Good Monday to everyone. It has been a few days, but I’m back with another tip to help make your GGE experience more fulfilling: using images. I think that most people are familiar with the loading of images to display in the slick flash galleries in your profile and game pages, but often people wonder how they can put images in other parts of the profiles. This has been discussed a bit in the forum, but I thought I would go ahead and explain it as best as I could here, for all to see.

There are a few ways that importing images can work, and all methods are similar, it simply depends on which gallery you are using. There is your own personal gallery found in the My Account section, there is the gallery specific to each game page, and there is a gallery specific to each group. The default quote for each gallery is 2mb (2mb for your gallery, 2mb for a games gallery, etc.) This is explained in the help with my images part of the help section. For simplicity I will just talk about the My Images area, but feel free to extrapolate from there. This should give you an idea of how to place images in any uber modules you want. Continue on for the steps.

Read more about Tip of the Day: Image Time

Tip time boys and girls. Today we have a relatively straight forward tip: Subscribing to RSS feeds. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows information to be published in a standard XML format that can be accessed via a URL. This is less of a tip than of a reminder, actually. Nearly every list of anything on GGE is available as a RSS feed. The most useful feed in my opinion is the My feed, in My account. I like to keep up with all of the new games as they come in, but the feed in your account is where all the information is: who is recommending what, who plays what, and who is adding what.

The brilliant part is that you can add this feed to virtually any feed aggregator. There are tons of them out there, just look at a google search for “rss readers.” I prefer google reader, but you are free to use whichever service you prefer. You can also drag and drop the rss icon into the toolbar of applicable web browsers and read the feed that way.

The easiest way to subscribe is to click on the subscribe button:

Then, just copy and paste the URL of the feed into your RSS Reader. It’s that simple. Remember that nearly all of the lists on GGE (new games, most viewed profiles, recent gamers, etc.) are RSS feeds that you can subscribe to.

Well, it’s Monday and it’s tip time. Have you ever thought “this profiles good, but I could make it way better?” Well, you can easily request to become a contributer for that game and have full editing privileges to add new text, videos, images and whatever else you can think of.

The first step is to go to the game profile for the game you would like to contribute to. Then click on the “Become a Contributer” tab on the right sidebar:

When you click that tab, a message box will appear asking if you do want to become a contributer.

Clicking “OK” sends and notification to the user who submitted the game for approval. They must accept your request in order for you to be able to edit the page. However, after 2 days (48 hours) if the user has not accepted your request, it will be automatically approved and you will have access to the game. This is to allow users to become contributers of games whose submitting user may have become inactive. This also gives the user who submitted a game some room to deny contributers if they so wish.

When someone asks to be a contributer you will get a notification and a message that looks like this:

If you have contributers on a game profile that you were controlling, you can manage those contributers using the “Games” module on your account page. Simply click on contributers for whichever game and you can remove, ban or invite contributers from this page. And at the risk of adding one too many images, the contributer managing screen looks like this:

So there you have it. Become a contributer and make your favorite game the hottest page on the site. Again, any questions just add a comment and they will be answered.

Lately we have been thinking about how many amazing tools there are on GGE, and how much functionality there is. But we realized not all of it is immediately obvious. So we have decided to start handing out the lessons so that you might be able to learn some things that you perhaps didn’t know were possible on the site. Consider this a mini-tutorial. If, after you have read one of these tips, you still have questions, just respond in the comments and we will try and clarify. So here we go with the very first: How to have a feed showing only the friends you want it to.

Most people, I hope, have seen the feed in their account section. This feed lists everything you could possibly want to know about what is happening on the site. But what if you just want to know what certain people are doing? That is what the “My Friends” Module in the My Account page is for. You can add an ultra specific feed in just a few steps.

Step 1: Click on the my account tab and then on the right sidebar click “customize.” You should see a screen similar to that of editing a profile. This is where you can set up what you see when you click the my account tab. The same module system applies and you can move and edit just about everything.

Step 2: On the right sidebar in the “add a module” box, click “Friends” and then click “Add!.” This will place your new module in the inactive modules space, ready for editing.

Step 3: Click the edit icon towards the right hand side of the My Friends Module bar. you should then see the editing page that looks like this:

Step 4: Now you can change the title of this module, select which tags you would like to see, and select the number of items to display. The important part of this step is the tag selection. When you accept or invite someone as a friend you can choose preset tags such as “good profile” and “friend monger,” but you can also add your own tags from the “My Friends” page. So you might tag all of the people you went to school with as “school friends.” This tag could then be selected from the dropdown box, and you would only see the activity of your friends from school.

Step 5: Click “save changes” and then click and drag the inactive module up to the active modules and you are done. Simple

This feed is actually really useful. The main feed tells you all the information you could ever want to know. The friends module will tell you exactly what you want to know. You can add as many of these modules as you like. You could even have one feed for every single friend you have I suppose. So, that’s it, nice and simple. Enjoy!

