When this blog published its first post in May 2020, it was called Data & Games, and its subtitle billed it as “the Recommend.Games blog on board game analyses”.1 It has been Analysis Paralysis since that November. As of today, it finally lives at an address that says so: analysisparalysis.games.
That’s the entire announcement. But the last two times I wrote a post like this, the news was rather more dramatic, so let me answer the obvious questions before anyone starts worrying.
Is Recommend.Games going away? No. The recommendation engine is running exactly as it was yesterday, and it’s still linked from every page here. This move says nothing whatsoever about its future. The blog simply outgrew living on a subdomain of a different project: it has had its own name for nearly six years, and now it has its own address to match.
Do I need to update my bookmarks? No. Every old link keeps working. blog.recommend.games redirects here permanently, and it preserves the full path, so a link to a specific article still lands on that article rather than dumping you on the front page. I have no plans to ever switch that off. Update your bookmarks if you enjoy tidiness, but nothing rots if you don’t.
Why did my feed reader just mark five years of posts as unread? Ah. Sorry about that. Feed readers identify articles by an ID that includes the site’s address, so changing the address makes every single one of them look brand new. There was no way around it short of never moving at all. It is strictly a one-time event: mark the lot as read, and your feed goes back to normal from here on.
So what actually changes? Nothing else. Same blog, same author, same open source, same complete absence of paywalls, ads or tracking. Just a name and an address that finally agree with each other.
Until two days before that first post, it was Playful Data. Naming things is hard. ↩︎