TGSN Back Online

As the title suggests - and as you hopefully realise by now, we're pleased to be back online following a move from our old webhost (Lycos, who have had to scrap their web-hosting business - a sign of the times I guess) to our new one. Read on for where we're heading from here.

We all love news. It keeps the world going round; it makes some people optimistic and keeps others eternally depressed (we know who we are!). Thankfully, gaming news is almost always positive. Rarely do days go by where there isn't something to smile about, get excited for, or anticipate in the future. That's why we have, in the past, felt it's important to bring you as much of this goodness as possible. Unfortunately, this take a considerable amount of time and effort, and there is heaps of competition in this field. It's clearly impossible, or at least very nearly so, to compete with the professional outfits out there (i.e. those that are full-time, the people behind them may be complete slobs of course).

We often managed to keep it going for a few weeks before one of our writers needed a break, and the house of cards comes tumbling down. We thought this was a good time to revise our system, with a full update to the site, one reinventing the design, coming this summer (with no scheduled downtime, we're pleased to add).

From now on, we will post just one 'news' article a day. This will be a conglomeration of the day's news updated by a variety of writers as and when news filters through to our bat-like ears. A very short summary of the news item will be posted, along with a link (zooming you further down the page to a press release or media, or to an external, official source) for more details. By the end of the day a paragraph or two of summary will have been compiled. You will then be able to read this when you come home from work and get a complete run of the day's stories, without having to open reams of pages, visit tons of sites, or examine all those RSS feeds.

This will be quicker and easier for us, but also for you. There's still the nice idea of visiting the site every hour or so to check for new stories, as the site will still be updated frequently, but it will take place in one article. Something like BBC Sport's Live Text service for Premier League games will hopefully evolve, but with more information frequently available further down the page. It remains to be seen how effective or efficient this system will be, but we'll be going for it from next week. We will also be doing away with redundant pages (the console-specific news pages in particular).

We're hoping that each post will contain banter, humour and well written, concise summaries to bring a bit more light through your monitor (if you're not blinded by it enough as it is) and take on more of a friendly ethos than we used to show i.e. 'this game's been announced, there's the features, the end'. That is as boring to write as it is to read. We will also be devoting our newfound eons of free time to writing more features. Indeed, articles that would have previously been crammed into news pieces, such as large announcements, new details or media may be comfortably slotted into a feature and will appear more prominently on the site. This new focus will be reflected in a slightly altered design coming in the summer. Stay browsed to TGSN.co.uk over the coming weeks to see how the more recent changes shape up. Oh, and please excuse any glitches you may unearth, moving hosts on the Internet isn't always as easy as it is in Call of Duty.

All the best, the TGSN team.

- News posted by Mike Hazleton

------------------------------------