So I had this all typed up and ready to go earlier and then restarted my computer without saving the draft I had open in Notepad2. FAIL. Given how much I hate retracing my steps I waited a few hours and some new stuff came in for me to talk about so that makes things a bit better.

E3 pass giveaway

I announced earlier this week the contest to give away 2 passes to this year's upcoming E3, and it's still on-going until next Tuesday so if you haven't signed up already then check it out. Entry into the contest is absurdly easy because we're giving preference to any GDNet+ members who enter, which is actually the first contest I've run where we've done that. Since this means that if more than 2 GDNet+ members enter everyone else is pretty much screwed, barrier to entry is as low as possible.

flickr sets on Facebook

We've recently started using a Pro flickr account to host our conference/event images, mainly for including said images in articles and whatnot. We don't really have a strong flickr following so we're not too interested in the comment and tagging features. However we do have a ton of fans on our Facebook page so we've been wanting to get the flickr sets up there for some time now.

Problem is there's no real good solution for doing that. All the Facebook flickr apps only work for personal profiles, not for Pages. The flickr tab we have now shows the latest images from our photostream, but doesn't give people a way to get there to actually view them.

So we're going with the manual solution for now. Using bulkr to grab a set of images and then batch-uploading them to Facebook. The tagging, sorting and adding descriptions also has to be done manually. I managed to get all the GDC photos up with minimal hassle, so it's not a bad solution, it's just not the greatest. If anyone has any tips regarding this, I'd love to hear em!

ERB looking for new members to help review articles

The Editorial Review Board is my right-hand when it comes to vetting articles for publishing here on the site. I've been around the industry quite a while and know a good many things, but I don't know everything well enough to be able to determine whether every article that lands in my inbox is technically accurate and worth your reading time (and sometimes even I get it wrong).

So the ERB is composed of individuals with varying skills in game development who I can assign articles to be reviewed. You don't need to be an English major, I still handle all of the editing and grammar checking, but you will for example have to tell me whether this guy's algorithm for SSAO is actually groundbreaking or not.

Best part is we can send you a bit of cash as thanks for your time. So if you're interested, drop me an email at drew@gamedev.net

GDC Canada/LOGIN

Next week I depart for Vancouver to attend GDC Canada, and then I'm heading straight down to Seattle to hit up LOGIN. Last year the inaugural GDC Canada stepped all over LOGIN and prevented me from attending, but this year, whether by fate or design, the two conferences are playing extremely nice, with GDC Canada butting up against the weekend and LOGIN kicking off at the start of the following week. The fact that the two cities are within a few hours travel time is even better.

Keep and eye here for reports from the events, and if you're also attending be sure to track me down and say hello! You can also find out more about the events and parties happening during them at their threads over in the Events for Gamers forum:
LOGIN 2010 Conference
GDC Canada 2010

Article publishing re-launching in May

I spent the better part of this month working through my backlog of content that's been building up since February and have made awesome progress. I've cleared through at least a dozen articles for publishing over the coming 2 months and will have a schedule up shortly on our publishing calendar (see the top of this journal).