News

Not much happening at the moment. I haven't worked on the Chat site for several weeks, I'm busy with some personal matters and I have a surge of writing-craze. I just feel like writing a lot, my usual reviews of course, perhaps I will even dare to write some fictional short story.

As for my sites, I updated 1UP with two reviews recently: Lethal Weapon and Alien 3, which kick off the summer special about film adaptation for Super Nintendo.

In barely two days, the site will be moved to another hosting, ending two years with my former host, Hosteur.com. They've been doing their job pretty well, even though the actual hosting took place on ThePlanet servers, but I decided to move because I could get a cheaper offer and a few things disturbed me with Hosteur, so that my fidelity was compromised. Besides, all they did was hosting a plain html site and that wasn't worth the price I paid, frankly (24 euros / year).

As for my other sites and projects, nothing at all for now. I just corrected a little bug in Ipheo's stats, the robots/crawler number wasn't included in the overall ip numbers hence making the percentages inaccurate. I'll try to work on the Chat site soon, if time permits.

Projects Overview

I'm currently busy moving and it doesn't leave much time for working on my websites. In the past few days though, I improved several bits of Ipheo.com, I'll post a list of these changes once the last bits have been completed.

Now the question is where should I focus my efforts ? I have many projects, too many, and I'm not sure which one should get my attention first, so here's a list and an attempt at prioritizing them.


1. Chat 2.0
The new version of the chat should definitely be among my top priorities, because it's promising, because I worked on it for some time, because there are some nice ideas. I might have found a domain name also. What slows me down now is 1/ the design of the main page, I know what I want to do, but it kind of scares me to do it, mostly because my computer is a pain when it comes to graphics 2/ some parts are rather complex php/javascript, at least for me, and as I said earlier, it was very difficult at first to know what I had been doing. I rewrote one script, which is now much lighter and more efficient too I believe.

2. Ipheo
I'm not sure Ipheo is so important anymore, now it's mostly about getting visitors, but I still want to do a few things if time permits: 1/ launch the spamology section, even just a draft 2/ officially launch the forum, which still needs a little bit of work 3/ completing the "bits" I was talking earlier. Since I've been working mostly on Ipheo in the past few days, it's of course easier to continue this way, at least I recognize my source code !

3. Project A
No better idea of a codename for now. This is a tempting project, not necessarily too complex but that could be very helpful and very popular too. It's targeted to Finnish audience, and this is the problem mainly, it will need translation and that makes me dependent on other people. Yet, because it's rather accessible, it comes in third position.

4. Project LAFS
This one is a big project and this is the problem, the testing phase is ok, I can work on it in the meanwhile, but making the site in itself is going to take quite a long while, and then there will the problem of the hosting... in this case, it really is going to be an issue.

5. Project NN
Difficult to rank as well. I started coded one bit of the site, turned out pretty well and fast, I did some design tests, quite ok too. It ranks so low for now because of the motivation, not really high, though it might change completely the next day...

6. Project Alone
An idea that popped up in my mind this weekend, kind of interesting, I might give it a try. So far it's nothing but an idea.

7. Project ?
No idea how could I name this project, haha. This one is DAMN ambitious, hence the low rank, I don't see how I could do this now. Plus, there are a lot of technical issues. I had done some testing last year, it worked better than expected and since hten I've learnt a lot more, so perhaps not a complete impossibility.


Right now it seems I can't decide which one among projects 3,4,5 I should focus on. However, it's clear Chat 2 is the short term priority, I need to finish it, and finish it fast.

Chat

Again, when reading the source code of the Chat site today, I thought it looked weird and it held me back from making any changes. Who typed this ?? Well, I confess, I did type it, and not that long ago. But I will need to disentangle the code because it's very messy, and crippled with a couple of not-very-smart-things-to-do. If it wasn't for time issues, I'd be really tempted to restart from scratch, that'd be only the third time. Instead I thought I should perhaps work on the version after that in parallel ! How wacky.

Ipheo and after

As you may know, I finally launched Ipheo last week. It went well, although the number of visitors at the moment is disappointingly low, which, at least for me, is not unusual at a new site launch. 93 IPs have been recorded, and the pace is far from being steady, many of those IPs have been recorded last week.

Since I launched the site, I corrected a couple of bugs, entirely redesigned the IP address dialer and worked a bit the overall aspect of the forum. The next steps will be to create the Spamology section, though I need to put more thoughts into the whole concept yet. Right now it's mostly a fancy idea that may or may not be interesting.

I decided also to make a significant (and more logical) change about the main page. I must remember as well to correct a couple more bugs, one with IE (which sets its own font-size on tags) and one related to bots and Javascript. Interestingly, Google bot disregarded a Javascript instruction I use during loading which alter the title of the page. Basically I used this because I didn't want to use buffering on the server side; I'll have to think of something else as it's a pretty important issue.


