The channel has been doing great this year! Granted, we're only about a month and a half through at this point but still, I'm super happy with how things are going!
So, this post has gotten a little rambly so I'm going to break it up into sections -
I've been trying to write more on Medium and last week I wrote a 2020-02-09 06:07:42 +0000 UTC View Post
The time has come to put an end to the official Egee.io blog.
I relaunched the Egee.io website with the intent of running a blog from there to help generate traffic for "things" connected to the website (such as the YouTube channel).
I talked about the structure of the website in detail in a previous post but basical...
2020-01-31 17:24:24 +0000 UTC View Post
I've had a few things on my mind to write about but things have been so busy lately that I haven't been able to focus on much.
Maybe busy isn't the right word. Distracting, maybe?
January was a busy month.
Lots of irl stuff happened that indirectly changed the trajectory for the whole year.
I did manage to produce 9 videos for the YouTube channel though! It didn't feel like a grind either; Distro Delve episodes are really fun ...
2020-01-29 04:18:11 +0000 UTC View PostAs a follow up to my previous post here, I wanted to talk a little bit about my thoughts on using Medium over the blog on the Egee.io website.
I wrote a short "Pros & Cons" list that I won't bother sharing because I can better explain my bullet points in just a few paragraphs.
It really comes down to branding, customizability, or personalization. I'm not sure what to call it but I think you know what I'm talking about.
On the Egee.io blog, I can make it look and feel how...
2020-01-22 01:14:54 +0000 UTC View PostIn my previous post, I talked about my goal for the year - writing a blog post every week. It's actually two blog posts; one for my supporters here and another for the egee.io website.
Having a blog attached to the website has been something I've wanted for a long time. ...
2020-01-18 10:50:49 +0000 UTC View Post
I set a pseudo-goal for myself this year that I would write more, basically blog posts (like this one) and website updates.
It's been a little over a week since I posted anything here and in hindsight... I don't know where the freaking time went!
Sometimes I look back at my performance over the past 7 days and size up the work I've done. This week, I've accomplished:
I always seem to catch a cold in December. I caught one at the end of the last week in December which has put a damper on my plans for the new year. 🤧
I've got 2 videos "finished" without voice-overs because my voice is still a bit tired. There's also a Podcast in the works that we haven't started for basically the same reason.
The Distro Delves episode I released on the 1st has done super well, far exceeding my expectations. I'm really happy with the video and I'm super excite...
2020-01-03 09:21:39 +0000 UTC View Post
I've always done something different with the channel in November and December. Last year I did "Open Source Appreciation Month" and it was a really fun experiment.
This year, I cooked up a couple of new series', like Distro Delves, as well as working with new sponsors such as NordVPN.
The general reception to Distro Delves has been rather mixed. For the amount of effort required to produce an episode, the viewership is rather poor and the number of dislikes on each video...
2019-12-31 09:02:27 +0000 UTC View Post
I've had my mind on a new benchmark/comparison series for years. Some of my most popular videos have been desktop & distro comparisons but these types of videos are really difficult to make.
On the surface, it's just a comparison video.. Take two desktops (or whatever) and put them against each other, right?
I mean, yeah, that's basically it.
But how do you feature them together in a single video?
Doing side-by-side footage is surprisingly...
2019-12-20 21:57:30 +0000 UTC View Post
I set one goal for myself last week - to produce a video for the Egee channel.
And I missed it. 😩
The video was very technically challenging to produce and basically, everything about it took way longer than I expected.
I was sort-of writing the outline/script for the video as I produced it and I kept changing my mind on what exactly I wanted to focus on in the video.
I had a mini-existe...
2019-12-10 09:35:33 +0000 UTC View Post
It's September already, which means its time to do the September Channel Digest!
Wait, what is a channel digest?
The monthly channel digest is a Patreon post where I talk about the happenings around the channel; past, present, and current.
This post is also a chance for you guys to ask questions or provide feedback about the channel, videos, or really anything you want.
August was a hectic month IRL, but I still managed to put a vide...
2019-09-02 08:43:56 +0000 UTC View Post
The channel hit a milestone today, reaching the 18,000 subscriber mark. If you've followed me for any length of time, you'll know I don't pay much attention to these numbers.
Thing is, the Egee channel is fueled largely by viewers flocking to the tech videos. These viewers are often times developers Googling or whatever, and rarely subscribe. So, the larger number, 3,595,398 views 🚀, is more relevant.
It means that the channel is kicking a...
2019-08-10 07:14:23 +0000 UTC View Post
As you probably know by now, I'm working on refreshing the channel brand. I am working with a couple of artists for this instead of trying to do it all myself.
Up until this point, almost all of the artwork has created by me. I'm a fledgling artist at best and I feel like everything I did felt very amateurish.
The logo above is a draft but the final version will look similar.
The ti...
2019-08-04 10:27:51 +0000 UTC View Post
My most recent video for the Egee channel has one of the worst like/dislike ratio of any Linux distro video I've made.
Was it a bad video? I don't think it was. But apparently the viewers did 👇
I worked on this video for over two weeks because I don't have much free time with the big move and everything else going irl. I can't say I was expecting so much criticism from such a simple vi...
2019-05-26 20:46:06 +0000 UTC View Post
I've been thinking a lot about the future of the channel(s) and Egee.io in general. I have taken vacations & hiatus' in the past but this one will be a bit different.
I'm taking a long hiatus from the Egee channel until this upcoming Fall.
There are a few reasons for this but the biggest one shouldn't be a surprise for folks who follow me here on Patreon - I'm moving. Not just houses but States, too. This is a pretty big move.
I'm going to capitalize on ...
