The following article was imported from our old content management system on 08/10/2008. It may contain missing links and missing images which we do not plan to go back and correct.We apologize for any inconvenience.

I took a break from Gamer Hotsheet starting around mid-December.  This was in part due to being very ill (some sort of flu bug) and in part due to a need to figure out a future direction for the site.

I started the site with the idea of, in essence, re-creating the dealer rooms at Origins and GenCon.   That is, I wanted you to be able to come here any day of the year and have a pretty good idea what new games your favorite company is putting out, what new miniatures are released, what RPG supplements you can pick up, etc.  That meant that I needed a way to identify when new things came out. 

I found a freeware program called "Page Update Watcher" that did a pretty good job of tracking changes to the news pages and product lists on about 600 game manufacturer and game news sites.  In around 5-10 minutes it could scan those sites and tell me where I might find news.  About 20% of the time, it was wrong.  The other 80% of the time it was right, but if the site’s layout changed dramatically it would be unable to adapt automatically and would permanently report that site as "unchanged".  Unless I happened to be on the ball and notice, for instance, that I wasn’t seeing anything new from a company, I effectively stopped reporting about them.  That wasn’t good.

I invested pretty much the entire year’s ad revenue in a new product, a shareware tool called "Check & Get" which does a far better job of monitoring web sites than Page Update Watcher is capable of.  As a result, I’m staring at another 86 potential articles to post on the site tonight.  Check & Get is helping me in another way, which is that it highlights the part of the page which changed since the last scan, making it easier than ever for me to determine if a particular change is really something newsworthy or not.

Since it appears that I’m going to be covering more news than I was in the past, I’m going to have to break the job down a little better.  Toward that end, I’ve broken the list of 600 game sites down by name, into five alphabetized chunks.  Each weeknight I’m going to try to cover just one chunk of sites.  That should make the task more manageable and allow me to keep this site pretty current without breaking my back writing 100 articles a night.

There are several of you who’ve submitted articles for the site in the past.  I expected the server software to notify me that articles had been submitted, but it wasn’t doing that.  As a result, I didn’t know to check in your articles.  Those of you who have submitted legitimate articles in the past have been upgraded to "publishers" on the site and are now allowed to make your articles go "live" when you’re ready without my need to review and approve.

If any other readers would like to become regular contributors, email me and let me know and I’ll set you up also.  The email address to use for this particular request is my first name (mike) followed by my last name (salsbury), followed by an at sign, then "gmail.com".  That address should reach me any weekday and should result in a pretty rapid response.

As always, thank you for your continued readership of this site, thank you for patronizing our advertisers when they offer products of interest to you, and, well, thanks for keeping the gaming hobby alive!