Nick, I'm envious of you for your web development savvy.  This site is progressing quickly.

Nick Gravelyn:

If/when we do ratings, we're planning on a simple 0-10 score system

Why not go the Zune software route and just do a Bad/Ok/Good rating? The significance of quality difference between a 7 and an 8 rating is still beyond me...

Bjoern Graf:

Nick Gravelyn:

If/when we do ratings, we're planning on a simple 0-10 score system

Why not go the Zune software route and just do a Bad/Ok/Good rating? The significance of quality difference between a 7 and an 8 rating is still beyond me...

It's not that the difference between a 7 and an 8 is a big deal, it's that it's easier to average a large scale of 0-10 and give a fair average than it is with only three options. Unless we have Bad/Ok/Good as ratings and then display the average using some sort of slider display. That actually might be the best of both worlds.

I never meant to imply to store the ratings as 0, 1 and 2 only (ratings in music management applications are usually stored in the 0 to 100 range), but only expose the ratings as Bad/Ok/Good :)

Not a bad start you have there Nick, well done.

I do have a few suggestions (based on tests I was working on myself but decided not to do anything with it), I understand the primary use of the site is to provide simpler URLs to redirect to the marketplace but I think a few additions could help:

1. You could provide an alternate view ordered by date of release (or date updated), like your A-Z view but using month and year as the headers then under each month have the list ordered in descending order with the most recent at the top.

2. A single page just full of box art would be interesting, simply ordered by game name (or release date as detailed above) with a small margin and float: left applied to the images so they would basically wrap as far to the edge of the screen as possible no matter the resolution. I had started something like this so you can see all the images on a single page and click on them (since the box art is what attracts people to select your game in XBLCG afterall).

3. The same as above but with the 1st available screenshot (sampled down in size ofcourse), less useful because of the size of the images, but some people might like it.

4. Why is there a '2' in the top left box? [edit]had a filter selected

Looking good Nick. Thanks for putting together something like this that will benifit the community.

Martin Caine:

1. You could provide an alternate view ordered by date of release (or date updated), like your A-Z view but using month and year as the headers then under each month have the list ordered in descending order with the most recent at the top.

Yep, it's something I plan to do at some point. Right now I started with name and from there it was easy to do genre (because things are still in alphabetical order). Doing by-date requires a bit more changing so it will take me a few days to get figured out.

2. A single page just full of box art would be interesting, simply ordered by game name (or release date as detailed above) with a small margin and float: left applied to the images so they would basically wrap as far to the edge of the screen as possible no matter the resolution. I had started something like this so you can see all the images on a single page and click on them (since the box art is what attracts people to select your game in XBLCG afterall).

Sure, I can probably whip something like that up after work today. Would be interesting to say the least.

3. The same as above but with the 1st available screenshot (sampled down in size ofcourse), less useful because of the size of the images, but some people might like it.

As of right now, I have no good way of getting anything but the thumbnail boxart. The thumbnail is linked in the RSS so I'm just pulling out the URL and linking it. To get screenshots I'd have to scrape the marketplace page and I'm still not 100% comfortable with that as a solution.

4. Why is there a '2' in the top left box? [edit]had a filter selected

Yeah, I have the filters set up so there will be one for each number. I'm going to look into making a single # filter to take care of that.

Thanks for the suggestions and feedback.

Very cool, and I agree with ZMan on the http://xblcg.info/Bloc suggestion.  You could even get a domain hack and do http://xbl.cg/Bloc!

Matthew Doucette:

Very cool, and I agree with ZMan on the http://xblcg.info/Bloc suggestion.  You could even get a domain hack and do http://xbl.cg/Bloc!

I hate those hacks. But anyway, as I said before we have future plan where we might use http://xblcg.info/games/Bloc. I also have ideas that would require other such URLs that allow for viewing a wall of thumbnails, viewing games by developer/date/genre on separate pages and more. By using a /link/X system, I allow myself room to grow without breaking links down the road.

At this point it's an extra 5 characters but you're still far shorter than the marketplace URL and it's still an easy URL to remember. I consider it a great improvement over what we used to have. :)

Nick Gravelyn:

At this point it's an extra 5 characters but you're still far shorter than the marketplace URL and it's still an easy URL to remember. I consider it a great improvement over what we used to have. :)

It definitely is better.  Too bad you didn't get the .com, as that's an extra ".info" that would not have to be remembered and gives that cleaner feel even more-so.  Considered buying it?

Matthew Doucette:

Nick Gravelyn:

At this point it's an extra 5 characters but you're still far shorter than the marketplace URL and it's still an easy URL to remember. I consider it a great improvement over what we used to have. :)

It definitely is better.  Too bad you didn't get the .com, as that's an extra ".info" that would not have to be remembered and gives that cleaner feel even more-so.  Considered buying it?

