Reflecting on a year of Reconnect

How we got here.

I’ve been blogging all my adult life, and like most people I struggled to stick with it.

Each new blog disappearing as quickly as it was established, in all honesty, for those early blogs, I spent more time designing the theme, than I did actually writing.

But the itch always remained. Fast forward to 2019 and finally something stuck.

A colleague of mine had started blogging on Dev.to, a tech blogging site, and I decided to stick my foot in. Given we both worked in data analysis it was an easy niche to carve out.

There were a million people blogging about Javascript and software frameworks, but Data Science hadn’t become ‘cool’ yet so we were big fish in a small pond, and I started to gain actual traction with my writing.

I’m not ashamed to say that the thing my writing really needed was a quick feedback loop.

Most of my early blogs died because I didn’t get instantly ‘famous’, and looking back I regret not sticking with them. Some of the people who were starting when I was, run some very influential sites now, Windows Central for one.

But everyone's journey is different. With Dev.to providing me with the right feedback loop, I expanded my horizons and started writing on Medium.

I wrote about all sorts, Mental Health, Space, Tech, and Gaming.

Then I applied to write for a Medium Gaming Publication called SuperJump Magazine. They took me on and I started writing within a community of writers and editors.

It was amazing. Getting feedback on my writing was amazing, and having a community cheer me on was the right amount of encouragement.

I wasn’t and still aren’t an amazing writer. I have my voice and I have my style and I’m very happy with that. But what SuperJump exposed me to, were amazing writers.

I would see them join the group, pump out some amazing pieces, and then they would start getting freelance work at IGN, Polygon, and GameInformer. It was really inspiring to see these writers make their mark and start a professional career.

Then by 2023 the industry had changed. Games writers were being let go and publications were being shut down left right and center. Social media was also going through a turbulent time. Musk had purchased Twitter and the platform was tanking, and Reddit was alienating its user base, also causing a dip in Reddits popularity.

In a very short amount of time the people who write were no longer writing, and the means to find writers had dried up.

To make matters worse, the remaining games publications had pivoted away from editorial writing and towards the things that drove traffic. Game reviews, and game guides.

My interest in reading that stuff wained.

I wanted Editorial writing. I wanted the good old days of deep think pieces by Austin Walker, behind the scenes reporting by Jason Schrier, and interesting explainer-pieces by Patrick Klepek. But more than that, I wanted to find the up-and-comers. I wanted to find the next Rob Zacny, the next Danielle Riendeau, the next Nick Breckon.

But with the industry in the state it was in, I couldn’t easily find that, and I thought games writing was dead. Everyone had already pivoted to video and podcasts with the new talent all producing videos for IGN or guesting on Giant Bomb.

Then Waypoints closed, and out of the ashes came Remap Radio. Rob Zacny and Patrick Klepek made a video / podcast outlet to keep themselves going having lost their jobs.

Several months into Remap, they started writing again, and they talked about the state of the industry, they talked about where writing was happening now, the rise of Subtack, and the problem facing all current writers….. discoverability.

See, Patrick had started his publication Crossplay, and even though he’s famous, and can tweet out his new blog and get an instant following, he empathized that it wasn’t as easy for others. He saw that the uphill battle for himself and everyone else, was getting your writing out there in the highly competitive world of the modern internet.

So an idea struck me. What if I could build a site that centralized all the writers work in one spot to improve discoverability. I had kinda built something small for myself and the few blogs I was following using Apple Shortcuts, how hard could it be to launch a web-app that did it for everyone?

Well, that idea came from the Remap Radio Podcast posted October 19th 2023.

The first public release of Reconnect was February 2024 and it looked like this:

It had taken me four months to learn how to code a Django Web App and launch it on a hosting service.

Version one was a mess. I was effectively testing in prod. With about 300 bots hitting the site every day, I quickly figured out many bugs I had missed, and I learned some valuable lessons.

I used to have a contact form for people to reach out to me, and whilst my first ever contact was a real human being who wanted to help, shout out to Jaycii, nearly every other contact was a bot trying to sell me something.

When I launched in February I had maybe 30 blogs and I was trying to find the balancing act. Some blogs were more news heavy than I would like, spamming the site with three times the amount of articles than anyone else.

Whilst I had built a ranking algorithm, I hadn’t built a way for things to de-rank over time, and so the front page got stale as the same articles stayed there.

It also wasn’t very mobile phone friendly and I wanted Reconnect to be something people could visit regularly in whatever manner suited them. I was also being requested to add an RSS feed.

With lessons learned I got working on a version 2.0 that I build from the ground up and launched in June.

By the launch of version 2 I had 100 blogs. When I started this project I didn’t expect there to be a hundred blogs at all. I have spent the better part of the last year scouring the internet for gaming blogs.

I used google, I searched reddit, Hackernews, Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, Fuze, Mastodon, CoHost, and Hive.

Fifty percent of the time, If I did find a gaming blog, I hadn’t been touched in over a year, and another 25% of the time they weren’t really suited to Reconnect. But I kept searching.

Substack blowing up in the past six months helped a lot. When I started here, I couldn’t find many, and everyone’s recommendations kept point to each other like a tiny echo chamber. But one day something changed and more people started popping up and so more got added.

Fun Fact. The script that goes out and gets everyone’s articles has to account for all the dumb different ways that RSS/Atom feeds can be made, also every domain handles RSS urls differently. The amount of time I spend on someone’s blog adding /RSS or /Feed or feeds/posts/default/ is time I will never get back. But on Substack, everything is standardized and so suffice to say, Substack blogs are the easiest to parse into Reconnect.

Now we have over 200 blogs on the site. That’s over 200 games writers, working their little buts off to put awesome pieces of writing out into the world every single week. In under a year Reconnect now houses over 10,000 articles.

The last few months have really taken off and I’m not sure what to do but to enjoy it. Of course I’m trying to think of what a version 3 of Reconnect looks like. How it can add more value to the world and attract more visitors?

Notes on Substack has been an amazing experience, I’m thankful for those who interact in the Discord Community, and I’m so thankful for those whom I interact with on Social Media.

What’s even more flummoxing is that over 100 people have subscribed to this newsletter. In my days of writing on Dev.to I got tens of thousands of reads on my articles, but I have reason to believe those numbers are inflated, apparently my blog had over 100k views, even more doubt. But to see over 100 real people, with email addresses, willingly say “I want Alex’s words in my inbox” is amazing, I am actually beyond words. Thank you.

Talking of made up numbers, I thought I’d share Reconnects traffic with you during this year. When I started it was mostly bots hitting the site, a few hundred a day. But now thanks to a year of work, and some amazing adverts from my designer-and-partner, in November Reconnect had forty-nine thousand visits.

Well that’s been the year of Reconnect, its first year.

I love every moment of this. I love building and maintaining the site, I love meeting new writers and seeing their work on the site. I love writing a weekly newsletter, and writing articles, I love the community that I’ve found, and I love the work that each and everyone of you puts in.

More importantly, I love that GAMES WRITING ISN’T DEAD.

See you in 2025.