Monday, October 22, 2007

   I like ComiPress - what other anime/manga/otaku news site would report on our 7th anniversary?
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Sunday, October 21, 2007

Milkycat, one of our original Art Of Otaku artists, vents that her original works of an art don't receive much attention on the site. I think this is an important issue; how do we give people's art more attention, so they don't get lost in the crowd?

The cause of the problem are simple:
(1) We have a ton of original art that comes in every day - 56 works yesterday. Compare this to 20 for Naruto, our most popular section. This means each work gets a little less attention

(2) People who are fans of anime are generally fans of specific series so when they hit the fan art site, they jump to those series directly, bypassing the original works

How do we solve it, though?

I can already confirm that we're going to have a bigger link to Original Anime art on Version Vibrant. That's a start.

But what else could we do?
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Saturday, October 20, 2007

They Grow Up So Fast
theOtaku has turned 7...

I can say two things about theOtaku that I'm most proud of, in terms of building it:

(1) We've grown where we are through honest, obsessive work. No one ever handed us anything on a silver platter, we've had to fight to go from 10 people a day to 20 people to 200 to 2,000 to 20,000 to currently 35,000 - 40,000. That's really the only formula to success, in my mind, is to be willing to obsess and work harder for a longer period of time than anyone else.

(2) We've always maintained the highest levels of integrity. We've never run pop up ads, we've never run spyware ads, we've never run between-page ads, and we only allow reputable companies to advertise with us. Compared to sites like IGN we hardly run any advertising at all, in fact. In addition, even while so many sites have exploded in popularity by offering, at profit to themselves, fansub downloads, we remain dedicated to helping the anime industry versus leeching off of it.
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Friday, October 19, 2007

I'm pointing my webcam to the ceiling. Even though it's off, it just feels odd to have the lens pointed at me. Take that, wannabe webcam hackers...
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Thursday, October 18, 2007

I found a service that lets you stream live video anywhere online. I just installed a webcam, so the possibilities are endless:

(1) Recording panels and streaming them live (maybe our panel?)
(2) Lectures
(3) Live Ask _____
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Wednesday, October 17, 2007

My simple vision for Version Vibrant's new main page:

Keep the anime news the same, cover pertinent gaming news more often, mix it up with a lot more content from around the network, and do more fun features, ala my Adult Swim 0wnage
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Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The more time I spend improving and refining Version Vibrant, the uglier theOtaku and myOtaku look :-)

Good sign, right?

As with all new designs, they grow on you over time.
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Monday, October 15, 2007

Top Searches on theOtaku
Out of curiosity, I ran some statistics on what people browsing theOtaku search for in that little search box at the top. Here are the top 11 results:

(1) Naruto
(2) Bleach
(3) (Don't type anything, just leave it blank)
(4) Sasuke
(5) Death Note (wow!)
(6) Inuyasha
(7) Gaara
(8) Love
(9) Akatsuki
(10) Kingdom Hearts
(11) Yaoi

It's funny that Gaara and Love are #7 and #8 because those are the two search terms I recommend as examples to people who search for something and get no results.
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Sunday, October 14, 2007

theOtaku And myOtaku Are Engaged For Marriage...
Some might be surprised, others not, but I'd like to say that theOtaku and myOtaku will finally merge in Version Vibrant.

The separation we have now is awkward and only exists because I had a different vision for how myOtaku would work than ultimately happened. I've been wanting to merge the two for years

Anyway, your site will still exist at myOtaku.com/yourname BUT I also want to make a theOtaku equivalent and, when we link internally, reference that

theOtaku.com/pages/yourname?
theOtaku.com/spaces/yourname?
theOtaku.com/blogs/yourname?
yourname.theOtaku.com?

I kind of like 'spaces' - but I'm open to other ideas
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Saturday, October 13, 2007

How spammers almost ruined theOtaku
It was odd, I was walking home the other day and a thought leapt in my head: "Maybe I should double check the backup system we have in place on theOtaku"

So I came home and emailed our ISP and said "Hello! Just wanted to check to see that all systems are going fine with regard to our backup infrastructure"

Then I hear the bad news: "Uh...it looks like nothing has been backed up since August 2006"

"What?! You mean if the site had crashed since August 2006 we would have lost everything?"

"Yes..."

So I went to immediate, urgent work on re-backing the site up. But a problem: Every time the backup would start, it would crash moments later

What was going on?

After investigating, we found the issue: spam!

Lots and lots and lots of spam. Spammers were overloading our server with junk/viagra/porn emails. Almost 30 GB of it (the size of 10 filled-the-brim gmail accounts)

The backup wasn't working because there was so many emails, hundreds of thousands of them that it couldn't keep up.

So we deleted it all and the backup is currently in progress and should be done by tomorrow.

What a day...
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