They freed our boy.
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To celebrate 20 Years of Xbox, Microsoft has finally added Blinx: The Time Sweeper to Xbox Game Pass. As of July 26, Game Pass members will be able to play TTS on cloud and console.

The OG Xbox classic Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge was also added to Game Pass alongside it.
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​With this, the first Blinx game has never been more accessible. Now if only they would make the sequel backwards compatible too.

There's already a noticeable increase in the number of Blinx: The Time Sweeper Twitch streams. It's equally fun and frustrating watching people playing it for the first time.

If you're interested in getting Blinx: The Time Sweeper (or Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space for that matter) running, you can read my updated 'How to Run the Blinx Series' guide.

​I'm excited to announce that the Blinx The Time Sweeper Fansite is getting a fresh rebuild from the ground up.

When the fansite was first created, I wanted an easy place to put anything Blinx related to refer to later without having to worry about the backend. Four years and over 200 pages later, the fansite has pretty much outgrown its website builder host platform. I believe that building the fansite from scratch is long overdue and will benefit its growth in the future.

​Faster Load Times
Without getting too technical, the current fansite is dynamic and the fansite rebuild will be static. The content on dynamic sites is rendered by server and database processes while static sites are pre-rendered and can be passed straight to your browser. As a result, static sites have faster load times since there is no processing time required to deliver a webpage.

In addition, I can trim away all the fat that comes with the generic page rendering processes that come with website builders and optimise the architecture to suit the fansite's requirements.

Better Workflow
The Weebly editor is the biggest obstacle to making changes to the fansite due to its slow speed and how it handles page editing in general. Less time spent fighting with the editor is more time spent writing content.

Full Creative Control and Freedom
What content can be added is determined by the website builder. Custom visuals and more advanced behaviours are often only possible with paid feature apps. Because of that, I often spent unnecessary time trying to find free workarounds.

With the freedom to code whatever I want, things like proper references and dark mode can finally be added.

Because I Can
May as well since I have gained skills in web development from my job as a software developer. Looks good on a resume (probably).

​Below are several screenshots of what's been built so far, just to show it's doable.

As seen from the screenshots above, I've built the foundation of the new fansite and I've started the process of moving content over.

I don't have a current timeline yet but I hope to get it done by the end of this year at the very latest. Extra time will be spent adding new site features and refreshing old content. If it's not finished by the end of this year, blame notna888 for not being able to copy and paste.

I'll be doing regular updates on this blog so keep a watch out for those.

Updates on the current fansite will slow down as I focus on building the new fansite but new content, news and revisions will continue as usual.

That's all for this announcement. Thank you for all the support over the past few years. I don't think the fansite would nearly be as big without it. :)

​From this month onwards, I'll no longer be posting Featured Fanart as I'll be uploading fanworks on the Fanart gallery on the new fansite.