10,000 page views and new 40k terrain!

10K views!

Wow, I’ve now registered over 10,000 page views!! How did that happen??

I think that’s pretty good for a small out-of-the-way blog that doesn’t get updated nearly enough. I started this blog in August 2011 as a way to re-focus myself in the hobby, and along the way I’ve bought, built and sold two large armies (Blood Angels and Orks), had a baby (best thing ever!) and had two ‘I’m selling it all, I hate you 40K!’ mega meltdowns/ fire-sales. My posting has gone from insane amounts per month, to 3-4 months without any updates. But in all that time I’ve watched the page-views slowly increasing as people came along for a look.

Now before I go any further, please understand that I’m not concerned about generating page-views for any other reason than to spread the hobby love (as it were). I get nothing from this page financially, and it’s purely a networking/ sharing of information/ online diary endeavour.

That now said, I thought it might be worth mentioning blog page views and how they come about. As it stands, my top-viewed articles, in terms of raw numbers (at today’s date) are:

1.      Blood Angels Paint Scheme sorted out- 829 views

2.      Modular Cities of Death Game Board- 631 views

3.      Mephiston Red- aka Hotrod Red- 559 views

For a very long time, the Meph Red and Modular City board articles were neck and neck for views, although the BA paint article has risen from obscurity to eclipse the other two. From what I can gather, a fair bit of my traffic is coming from Google searches based on a few key words- a search on any of the terms within the articles above should return a link or image from my site near the top of the search results (searching ‘Blood Angels Paint Scheme’ does exactly this).

So, to put it plainly, having the right words within your article’s title will (theoretically) draw in more views that if you were to put in a more obscure string of words. I don’t think my paint article would have had nearly as many hits if I’d called it ‘BA army colours’. Which leads on to another couple of points- spell-check if you are unsure of a word, and try to use terms that are both relevant and are spelt the same no matter who types it in. As an example I’ve tried to be mindful of avoiding the word ‘colour’ in my article names, as we spell this as ‘colour’ here in Australia, whereas our US brethren spell this as ‘color’, meaning that depending on how/where they search they could miss out seeing this article in a search engine results page based on a simple spelling variation.      

So, there’s a few quick things to help people understand page-views a bit better. If you run a blog of your own, I urge you to have a look at the statistical mechanism behind it to get the best understanding of how and where your page-views are coming from. In the rawest sense (for me at least), seeing the page-views increasing helps drive me onwards and keeps me enthused to keep coming back and writing articles, which in turn keeps my hobby going strong. Win-win.

Bring on the next 30,000- I want to see 40K views for my 40K blog!! J   

Hobby update! Or, ‘I’m going to wear out some paint brushes!’

As previously stated, there were several giant hobby ‘purges’, in which armies and terrain were sold off. The end result though was that my Dark Angels have stayed with me, and I’ve pushed them out further with a few extra purchases, so my hobby table* is starting to become very crowded- there is a lot of units to be built and/or painted- here’s what I have to do:

·         Dark Vengeance DA Captain (with headswap- aka Azrael)

·         Dark Vengeance Deathwing Terminator Squad

·         Dark Vengeance Tactical Squad (10)

·         Dark Vengeance Librarian

·         Forgeworld ‘Mortis’ Contemptor Dread

·         Vindicator

·         Predator

·         Rogue Trader- era Whirlwind

·         Rogue Trader- era Techmarine

·         3x Ravenwing Black Knights

·         Ravenwing Dark Talon/Nephilim

Some of you may ask why I’m doing more Ravenwing- well, to be honest I’m actually replacing some of the previous Ravenwing that I sold off. As funds are a bit tight nowadays I found myself accepting the offer of a young gent who was after some assembled Ravenwing for his own army- I sold him my bike squad (6), Black Knights (3), Dark Talon and Landspeeder for what was basically RRP- he needed them in a hurry and didn’t have time to assemble his own. So, in order to pay some bills I sold those off. However, with the subsequent sale of some more old hobby stuff (it just keeps coming out of the woodwork!) I have been able to replace the Black Knights and DT. Both are undercoated black on their sprues awaiting assembly, although im still yet to decide on what pattern to build the flyer as. Possibly a Dark Talon again, as it fits my playstyle and is slightly cheaper points-wise.

Oh, I almost forgot. I bought a Baneblade box set, one of the nifty new ones that makes all 8 variants, and spent the better part of two days magnetising it to make every single variant. The amount of engineering involved to due this is quite large- made a lot of sprue-based support bars for the magnets (with bracing to remove any flex), as well as locating pins for gun mount swaps and a host of other small things. This kind of endeavour is not easy and I would strongly advise that people try a lot of small magnetising swaps before ever tackling something like this. You’ll also go through about $20+ in rare earth magnets as well, so that’s worth factoring in.

I’m hoping that I can get some photos up for the next post, to show you are the pure magnitude of what I have to be done.

*Speaking of- I built this little beauty out of scrap wood from my garage, I now have space for 70 or so GW paint pots, all my brushes and other hobby bits. Weighs a bit, but its easily moved around on top of a small rolling sewing table that my wife has. No more using shoe boxes for paint storage- going vertical is the way to do it!

All thats needed now is some channels carved in with a router to store the brushes/stop them rolling around.

 

More Terrain!!

I was recently gifted with a load of terrain from a mate of mine who has moved back to the US, comprising of a load of milk-crate terrain (which I cut out for him, incidentally). Mike did a fantastic job of building and painting up the ruins, adding plasticard panels in a lot of the open spaces (LOS blocking rules!) as well as lots of old gubbinz from things like broken printers and PCs. They’re like a more advanced version of my old ‘Fallout 3’ inspired ruins that Alan now owns, both milk-crate sets should work together on the table beautifully to create a huge ruined city. There’s the possibility of an Apocalypse game in the middle of December, so these will definitely end up getting some use!

Mike was also gracious enough to give me all his old blue insulation foam- I’ve never worked with this stuff before, but its pretty impressive. Using a really sharp thin-bladed knife, some PVA glue and sand I’ve been able to craft some excellent hills and some bases for my trees (see pic). The trees have had some flock added to their bases already, the hills will be getting some soon (ran out of PVA). I’ve also started building a load of shallow craters and some steeper ‘pits’ which will be painted up to contain bubbling magma- like a small volcano, or where a small lance strike has hit the ground. For this the blue foam is supreme. I’ve been using simple and cheap acrylic ‘Art’ paints from a tube to paint my foam creations, and there is no need to prime it beforehand- the art paint binds to the foam incredibly well.

Just needs some flock now

Trees came up better than I expected

Crater or bubbling lava pit? Not sure yet....

 

Actually, the first thing I built from the insulation foam was this little 40K objective marker… the Doctor’s T.A.R.D.I.S. J All the window and door details are hand carved into the foam with an exacto blade. I’m particularly proud of how the writing above the door came out, you can actually read it!! Its being based to match my Dark Angels army, and I hope to use it in some upcoming tournaments. Obviously, there's a bit left to do, should have some completed pics up in the next post.

The Doctor is in!

 

Okay, that’s enough for one day!! Will get more up as soon as I can. As always, thanks for looking, and please feel free to leave a comment- I appreciate any and all feedback on this page!