I was a bit surprised to see that I didn’t have any comments when I checked the site first thing this morning, only to find that I’d left manual moderation on for the journal. I’ll have to experiment with what’s the best settings.

A good question is what I’m actually going to do with my fledgling site here at trazoi.net. While I am going to use this as the place to put things I want to put online, the primary use of the site is as my own test ground for web site development. Since this is my personal site I won’t mind too much about making the inevitable screw-ups while I’m learning the ropes, so when I need to make a more professional site I’ll have a greater chance of making smarter decisions first time.

That is also part of the reason why I’ve picked “trazoi.net” as the name of my site. I’m sure those of you from GameDev.net can figure out where the Tra-Zoi part comes from - but as a word I quite like the sound, and it has an advantage that it doesn’t really mean anything (except in Albanian apparently, where “trazoj” means something like confuse or agitate. Sorry if I’ve confused any Albanians!). Apart from in Albania I think it’s got potential as a name to publish my games under.

I’ve decided to go with a dot-net address because I consider that more appropriate for a personal address. If I decide to eventually go commercial and sell games on-line then I’ll start up a more formal sister site over at trazoi.com, which I’ve currently got parked. Once I put in a proper index page I’ll point the dot-com site to here for now.

Even though trazoi.net is my personal site, it is a dry run for potential commercial sites in the future, so I am going to try my best to make it look professional. So what can you expect from the site in the near future?

• Top priority is a main index page for the site so there’s actually something at the root address. I haven’t yet figured out the best way to create this; while I know my way around HTML well enough to knock something off pretty quickly it might be better to use a more WYSIWYG method to make the process of updates more clean and to easily manage sidebars and links. It might take a little while to research what’s available (and I’m open to suggestions).
• I also need to properly configure this journal. There seems to be a zillion different things you can do with WordPress, and it’s obvious it will take some tweaking to make it just right. One thing I’m definitely going to do is to try and find the right theme, maybe even making my own.
• I’ll also put copies of some of the resources I’ve got up at GameDev.net over here, such as my games “Pierre and the Fish”, “Brixtar” and my Inkscape tutorial (which I really need to continue some day soon, once I get more practice).

In the not-so-close future, I’ll be putting up more things, such as games when I complete them. I’ve also had a strong compulsion to start a web comic, and now I’ve got my own web hosting that’s one less reason not to; although there’s still the point that it would be mighty hard to balance being a postgrad student, game developer, web comic creator and staying sane. I might have to just opt for the first three.

I’ve still got a bit of time this morning to work on web stuff, so I’m off to see what good methods are out there to create my main index page. Hopefully I can get that up sometime in the next day or two.