I’m sure we have it somewhere but I’m looking for high resolution images of all the maps and all the box covers for all the games. Yes, including Zombies.
I could take my own photos but I’m lazy. 🤣
Celebrating 25 Years
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I’ve been running this site for 25 years and have been enjoying doing it. Even when I’m not very active, I see the metrics and know that people are still enjoying themselves.
I didn’t really think about how to celebrate until mid-January and I had this idea for a league-style, play all the versions of A&A type thing. I decided there are better ways to celebrate. Maybe we’ll do that one day but not this year.
The main way I’m going to celebrate is:
- Have fun playing the game, in person
- Have fun updating the site and creating content
- Have fun talking with folks here, on the socials, and definitely in person about the game
- Maybe give some stuff away, if our sponsors are up for it
- Create a special badge for 25 years
You might see a patten. 😉
And I’ve already started. I went to OrcCon in LA with @rmorel and met up with @The_Good_Captain. Typically, I’ll only play 1 game of A&A at that conference. I play 2x D-Day, 1x Anniversary, and Fortress America (that counts, right?)
I’m probably going to attend a BBR event (the one in St. Louis might be too soon).
I’m considering the Spring Gathering.
I’ll definitely be at Gen Con and I’ll be running an Axis & Allies Campaign Tournament. Again, at Gen Con, I’ll usually play other games, but this year, my focus is A&A.
If there are some other must attend A&A events that you’d like to see me at, please let me know!
As for the website and content. I’m working on the blog part of the site and I’ve started creating YouTube shorts. Since they’re “short” it’s less time to put them together and it’s fun.
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Also, when I first started this site, it was a bit of a technical playground for me. In the early 2000s, it wasn’t easy to host a site and the challenge was fun. I even built a static site generator in 2000 before it was a thing (I used XML and XSLT). It was even more difficult to get a database going to set up a forum. The act of doing this project and seeing that a community coalesced around it was awesome.
With GenAI and code “co-pilots” I’m getting back to those roots of experimentation and technical exploration to create something for the A&A community. I’ve literally wanted to build a real odds calculator for A&A since 1996. Now, it shouldn’t be too difficult. I created this linktree-style site in a few minutes, instead of hours: https://axisandallies.link
And weeks of work to create a new site and migrate off of Wordpress will turns a weeks-long project into days.
Now when I do a little work here and a little work there, real progress is made.
Anyway, keep an eye out for some fun stuff this year.
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@djensen I’ll be looking forward to it!
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The new website is coming along nicely. At first it may not seem like much – except that it will be blazing fast (forum will remain the same speed).
I’m adding a few things to get to you visit the homepage more often:
- Featured videos: I’m going to automatically pull in videos from various folks and list them on the site
- Events: events are a hassle to maintain so I’ll let you do it! I’m going to have a form that goes from form automatically to the website (upon approval, of course). However, there are some of you that will be whitelisted for creating events and those will get synced immediately.
Other ideas on deck:
- Featured forum discussions
- “Shopping” page
- AI written news – this one is tougher but the idea is to automatically detect announcements from Renegade have an llm parse them and draft an article.
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@djensen All of them seem interesting, as long as you get AI summaries to work properly, Apple sort of made that feature look bad. Here are some ideas to consider:
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Dynamic Forum Icons: Many Icons on the forums are just speech bubbles, which takes away some of the identity of the games. Instead, you could have each icon sort of represent the games. (North Africa could have a silhouette of Libya and Egypt, Anniversary could have a 25th or 40th, etc.)
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“Pinned” Categories: What I mean by this is that users can right-click categories and “pin” them to the top of the forum page. The reason why the pinning is air quoted is because it would only show up on that users end (If I “pinned” a category, only I could see it).
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Themes: While it could just be light and dark mode, I think it would be cool to have ones based off of Axis and Allies games. For example, 1984 Classic would have almost like that 80s paint style, 1914 could have the gradient of the map over a tan background and have trenches and gas masks at the bottom. This is just another thing that would add flavor.
I hope you consider these additions!
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Also, cool 25th Anniversary tag!
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@CentralCommando Yes! I’ll be offering that for purchase soon: $25
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@djensen
Regarding what @CentralCommando suggested above - are you going to relaunch the forum / enhance NodeBB or move away from NodeBB?
I rather understood your announcement being related to the website (?). -
@djensen I see what you did there.
I hope you don’t mind me asking, but what do you think of my ideas? Some are harder to implement than others, but I’m still curious. -
@Panther Oh, I see now.
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Thanks for calling that out, I missed it. Most of the changes I mentioned are for www side of the site, which helps funnel new people into the forums.
Thanks for the suggestions!
@CentralCommando said in Celebrating 25 Years:
@djensen All of them seem interesting, as long as you get AI summaries to work properly, Apple sort of made that feature look bad. Here are some ideas to consider:
I’ll be using something more like ChatGPT.
- Dynamic Forum Icons: Many Icons on the forums are just speech bubbles, which takes away some of the identity of the games. Instead, you could have each icon sort of represent the games. (North Africa could have a silhouette of Libya and Egypt, Anniversary could have a 25th or 40th, etc.)
I can work on that. I’m not a graphic designer so it’s a little more difficult for me to get it just right. GenAI is okay at monochromatic vector art but not quite there yet.
- “Pinned” Categories: What I mean by this is that users can right-click categories and “pin” them to the top of the forum page. The reason why the pinning is air quoted is because it would only show up on that users end (If I “pinned” a category, only I could see it).
That sounds like a functionality request for NodeBB. It would be fairly core so I’m not sure I can write a plugin to do this.
- Themes: While it could just be light and dark mode, I think it would be cool to have ones based off of Axis and Allies games. For example, 1984 Classic would have almost like that 80s paint style, 1914 could have the gradient of the map over a tan background and have trenches and gas masks at the bottom. This is just another thing that would add flavor.
Themes can be difficult to maintain. I’m actually considering moving to the new default “look and feel” of NodeBB soon. I’ll have to re-theme that with the colors I would prefer so I’ll take a look at making multiple themes.
I hope you consider these additions!
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