EPTWow...I have 1000 posts. Feels kind of weird, as I still feel like a fresh faced noob to this community (well more fresh faced than I am). In my time here I've learned a lot and had a blast doing so. I've had ups and downs, but in all it has been a pleasurable experience. Quite recently I discovered Liquipedia. Of course I've known about it for ages, but during DreamHack Valencia I started editing it the tournament page inspired by shz's blog post (http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=370028).
At first I thought it would just be something I'd do every once in a while, for fun. But as I did it throughout that weekend I enjoyed that feeling of making a difference, however small, more and more. I haven't really contributed much to the community. In march 2011 I ran a tournament for Bronze-Gold players for 2 or so months, and I upkeep a resource thread, but apart from that there really isn't much. Recently I've been trying to change that. I've volunteered more and more to help people with projects, because while I don't boast much in the way of video editing skills, graphic designing, or writing talent, what am I prepared to do is grind. If I have free time and I don't know what to do, I can quite easily grind something out for someone.
I think that's where my love for LP came from. I tend to be quite perfectionist with what I work on. As you can imagine, that means that if I find irregularities I like to fix them. For example, on LP, there are 2 ways of showing outside links. You can plain old just put them in these bad boys [___], or you can use something itsjustatank showed me. External Media Link Templates. Now, it takes quite a while to format links onto these, but in the end it makes everything look a lot cleaner. So I found my niche. Finding a niche is very important with editing on LP in my experience. Without it you won't have something solid you can just...do. You'll be wondering from page to page, looking for those few spelling and grammar mistakes. Anyway, back to my ramble, I had found my niche. I would go through player pages, changing the interview links into External Media Link Templates. It took a while, but afterwards the page would look that bit cleaner, and be that bit easier to navigate. It helped me feel like I was making a difference.
I'm kind of surprised at the amount of edits I've actually done since DH Valencia. My total number has gone up from somewhere around 10 to......280. On top of that, I was camping for 3 days. I imagine I'll get pretty burnt out soon, hell, I'm kind of losing the drive to keep doing it now (though I imagine it will return in a few days. Just like your favourite drug, when you've started editing LP, it's hard as fuck to stop editing LP). I don't know what my overall goal is with editing LP. Obviously I want to make a difference to the community, but what I add is negligible. I'd quite like to get a gold coin, just because it would feel cool. First I'd need a silver coin though :D
Some of the nicest people I've met are actually LP staff. All of them help you, without laughing at your stupidity. Despite not every playing Starcraft 2, or so it seems (salle...) they are happy to jump online and play a game of StarJewelled with you, or do some 4v4 monobattling. So I just want to say thank you to you guys, because you make editing LP an absolute pleasure and have helped me more than I can believe. Especially thanks to itsjustatank, because he has showed me things that I didn't even know existed on LP.
Well, that was a bit of a ramble. Thanks for reading, here's to another happy 1000!
