Games by Tim temporarily closes Sunday, June 14, 2020

Games by Tim temporarily closes this Sunday to transition to a brand new website, currently in beta.

What's going to happen?

• The new Games by Tim will transfer from beta.gamesbytim.com to www.gamesbytim.com, with the remaining blog posts ported, beta banners removed, and search engine indexing enabled.
• The old Games by Tim (this site) will transfer to old.gamesbytim.com. The old site will go read-only, which means:
• No more blog posts or content will be added.
• No new comments will be accepted.
• The "Followers" and "Follow by email" widgets will be removed.
• Search engine indexing will be disabled.

What about my bookmarks?

The new Games by Tim will redirect page, project, and important blog post links to their new respective locations. Although I have no plans to remove the redirects, I highly recommend you change any bookmarks to the new links.

Due to having to manually set redirects, not all blog posts will redirect. If for whatever reason you bookmarked a specific blog post, prepare to relocate that blog post on the new site.

Links to slideshowgames.blogspot.com, this site's old URL, will redirect to old.gamesbytim.com. If you still reference slideshowgames.blogspot.com links, please switch them to gamesbytim.com whenever you get the chance.

What if I'm a follower?

Existing followers and email subscribers will no longer receive new blog updates, so I encourage you to unfollow or unsubscribe from the old site.

The new site has an RSS feed, which you can use to get notified about future blog posts. There's currently no email option though due to the inability to automatically deliver emails on the new site and time/effort constraints. If I receive enough comments requesting an email option, I may consider re-adding the feature.

What's new in the new Games by Tim?

I will prepare comprehensive release notes for when the new Games by Tim officially releases. For now, refer to the beta announcement for details.

Comments arrive to the new Games by Tim beta

Since the initial beta announcement, I've been hard at work polishing the new site. Today, I'm happy to announce that comments have arrived.

As the old site's comments system's stuck with Blogger, I had to think of a a different platform for the new site. After researching all sorts of options, I decided to use the service Hyvor Talk to manage comments.

What is Hyvor Talk?

Hyvor Talk is a commenting platform that lets you place comments on pretty much any website. It can dynamically create individual comment threads based on the site page. For instance, the comments thread for the So Many Numbers project page differs from the one of this blog post. Hyvor Talk stores comments on their server and handles all the backend work.

Compared to Blogger, Hyvor Talk has two useful advantages.

• There's built-in anti-spam measures, which should greatly improve the overall quality of comments on the site.
• You can optionally send your email address. By doing so, you'll get an email when I reply to the comment.

I believe Hyvor Talk will allow for a more engaging and trouble-free commenting experience than Blogger's system could ever hope for.

Some caveats to know

Naturally, switching to a brand new commenting platform will have a few drawbacks. Here's what you should be aware of.

• There's currently no way to transfer Blogger comments to Hyvor Talk. As such, the Blogger comments will soon disappear from the site.
• Since Hyvor Talk's an external resource, I cannot internally adjust its colors for dark mode.

Other updates to the Games by Tim beta

Alongside comments, other features added to the beta include:

• Social media share buttons
• Filled-in contact page with a new public-facing email address
• Improvements to site performance and SEO

I look forward to taking this new site out of beta soon. In the meantime, feel free to take a new comment system for a spin!