2019-05-26 08:40:17 +0000 UTC View Post
Over the past few weeks I've been solidifying what the backend infrastructure of Egee.io will look like, and I'm practically done! Next up is the big website revamp.
The purpose of the website will change slightly but it will largely remain a landing site for folks to explore our game servers and community.
What I need now is ideas on what the theme & style should look like. The current design is an interesting blend of website concepts I've seen and worked with. There's a lot...
2019-04-29 01:44:32 +0000 UTC View Post
It's been a little over a month since I created my ko-fi account/page thing. Ko-fi is yet another crow-funding, creator-supporting platform similar to Patreon but geared towards "one-time" donation in the form of ko-fi's (coffee's), sorta kinda like PayPal donations.
A couple weeks after I created my ko-fi page, Patreon released a big UI update that fixed some of the major gripes I had with the service. And while they did...
2019-03-25 18:47:22 +0000 UTC View Post
There's a common misconception that Egee.io is some kind of Linux community. This is most likely due to the fact that Egee io is a quasi fan-community that sprung up around my channel during a big Minecraft event I did almost 3 years ago.
Truth is, the original idea behind Egee io (primarily the website) was to be a place newbies could go to find cool Linux distribution that our "community" agreed upon. Originally when we (me and 3 other Linux community members) starte...
2019-03-10 07:11:04 +0000 UTC View PostLast year was a pretty interesting and eventful year. I got laid off from my job and produced two of the most popular videos for the channel to date.
During my time off, I did some thinking about the channel and where I see it going over the next year or two.
New Channel, New Content
You may have noticed that I've been promoting my other channel, 2019-02-04 12:19:42 +0000 UTC View Post
I considered making this post an article on Medium but decided not to because I don't want to be seen as any kind of authority on this subject.
You may remember a post where I talked about making the infrastructure that powers Egee.io Open Source. Well, that was a fun experiment but I decided to Close it for security reasons.
In December, the test server I had running in Linode got hacked. Some bastard ...
2019-01-06 08:51:35 +0000 UTC View Post
I've had a few videos over the past years that were really frustrating to produce. My latest video on Pingus is a great example. This video was a pain because I had to play a bunch of levels to get enough footage for the review.
I don't like puzzle games and I didn't like Lemmings. So why review Pingus? Because it is a good game that has faded into obscurity. In many ways, it is better than Lemmings. Really, the only thing Lemmings does better is the levels. And maybe the music...
2018-12-22 11:13:48 +0000 UTC View Post
Thought you guys might find it interesting to see what AWS spend looks like. This post is somewhat of a follow up for my previous post about Linode.
During October and November I experimented with moving the Egee.io infrastructure to AWS. You can read more about that journey in this post.
AWS offers a handy DIY DNS service called 2018-12-05 08:29:58 +0000 UTC View Post
So about a month ago, a rep from Linode contacted me about a deal involving sponsored videos. This was an exciting development for a few reasons!
At the time I was evaluating cloud options to move the Egee.io game server infrastructure to, a topic I blogged about here. I had literally just determined that AWS was not well suited to my needs and I'd begun researching Digital Ocean, Linode, and Vultr, so I wa...
2018-12-05 02:01:40 +0000 UTC View Post
So this is a pretty cool project that I've wanted to share for a while. I haven't until now for two reasons:
1. Egee.io's infrastructure was manually built up until about a month ago
2. I've been waffling on cloud service providers until this week
The actual infrastructure that the Egee.io game servers run on has always been open source. The 2018-11-21 04:07:57 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm really excited about this week's video but it's just time for a bit of a reprieve from the weekly grind of making videos. This one was released late because I just didn't have much time during the week to work on it.
The change in my work schedule has really thrown things off. I used to have about 2 to 3 hours each morning to work on Egee.io stuff but I've found that time has disappeared.. Inste...
2018-11-11 10:01:06 +0000 UTC View Post
To many folks, my channel is most known for making high quality coding videos. My video on QML is probably my "best" (to date) and it's the video that Packt referenced when they contacted me a few months back. But despite the positive feedback, I don't make many coding videos.
Bottom line is, they aren't fun to make. I've tried a few di...
2018-10-21 05:44:50 +0000 UTC View PostIf you know me, you'll know that I love AWS. Actually, that's not true at all; I don't particularly like AWS but it is the cloud service I know well and I don't really want to learn any other service (besides Digital Ocean maybe).
The Egee.io servers, website, and Discord bot are all hosted locally at my home on a puny dual core Intel workstation. We regularly over saturate the poor machine...
2018-10-13 09:01:14 +0000 UTC View PostI intended it to be a benchmark of sorts. I captured some Skyrim footage before I realized one important thing - I don't have enough Windows games for this video.
I mean, I do have some Windows games put they are either too old to be compelling or too new so they aren't supported on VMware.
Therein lays a fundamental flaw with gaming on VMware - compatibility. Which is, ironically, its' biggest strength (because gaming on Windows > gaming pretending to be Wi...
2018-08-25 16:55:38 +0000 UTC View PostThe "Egee" YouTube channel actually started as a gaming channel around reviewing games (mostly older games) and sort of checking out how games run on Linux. At least, that's how I envisioned it being.
The Linux YouTube community was a very different place (The Linux Gamer actually review games back then too!) and looking back in retrospect, I'm really glad I started doing Y...
2018-08-12 05:45:51 +0000 UTC View PostI'm going to pass 10,000 subscribers today and I have absolutely no plans to do anything about it.
Subscribers are very much a 2010 thing. Years ago it was a big deal to have tons of subscribers but today, it doesn't matter all the much. It's all about the views!
My channel averages about 7000 views a day. That is crazy. And this screenshot was taken before I hit 10,000 subs.
The ...
2018-06-26 15:56:24 +0000 UTC View Post