So What Was That “Enter the Moongate” Image All About?

In Spam Spam Spam Humbug’s tenth episode, I lamented that it was difficult — untenable, really — to continue to stay on top of keeping the Ultima Codex up to date. I don’t want to walk away from the site; far from it. I greatly enjoy the role it plays and am humbled by what it has become, as much as I am humbled whenever I hear from people that they find the site to be a valuable resource. And it’s nothing short of incredible that, in this day and age, more than fifteen years after the last published single-player Ultima game, I struggle to keep up with all the developments and news surrounding the series, the numerous fan projects it has inspired, and the comings and goings of the people that helped create it.

But: struggle I do. There is more work that needs to be done on the Codex than simply posting another evening’s worth of news…and there’s more I’d like to be able to do as well with what little free time I am able to summon. So I toyed with the idea, late last week, to experiment with not posting news daily, and with not posting individual articles for each bit of news. Instead, I had planned on going to a format more akin to what Dino’s Ultima Page used: roughly-weekly posts that rounded up all the news that’s fit to post about all things Ultima and Ultima-related.

And over the weekend, I thought it might be neat to roll that up into a second podcast, as well, to bring a bit more Ultima to the airwaves (as it were). With complete show notes, of course, for those who would prefer to skim through topics and click through to the content they want to follow.

The plan was still that there would be other updates posted to the Codex, and then not just trailers for the next Mass Effect game. Whenever there was a new gallery, or a new project entry, I’d post news of it on the Codex. I also be took a look at adding the calendar events into the main news feed. There would still have been regular updates to the Codex, in other words. My hope was that this approach would free up more of my time to work on other things that need to get done here on the site (in the short term), and on other projects I’d like to take on (in the medium and long term).

But…it’s not going to work. Part of that is due to the fact that the podcasting software I’m using doesn’t support publishing multiple podcasts, and my thought had been to keep this new podcast — which would have been called Enter the Moongate — separate from Spam Spam Spam Humbug. As that is not an option at present, I guess I need to come up with a new solution, and that will mean shelving the Enter the Moongate concept for a while. Fortunately, there were more than a few interesting ideas thrown out in the comments on the teaser image post, so…maybe I’ll put something together. We’ll see.