Howdy ho, internet-arinos!

No, this isn’t an April Fools joke. We are ac­tu­al­ly back to reg­u­lar publishing!

Good to see you here again. I have the ut­most plea­sure of pre­sent­ing to you…

SuperNerdLand Volume 1, Issue 1

First I want to thank the won­der­ful Alexander “Minze” Thümler! He gra­cious­ly al­lowed us to use his art­work for the April cov­er, and be­sides be­ing a nice dude… He is a fan­tas­tic artist! You should check out his ArtStation pro­file for more of his work.

Though this tech­ni­cal­ly isn’t the first time we’ve pub­lished con­tent in a mag­a­zine for­mat, this will be how ar­ti­cles are re­leased go­ing for­ward. You can see our pre­vi­ous test­ing of a mag­a­zine for­mat from back in 2016 over here, which we’ll just call a beta test of the for­mat. Volume 0, so to speak. 

I’ve ex­plained how well it works for us as far as pub­lish­ing sched­ules goes, but it also seems to work well for peo­ple out in in­ter­net land too. Magazine is­sues spiked au­di­ence num­bers, ar­ti­cles ac­cessed per user ses­sion, bounce rate… every­thing was bet­ter. So it makes sense to re­turn to this for­mat as we start to rein­vig­o­rate the site.

Over the next month we are go­ing to be a bit of busy bees, as we start to ramp up stream­ing again, work on a new theme for the main site, test­ing out self-hosted fed­er­at­ed op­tions for video shar­ing and so­cial net­work­ing, and more!

So what does some of this stuff en­tail? Glad you asked! Wait, I asked? Well, let me tell you about it anyway.

Custom/Self-Hosted Streaming — We had a so­lu­tion up in the past al­low­ing for cus­tom stream­ing from our own serv­er, with a lot of ad­vanced fea­tures that were eas­i­ly main­tained thanks to some pan­el soft­ware called WMSPanel and us­ing their free Nimble Streamer ap­pli­ca­tion. It’s a won­der­ful so­lu­tion, in all hon­esty. The only rea­son it is not run­ning now is budget. 

Frankly, the li­cense for the WMSPanel be­came too much as a lot of us be­came pret­ty tight last year. So it was an easy bud­get saver to just nix the cus­tom stream­ing, since there are plen­ty of ser­vices like Twitch to use in the meantime.

We will get our self-hosted stream­ing back up and run­ning, though. And soon! Because we have more flex­i­bil­i­ty on our own serv­er and are sub­ject only to our data cen­ter AUP, so we can stream all the lewd games we want. Plus it’s just fun to de­vel­op it. Whether we use some­thing like WMSPanel again or if I build up some­thing else (even a sim­ple ng­inx RTMP set­up would work at first) is to be de­ter­mined, but the streams shall ride again!

New Theme and Logo — It’s just that time, to be hon­est. We try to re­fresh the look and feel of the site every year or so, and it’s long time I went and did that again. Nothing much fan­cy to say here. Just that things will (hope­ful­ly) look pret­ti­er but func­tion­al­i­ty will re­main or be­come even bet­ter! We’re go­ing to try to make this the best look­ing ver­sion of SuperNerdLand to date. A big thing will be try­ing to fo­cus more on a look and feel that will work well with the mag­a­zine for­mat, but won’t stop peo­ple from be­ing able to read reg­u­lar­ly pub­lished ar­ti­cles from the past at all. 

Federated Video and Social Networking — Firstly, if you don’t know what I mean when I say “Federated” or “Fediverse” then go ahead and get a quick primer here. It’s pain­less, I promise. We’ll still be here.

Now that you are back with me; a cou­ple of years ago we test­ed the wa­ters with putting up a fe­di­verse node (that also had cross post­ing with Twitter!) but it didn’t re­al­ly take off. It was just the start of so­cial me­dia sites be­ing iffy with cen­sor­ship and plat­form re­vo­ca­tion, and I just don’t think peo­ple were tak­ing al­ter­na­tives se­ri­ous­ly enough yet. 

Well, it’s only got­ten worse since then.

So we are go­ing to be putting up a node again! You’ll be able talk to all your friends on the fe­di­verse, and hope­ful­ly still post to, and read from, Twitter if I choose the right back end. 

But what does this mean for video? The old video site is go­ing to stay up for a while, but soon I am go­ing to be test­ing some­thing called PeerTube. You can find out more de­tails about PeerTube here, but the gist is that it’s a fed­er­at­ed FOSS al­ter­na­tive to ser­vices like YouTube us­ing P2P video de­liv­ery. The fed­er­at­ed na­ture of the ser­vice I hope can add an ex­tra pool of folks who can dis­cov­er our content.

Our nor­mal­ly host­ed video site will be stay­ing up in the mean­time, but if the ser­vice works well enough, and af­ter we im­port all of our cur­rent video li­brary to it, we could see it be­ing a healthy replacement.

So that’s what will be go­ing on be­hind the scenes here in the next month or so, be­sides us get­ting back into reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled pub­li­ca­tion. Speaking of which, much like last time we re­leased mag­a­zine is­sues, you can ex­pect us here every month!

As al­ways I want to thank you for be­ing on this jour­ney with us. Since day one this has been a pas­sion project of mine and the oth­ers who con­gre­gate here. But even in our slow­er times, we main­tained a love­ly group of peo­ple who en­joy our pres­ence on so­cial me­dia, and we thank you for stick­ing around even when there was noth­ing in re­turn for it be­sides our sup­port for many of you and the un­end­ing dad lev­el jokes I make on the Twitter account. 

So come on in, stay a while, and en­joy the col­lect­ed works with­in SuperNerdLand Volume 1, Issue 1!

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Josh Bray

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand

Latest posts by Josh Bray (see all)

• Free Pack-in Game of the Month: Heidelberg 1693 — June 1, 2019
• Coming Down the Pike – June 2019 Game Releases — June 1, 2019
• Letter from the Editor (June 2019) — June 1, 2019