It's taken by someone and I'm not going to deal with trying to buy it off someone. The info is a little inconvenient, but I think people will get used to it. Hopefully. :)

Nick Gravelyn:

Matthew Doucette:

Nick Gravelyn:

At this point it's an extra 5 characters but you're still far shorter than the marketplace URL and it's still an easy URL to remember. I consider it a great improvement over what we used to have. :)

It definitely is better.  Too bad you didn't get the .com, as that's an extra ".info" that would not have to be remembered and gives that cleaner feel even more-so.  Considered buying it?

It's taken by someone and I'm not going to deal with trying to buy it off someone. The info is a little inconvenient, but I think people will get used to it. Hopefully. :)

I meant have you considered buying it off the owner directly?  That's how we got xona.com.  It was impossible to find a great, short, meaningful dot-com.  ("Xona-" has meaning even if it's not readily apparent!)  So we just pushed money at the problem, and voila!  We were lucky it was for sale, of course, and it was very expensive.

Excellent work.

Matthew Doucette:

I meant have you considered buying it off the owner directly?  That's how we got xona.com.  It was impossible to find a great, short, meaningful dot-com.  ("Xona-" has meaning even if it's not readily apparent!)  So we just pushed money at the problem, and voila!  We were lucky it was for sale, of course, and it was very expensive.

Nick Gravelyn:

It's taken by someone and I'm not going to deal with trying to buy it off someone.

;)

I've implemented referral IDs into the system. To use these you simply append the referral ID to your URL. I'm giving everyone 10 referral IDs number 0-9. So for Being the normal URL is this:

http://xblcg.info/link/Being

and the referral URL looks like this:

http://xblcg.info/link/Being/4

That stores it as a clickthrough with referral ID of 4.

As mentioned you only get 10 IDs (single digit numbers only), but that should be sufficient. If you use a URL that has anything but a single digit for the referral ID, you will get basically a 404 and get taken to the main page.

If you want access to your game's information, contact me at nick@gravelyn.com and provide me with some proof that you are a particular developer. I have no idea how to do this, but I want to share the information so that's about the best I can say for now. We'll talk specifics in email on a per-case basis.

See http://xblcg.info/developer for more info on how you can get in the system to get stats for your game. This is also the verification method to get a developer's website added to the system as well.

Nick Gravelyn:

If you want access to your game's information, contact me

I'm going to be particularly interested in how many hits Being reference #4 gets.  I'll be sure not to use that one anywhere else. :)

This is great stuff, Nick.  Thanks!

I don't know if it's been suggested before, but what would be really nice is to have a link to the developer's website (if they have one).

Excellent work on this, it's progressing nicely!

UberGeekGames:

I don't know if it's been suggested before, but what would be really nice is to have a link to the developer's website (if they have one).

Yeah it's been requested and we're going to start doing it.

I've made a little developers page that has the full info, but basically send me email at nick@gravelyn.com and let me know you are interested in submitting a website URL or getting referral statistics. I will send a five digit code to the gamertag linked to the creator account that submitted the game. You email the code back to me and I'll add you to the database. I will link whatever email you first set up this way so you'll need to use that email for any contact later on.

So if you get that set up, you can send me the URL of the website you want linked and I'll get those plugged in. I'm thinking that the statistics will likely be emailed to developers who register and I'm thinking once a week for starters. Until the site is getting more traffic (share the links! :)) it's not worth our processing power to send them out each night.

Nick Gravelyn:

send me email at nick@gravelyn.com and let me know you are interested in submitting a website URL or getting referral statistics. I will send a five digit code to the gamertag linked to the creator account that submitted the game. You email the code back to me and I'll add you to the database. I will link whatever email you first set up this way so you'll need to use that email for any contact later on.

I actually just sent you a similar idea in an email, thouqh mine was probably a bit more convoluted :)

Mark

thanks for the index! so much faster to navigate than the marketplace site. I would also like it if there was box art too for each game on the main page or something.

You have only to click the title to see the 'box' art.

I like the addition of the official forum link in there. Those were kind of a pain to get to as well. Now, simple!
Great service!

Glad you all like it. Wanted to let everyone know that I'm working with the guys at XNPlay to get links to all of their reviews. I already have most of the current ones, but they're helping me get an easier to parse feed of their links. So if a game has been reviewed at xnplay.co.uk, that link will show up in the Related Links for a particular game.

Nick Gravelyn:

Glad you all like it. Wanted to let everyone know that I'm working with the guys at XNPlay to get links to all of their reviews. I already have most of the current ones, but they're helping me get an easier to parse feed of their links. So if a game has been reviewed at xnplay.co.uk, that link will show up in the Related Links for a particular game.

xAD:

You have only to click the title to see the 'box' art.

I like the addition of the official forum link in there. Those were kind of a pain to get to as well. Now, simple!
Great service!

yeah, i also realized it would slow down the site. I just went through it all last night on an iphone and liked the links to the xnplay reviews, maybe in the future you can link to my reviews as well!

More updates. I've added prices and ratings (the violence, sex, and mature content ratings) to the data my site shows. I've also added a filter for price.