After all this, which is not necessarily a priority anymore now that the site is online, I will try to focus my efforts on the Chat site. I had almost forgotten about that version 2 I must say ! As a result, when I looked back at the current source code, I found it entirely confusing and perhaps worth some improvement. I almost felt like starting from scratch again, but that would be a mistake, because there are some nice pieces of code too I think (as usual, merely from my amateurish perspective).

I would also like to experiment something with one site, but I'm not sure which yet. I want to try using a Postgre database, and perhaps implement some functions that would allow to store temporary files when MySQL is down. Unless I try to use it on its own first, I'm not sure, but I definitely want to give it a try.

note: By the way, I decided to change the pronunciation for Ipheo, from a Frenchly 'eeféo' to a more standard 'i-fee-o'.

Statistics

Today, for once, I will show some statistics for 1UP and Samurai Nintendo. Results in the past months have been pretty good and stable for both sites. SN has by far a higher number of visits, even though it's hardly updated anymore. This is obviously because it's in English language and probably too because there's more ready-to-use content, such as average-sized pictures.




The progression for 1UP has been really steady, moving from 10.000 unique visitors per month a year ago to 20.000 in the last months. I'm glad of it, although I expect some decline because I haven't had time to provide updates for a month and it's like ly to continue in the next weeks.




Numbers for Samurai Nintendo are very satisfying too. 52.000 unique visitors in May (note that AweStats unique visitors are stricter than Webalizer unique visits, so it's all the more impressive), about a million page views and more than a million hits, 10GB of bandwidth. Numbers for June should be about the same, perhaps a bit less according to my estimations.

Latest news

Ipheo.com should launch in the next few days, the domain is now active. In the meanwhile, I launched a new site (yes, again) that should replace my old home page - my really, really old home page - that I had online years ago, when I had no idea that such a thing as CSS existed and that I knew barely 1/4 of all html tags, if not less. The site is simply called: sanjuro.

About ipheo (I'll have to make up my mind if I capitalize or not), I had another idea, I will introduce something else along with this site. It might be interesting in the long run, we'll see.

What else, what else... I put Samurai Nintendo for sale on Sitepoint, yes, that's some big news.

ipheo.com

Project Churchyard (...) is now almost completed and its final name is ipheo.com (pronounced 'eeféo'), I've bought the domain a few days ago. All I can say is that it has to do with ip and that I might host some projects there too.

But right now, my problem is... I don't have any hosting to put it. Hopefully this will change soon, I was unable to renew the hostings I was counting on because the people there simply don't care about the customers anymore ! Quite unbelievable but true, the site is deserted with clients complaning and no one is answering. I'm not going to give the name of this hosting (you could easily find it though, it's the one that hosted luomu.org and bbsig.com), because I still would like to renew my account there since there were many advantages and because, yes, I'm afraid that if I start dissing their name publicly, they ban me or something, we never know... even though they sure deserve to get lectured on the proper way to run a hosting company and the customer-care side of business especially.

Chat: Offline until May or later

I also forgot to mention the chat site will be offline for a few weeks starting today. I'm working on the next version but it's moving slowly right now.

Various

Just a general update about what I've been working on recently.

And the problem actually is that I haven't been working much. I didn't update 1UP last friday and I'm not sure I will this one. I did, however, update Samurai Nintendo, which is worth mentioning given that it had been left almost a month without a change.

The falsely-creepy Project Churchyard has been receiving most attention. It's moving along well, though I'm not sure it'll be finished this week. Tonight I finished adjusting some features, I'll have several additional checks to make tomorrow. What is still going to take time is:

1./ the design; it's simple so far and will probably remain like that, but I need to add some details though I don't know exactly where.

2./ the structure; should I add some features ? make things differently ? which sections should I make ? mostly questions in search of answers.

3./ the testing; this is a weird site and I'm afraid it won't work as well on the server than in localhost on my computer, we'll see.

I should also think of a name, I haven't found one yet, and then buy a domain (again) and change the current logo I use for testing. Aww, what a pain.

I haven't worked on any other projects, and that's bad because Project Churchyard is really not that ambitious. One thing I did though is to think of my blogs, this one and Metaphorink, and I decided I will sawp the content ! That's an annoying idea actually, because that means a lot of work ahead and I really don't feel like doing it. But I think this blog will be much easier to maintain in Tabulas than here. I'm really not in love with Blogger. Why don't they have categories ? That's what annoys me the most; categories would be very handy for such a blog. There's also the interface, which is pretty slow, why always those "republish your blog", why the heck can't it be all automatic ?

And here, in the create/edit post section, you can't even modify the date, or if you can, it's very well hidden. I think Tabulas has some major issues too, too many features make it very confusing to use for instance, but in the end I prefer it over Blogger. Though the real problem is, in my opinion, that neither of them are handy to use. Blogs are so popular and still the interface in both case is so awkward. Did I mention that the automatic bold text appear in a "span style=font-weight:bold;" tag instead of a plain "b" ?? They really like to use complex formula over here, ridiculous !