Monday, August 20, 2007

Version Vibrant Notes:
Main question: What should we call Version Vibrant's premium subscription service?

Premium?
Pro?
Elite?
Social?
Plus?
Platinum?
Insiders?
Gold?

Can you think of other names?

* We were down much of today because I made the decision that a few hours of controlled downtime was far superior to the possible prospect of an Otakulypse down the road. It's equivalent to taking a painful shot to cure an illness

* I have a LOT going on now that I've returned. I'm pretty much doing all the development for Version Vibrant as well as obsessively micro managing the design and working on a ton of things on the business side

* Version Vibrant will be different layout wise than what we have now. I expect some people will love it and some people will hate it--at first--but then everyone will get used to it (as happens with every site's relaunch).

* Our premium service will launch alongside VV at a cost of $29.95 a year. There will also be the option to purchase a lifetime subscription. I'm aiming for 5-10 premium features for launch with more added down the line.

* Relaunches take an unbelievable amount of time. TheOtaku.com is made up of over two hundred pages that all must be redone or modified. I'm aiming for November

* Prepare to freak out this week. Hint: Remember how awesome the AnimeFF contest was? :-)
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Sunday, August 19, 2007

OMG, Adam's Back!
This is going to be a really, really fun week :-)
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Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Goodbye Friends
Well, I'm going to be gone awhile...I'm taking a family vacation to eastern Europe and won't return to the country until around the 18th of August. I have a long day tomorrow, with nearly 24 hours of transit.

All the bills are paid, all my tasks are covered, and there'll be plenty of main page activity to keep you entertained...

All: Please keep the fort defended

I'm taking along with me a huge notebook to plan further the details of Version Vibrant. Once I return, as promised, we'll have some more major, and I mean major, announcements

*Waves*
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Monday, July 30, 2007

Welcome, Gia!
As if she wasn't already nervous on starting tomorrow...
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Sunday, July 29, 2007

Philosophy Of Speed
Two notes and then a mini-essay:

Note #1: Your PM inbox should load MUCH faster now. Please tell me this is the case (it loads much faster for me, but I need more eyeballs to test).

Note #2: There's a major problem with how we're tracking myOtaku hits. If someone visited your site like 3 years ago and visits again, that person isn't counted. I think that most people will, rather than a total count of unique visitors, be more interested in seeing a raw count of daily and total views (like a hit counter). That way if the same 10 people visit their site every day, their counter won't be stuck at 10 forever. What do you think? In addition to making more sense logically, changing how we track hits will also reduce our server load dramatically

Now the essay...

The biggest lesson I've learned about our network's speed is that it's not a matter of buying more hardware, it's a matter of doing more, better with the hardware that we have

With a few clever programming tweaks and database optimization routines, we can make parts of the network that took forever to load previously load instantaneously. No amount of hardware can make poor code or a poor database structure fast

This leads to an important life lesson: If you feel like you're missing something one day, don't look externally. First, see if you can make due with what you already have. You're probably neglecting those few tweaks you can make to remedy the present

Another example: I'll sometimes look in the refrigerator and think "Ugh, nothing to eat, time to go out and buy groceries" only to realize a moment later "wait a second! I can come up with an innovative recipe with the few completely random ingredients I do have." That's how my spaghetti with soy sauce recipe was born...
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Saturday, July 28, 2007

Good News
I spent all day today reading about database optimization. It's ironic; I never liked computer science in high school but now that I need to know it to improve the network, I can spend hours on end just reading articles, typing code, and benchmarking.

As I mentioned earlier I want to make sure that our new version has the new features but with no loss in performance. A difficult task for anyone. I want the best technology, design, administration system, platform for advertisers, and editorial base.

Are comments and the comment manager much faster now? I worked on them today using some new tricks I learned.

On a final note, I hope I can convince the newest member of our family to start Monday :-).

Update: I forgot to upload the code for the faster comment manager last night. Can you try again?
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Friday, July 27, 2007

Need your help
When you're browsing theOtaku and myOtaku, some pages obviously will load faster than others

Do any pages really stick out for you as taking forever to load? I'm planning our next version's technical architecture and, with all the new features we have planned, I want to make sure things run quickly, even faster than now
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Heh, thank you all for your feedback on my previous post, the constructive and hostile alike

You have to understand that I seek the best for the network and deeply love all the sites we have or ever have had. It's so difficult to retire anything, seeing as how it takes me and the team so long to create, but someone has to make the hard decisions

It's not a matter of uniqueness or how we have so many gems in our cosplay sites, it's a matter of trying to survive until next year. The cosplay site needs a serious overhaul and on top of everything else with the new version, I just don't know if we have the resources for it.

Also, on a negative note for some, I've decided to delete all comments moving forward that make note of the articles site. It's spam at this point, really.
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Thursday, July 26, 2007

Ominous Note
There's a good chance that cosplay won't survive our next version...that's all.
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007

On Vacation Soon...
This is so ironic/fitting

As a few of you know, we launched MyOtaku on July 31st, 2003 almost 4 years ago - here was the frantic post I made on it

The day we launched it, I had a flight to Europe where I remained for 3 weeks, nervously checking in via internet cafes

On July 31st I'm going once again on vacation, once again for 3 weeks. When I return, then the fun begins with epic announcement after epic announcement
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