I’m sure that many of you would love to add a game or two, but might not know which games to add. As the number of games on the site grows it gets harder and harder to find those games that have yet to be submitted. So, I thought I would help those of you who are looking to submit some games with a little old school inspiration: NES.

Currently, there are only around 70 NES games in the catalog. There are over 800 NES games that exist. If you do the math you will realize that we are missing a couple. That’s where you come in. Submit some of those classics that haven’t been seen here yet. Here are a couple that you might be interested in submitting:

The Karate Kid, T&C Surf Designs, and BombermanII are just 3 of the NES games you could submit. So all you die-hard NES fans and retro gamers, this is your chance to fill out the site with some of those titles that might have been overlooked thus far.

I am sure many of you are familiar with some of Google’s widgets, they have literally thousands of them. But did you know that all of them are compatible with your GGE profile page? They are so easy to add that I am surprised that more people haven’t added them. Many profiles embed video, or edit the text styles in the profiles, but there are so many more ways to customize your profile. I thought it would be worthwhile, at least, to alert you to the widgets that Google has to offer that may be of interest to the gaming community.

There are playable widgets for classic games such as Frogger, PacMan, and Asteroids, standard games like chess, checkers, and backgammon, and even some newer games like Bowman 2 and Gold Miner. You can find technology news, entertainment news, and even just regular news. Pretty much anything you can think of, there is a widget for it. There is even a Terramagnetoscope widget if you find yourself wondering about the Earth’s magnetic field status.

There are about 8000 widgets available, all of them can be added to your GGE profile in about two minutes using the [ggadget=”URL”] GGE code explained here and an uber module.

Don’t forget that you can also add slide.com slideshows and Xbox Live Gamer Cards to your profile. Check out the widget whitelist for more information.

So go and pimp your profiles, until they can be pimped no more.

This Friday brings you a more simplistic Friday Round-Up. The number of games on GGE is growing steadily everyday along with the number of users. Keep submitting those games and further developing the GGE catalog. The real highlight of the week is the soon to be available facebook application.

The application itself is completed and ready for use and is just awaiting approval from facebook (however that works) before it is available to everyone. The application simply implants your gamelist(s) into your facebook profile and makes it easy for others to link directly to your GGE profile.

So keep an eye out and we will let you know when the application is readily available for everyone.

GreatGamesExperiment T-shirts!

Below you can see some beautiful photos of the GGE crew and some assorted GarageGames employees sporting the brand new, extremely comfortable GGE T-shirts. Like what you see? Let us know what you think, and you may be able to get your hands on one.

That’s all for this week. I would just like to add that great users make GGE a great site, and we have some great users.

Some of you may have noticed yesterday that a slight change was made to the game pages. Now, when you add a game, you are given the choice to enter a release year, or check that a game has not yet been released. If the game has not been released yet, you will see on the game page an anticipation meter instead of the standard rating. This is due in part to the Starcraft 2 page, and the discussion over rating games that you can’t even play yet. We thought it was a good idea to make this rating more applicable, and bam! Anticipation Meter.

The rating is as easy as ever, only with a new set of descriptions for each rating level: 1) Not interested; 2) Not Impressed; 3) Indifferent; 4) Pretty Excited; 5) Totally Psyched. Use these ratings to let every know how excited, or not excited you are about upcoming games. On a last note, don’t forget to change the game to released once it is published so that the ratings can really begin.

Those of you who keep a serious watch on the site may have noticed a few more new features, a little less obvious than those shiny new gallery modules and gamelist widgets. I am talking, of course, about the new media kit and logo kit now available. They can be found at the very bottom of nearly all the pages on GGE, and are there for your use.

The media kit is a brief explanation of the sites purpose, what you can do on the site and why GGE is helpful to gamers, developers and publishers alike. The logo kit is simply a collection of all our banners and buttons of various sizes. Use these however you like, wherever you want, simply copy and paste the html. Here are a few samples:

We hope these additions will help new users understand what GGE is about and all that it can be used for but also let some of our more dedicated users share the love and compliment those badges and gamelist widgets with a nice banner or button.

We are gonna mix it up today and give you a little personal interest story. GarageGames has recently brought in a new intern, Matt Ostgard, who is going to be working on various art projects. Matt’s road to GarageGames was such a good story that we felt many of you GGE users would like to read about it. It all started when Matt was awarded the prize for one of GGE’s contests, specifically the GDC ticket raffle. Matt had already planned on going to GDC, had the plane ticket already in fact, so winning tickets came as a pleasant surprise. Like most people trying to get into the gaming biz, Matt made the wise decision of taking his portfolio along with him.

While at GDC, Matt decided to stop by the GarageGames booth. Matt had known about GarageGames for a while, being a big fan of Tribes, and a member of GGE during its closed beta. Our very own Tim Aste was rather impressed with the work, and Matt was eventually offered an internship. After weighing his options, and meeting all of the crew here, he decided this was the place to be and is excited to be here. Head to his GGE page to see his portfolio, it’s awesome.