I’ve been speaking with a few of the community members from the old Gamercast days, there’s some surprise that the website has been re-designed. So thought I’d write a post addressing a few common things that have been raised. I don’t normally give websites version numbers, however in this case its pretty substantial. It’s the biggest re-factoring in Gamercast’s history, it is entirely rebuilt using a static page generator. Not a single file has been re-used from the old version - excluding the content. This helps me preserve the website going forward as now I don’t need to worry about patching security issues, keeping databases running and other things, the website is super portable and can be thrown on any server easily. This is Gamercast 3.0.

This has been part of a wider effort to create static versions of all my old websites to better preserve them going forward. So much of the world wide web is a pile of broken hyperlinks these days - with content no longer open and available to all, instead locked away inside the datacentres of vast corporations, displayed only via applications and available on the web in only a handful of cases. Rant aside, Gamercast is a slightly different case unlike my other websites, as its possible new content will be posted, so a modernisation effort was also included in the work rather than just an archiving exercise.

Those were days, Gamertiles remember those, from the Xbox 360 days? Yes I know v1 is missing the background images I did spend a few minutes trying to find them, but couldn’t.

Feel free to leave any comments below with any questions, or join our Discord server.

Thanks for all your support over the years guys. - Paul

FAQs:

Does this mean the podcast is coming back?

No, I’m not sure if I can commit 2-3 hours per week to work on this going forward.

Does this mean there’s going to be new content?

Possibly, we have a new writer allegedly starting soon Grayson Lake. The timing of this work coincided with his possible start.

What about YouTube, Twitch, where’s Catherine, Charlotte and Adam?

It’s unlikely these will be looked at, although sometimes we stream the odd game. The old Gamercast crew are unfortunately busy with our day jobs these days.

Comments are gone?

Yeah I know, too much work to port comments over. I might look at doing it for a handful of the more popular reviews at some point.

Some posts look a little wonky and not as good as others?

Yeah they were imported in using RSS (another open standard people barely use, preferring their infinitely scrolling timelines these days where an advertising focused algorithm decides what they view - rant over). So they’ll inherit any issues of the posts they were imported from. I have gone through the more popular ones and tidied them up, fixing images and adding category and tag information. Sadly this had to be done manually due to how new pages are structured.

A dark theme? Nice!

Fun fact, the original version 2 theme from around 2009 was dark, and the newer mobile friendly, fluid-width version with the tiled UI also featured a toggle for light and dark, but this was hidden, but you could switch it if you knew how.

Gamercast, WTF is that?

Gamercast was originally a podcast, website and associated community. It pre-dates YouTube, Facebook and Twitter etc. It comes from a happier time, when the internet was better. 🙂