Friends and links

This started as a page of links to my friends' websites, but I decided to add a few other links, and it started to grow...

Friends and Family

  • Sleuthwood - Flipper's mix of old DVD reviews and guinea pig photos. No doubt to include baby photos sometime in the near future.
  • Fitness Design - Pete Cheung has a fitness web consultancy.
  • Sidmouth Hockey Club - my brother Phil ("Reach") has created this website for the hockey team back home.
  • Revland is John Tynes' frankly weird homepage.
  • Oh my, a world of Hatherley here...

Murder Mystery Party Games

DVDs

Search Engine Positioning

In the process of setting up the Run Your Own Murder Mystery Games site (and becoming a successful affiliate - and then going on to form Freeform Games LLP) I discovered how little I knew about the arcane art of search engine positioning - or how to ensure that when someone types in "murder mystery games" my site is at the top of the list.

  • Sitesell.com - features, among other things, the excellent Make Your Site Sell - a great pdf download just brimming with great advice about creating and publicising a website. (Whether I've successfully implemented everything in there is another matter, of course.)
  • The Affiliate Masters Course by Ken Evoy. A free pdf e-book. This is a zipped file.
  • Articles on Search Engine Placement - a number of excellent articles on getting the best from search engines.
  • Webposition - produce Webposition Gold, which is helps you optimise your web pages for you. I downloaded the evaluation version but decided not to buy it in the end (I found Make Your Site Sell better value for money). Either way, their free newsletter is excellent.
  • Wordtracker - use Wordtracker to generate keywords for your site. (Keywords are the words that people enter into search engines when they're looking for your site.)
  • Ixquick Metasearch - I don't actually use this as a search engine - I just use it to check the overall rankings of my websites. (It consults lots of search engines at once. Handy.)
  • 7MetaSearch.com - another site that searches lots of engines at once.

Boardgames

In my opinion, people don't play enough boardgames. And I don't mean Monopoly - I mean the kind of game that gets nominated for (or wins) the German Spiel des Jahres.

  • Boardgame Geek - a site for boardgame geeks. Good for reviews, links and (sometimes) interesting variants. The top tens are interesting too.
  • The Game Report - good for reviews.
  • Games Lore Ltd - a British site where you can buy boardgames. I've tried it and it's pretty good.
  • Funagain Games - an American site that I've not used to buy games but often visit to check out what's new and read the reviews.
  • Tycoon - Stan Hilinski has written a Java version of Wolfgang Kramer's Tycoon. He also created some AI opponents that are pretty good.

Science Fiction

A couple of general SF sites, plus some author sites.

  • SciFi Weekly - I usually check this out once a week for the news.
  • The SF Site - not quite as slick as scifi.com.
  • David Brin - one of my favourite SF authors.
  • Hatrack.com - this is Orson Scott Card's site.
  • Alan Dean Foster - 20 years ago he was my favourite SF author. Unfortunately my tastes have evolved faster than his writing.

Comics

Okay, so I read comics...

Steve