that just trying to gather, compile, organize, and present this info is a full time, never-ending job. It’s time-consuming and its tiring. Yet, somebody’s got to do it, I suppose. For those who think that PBM is dead, I would counter that PBM is not only not dead, but that it is, in fact, growing. Indeed, PBM information is being created at a faster rate than I could ever hope to track it all down and compile it. There’s numerous different individual PBM communities of players which generate a lot of forum or group postings. My aim is to gather some of the mass of PBM information that is floating around in Cyberspace, thereby making it easier for people like you – individuals interested in PBM gaming – to find and enjoy at your own pace.
Facebook Is An Imperfect Information Management Tool
There are things that Facebook works really well for. Likewise, there are also things that Facebook isn’t really geared towards. The PlayByMail.Net Facebook page seems to have really begun to pick up, of late, with numerous PBM fans finally beginning to weigh in more and more. That page is still a long way from being a continuous hotbed of PBM activity, but I do think that it is a real hub of PBM-related activity. Likes are up. Comments are up. Participation is up. And shares? Well, those never really seem to ever be up by much. Granted, that’s a true shame, for sharing postings could be a very useful way to grow the overall PBM community. Regardless, people prefer to participate in what all goes on in their own way, where the PlayByMail.Net Facebook page activities are concerned. For my own part, I felt that I needed to branch out with a different tool from that one. My search for a better way forward is a never-ending thing.
Thank you for joining us on this journey into the future of play by mail gaming!