Well Hi There!

If you've come looking for some Nintendo news, I'm afraid you're not going to find any here - I've Never Liked Your SpinachPuffs is now on (almost definite) permanent hiatus. You can still see what Paul gets up to around the web though - try these for a start:

Twitter: http://twitter.com/SpinachPuffs
Dailybooth: http://dailybooth.com/SpinachPuffs

My YouTube channel, where I video-blog and perform songs:
http://www.youtube.com/songsfrompaul

In the meantime, why not check out some of the other Nintendo blogs I like to read - the links are at the top of the sidebar!

The Time Has Come...

The long-expected - yet still obligatory - farwell speech

It's been a while since I posted my "I'm going on holiday now" post but since then I've been well and truly home and things have been happening that I never expected to happen. I've spoken in the recent past about my new video blog and the songs that I've been performing on there. Well, it seems that people like them - much to my suprise - and it's kept me pretty pre-occupied. Things really kicked off last Saturday when I posted a song about how I Don't Like Harry Potter.

This garnered a lot of attention amongst the nerdfighter community of which I am a part of and has led to a number of "high profile" nerdfighters tweeting/recommending me to their subscribers. In the past seven weeks (ish) I've gone from a handful to almost 70 YouTube subscribers which is about 60 more than I ever expected to gain (I owe a lot of this to a number of brilliant people, chief among them Karen Kavett, Alan Lastufka and Dr Noise).

So yeah - things are all well and good in my vlogging world but here in gaming blog land the dust is starting to gather. And - as much as I regret to say it - the time has come to draw a line and call it a day. Bottom line: gaming just doesn't interest me like it used to. Sure, I still browse the internet, buy magazines and read blogs but when it comes to keeping my own blog, it's feeling like a chore rather than a hobby. And it's at this point I promised myself that I'd stop, so stop I will.

Thankyou all so very much for reading/commenting/discussing here at SpinachPuffs - it's been a great almost-a-year and I'm still very glad that I started up this site. I hope you enjoy the rest of the gaming year (Wii Sports Resort and Scribblenauts are top of my must-have list) and the months to come after it.

I'll be leaving one last blog post as a form of "this is what I'm doing now, feel free to browse the archives etc" type of article but in terms of new content, this is where the road ends.

Thanks once again to all - you guys are awesome.
Paul T =)

I'm On the Road Again...

I've got to drive around the country this weekend to (among other things) pick up my older sister from University. I'm then planning a five-day vlogathon for my video blog (I'm just posting a video every weekday for a week, but I want it to sound more exciting) which will eat up a lot of my time - particularly in the early part of the week (making music videos and recording the actual track takes a lot of time). After that, I'm off to the Isle of Skye for a week's holiday with the family. Hopefully we'll have lots of sun (but no sand - it seems Skye, despite being an island, has no decent public beaches) and thoroughly enjoy ourselves =)

So... I guess what I'm trying to say is don't be surprised if this site remains near-dead for the next fortnight. At least I'll have a vaguely valid reason for my lack of posting this time around XD

Have a great weekend/week/fortnight everyone!

I Think I've Cracked It!

This should be the final design now. One or two things (such as the banner and a few fonts in the sidebar) need to be fixed but other than that I think we're sorted. The new look has all the benefits I mentioned in the last post but is now a lot more colourful and is easier to browse through quickly (starts and ends of posts are obvious etc). I need to try and set the sidebar to left-aligned rather than the right-aligned it is now, which hopefully won't cause me to break the HTML code again, but overall I really like the new look and I hope you do too!

Redesign Explanation

Because I didn't really do a good job of explaining it...

This is the third time that the blog has undergone a change-of-face, but this time things are quite a lot different. First off, as I'm sure you have noticed, the article section fills-up more of the screen than before. This should avoid previous problems, such as widescreen YouTube videos over-spilling into the sidebar, as well as allowing for higher-resolution images. Welcome to the 21st Century!

If you "Restore Down" (un-maximise) your browser window, you may also notice that the width of the main-section will adapt to the size of your window (at least, it does in my Firefox and Internet Explorer windows). The wider screen also allows for a wider banner (though I'm still ironing out a few browser-dependant kinks in that feature, so let's steer conversation away from it).

I do realise that the page looks a little plain, bare and generally less inviting than before and hopefully I can find a way to make it a little more appealing. I have pondered - and I'd like your opinions on this in comments - reversing the colour scheme so that the majority of the page was black and the text and borders were white. I may try it out later today so if you see the blog in such a state, that's probably just me experimenting for the time being. Don't forget to cast your vote in the poll - you've got plenty of time to make up your mind though.