Monday, May 7, 2007

Survey Results So Far
...I'm SURROUNDED by adolescent girls...

Sigh.
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Sunday, May 6, 2007

Ouch!!!
I have these HUGE samurai Japanese cooking knives. I was cutting a loaf of bread with one and deeply cut my index finger on my left hand.

Needless to say it's severely impacted my ability to type. I never realized how important that finger is. Maybe someone's telling me to slow down :).
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Behind The Scenes
I don't think people realize how much work I do on stuff in the background :). Stuff related to planning, advertising management, finances, emails, Artpreneurship, Art Of Otaku: Sessions...

I worked today from 8 AM to 6 PM on the network and then from 10 PM to 1 AM.

That's 13 hours! Loved every second, though.

I wonder what we could accomplish if I took a break from work for 6 months and lived off my savings then worked obsessively every day. Hm..

On a final note, I especially loved this week's podcast. I think it was the best episode in a while.
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Friday, May 4, 2007

A Small Gift
Wallpaper artists can now caption their work. I think this is a great feature, since before now we've had no context on a person's wallpaper.

Also, captioning will add another tool in our ongoing battle against plagiarism. If someone doesn't really understand what plagiarism means and uploads a wallpaper, they might caption it "Found this on Google Image Search."

This took me about three hours to implement, since adding a new feature always requires modifying the code in multiple parts of the site (submission, approval, editing, etc.).

I hope you like it!
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Thursday, May 3, 2007

The Book Is Back
Art Of Otaku: The Book is back on sale. You'll see ads for it throughout the site. Sessions will take a while and anyone who buys the book will get a discount toward Sessions anyway :-).

Artpreneurship will release in probably 2 weeks...
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Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Guru Goal Met...
30 days in April and 30 quizzes approved for that month. Still have to judge entries. I typically cop out on judging and instead grab someone else for the task. Good luck to all contestants.
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Monday, April 30, 2007

24...
Maybe this will be a good excuse to start watching the TV series, 24?

I had a great time this weekend celebrating my birthday.

I went to a Japanese festival today in the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. I'm going to write a report for theOtaku about it, since there was anime/manga influences there.

I partied it up Saturday...

It's also James' birthday. It's probably the biggest coincidence in the world that we were born on the exact same day (and year).

Thanks to Hal (CosmicSailor) for being the first person on the site to wish me a Happy 24.
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Saturday, April 28, 2007

Right now I'm leaning toward making two optional upload fields in wallpapers when you submit: 1280 x 1024 and 1280 x 800. If you upload both then your wallpaper gets a small bit of text that says "high resolution" on the thumbnail pages.

A cropper tool wouldn't work, because then we'd have to force artists to upload a HUGE source file and cropping it would cut off much of the content.

Still thinking about it...

I also want to add captions to wallpapers. That's one reason I expanded the view page.

Lindsey, one of my favorite artists on theO, has published her first fan manga on our site. Check it out.
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Thursday, April 26, 2007

Wallpapers
There are a lot of differences now compared to when we launched the wallpapers site.

When we launched, a lot of people used 640 by 480 as a browser resolution. Now, absolutely no one does. Literally, the percentage is 0.15%(!).

Given this, I see absolutely no need to store 15 GB of 640 by 480 wallpapers, it's a waste of space. Thankfully 68% of people browse with 800x600 or 1024x768. However, that still leaves 1/3rd of our audience without properly sized wallpapers.

If we include 1280x1024 as a wallpaper size, we can increase compatibility from 68% to 80%. If we include 1280x800 we can get it to 90%.

One problem is that there are so many resolutions. There's 118 different screen resolutions that account for about 10% of our visitors. Should we accommodate a size that only 3% of people use?

Another problem with higher resolution wallpapers is that the sizes aren't proportional. I loved the 1024->800->640 combo because the artist could just upload one wallpaper and our system would resize it without distortion. We can't do this with the higher resolution sizes so the artist would have to upload multiple files. You have to draw a line though at the number of files you ask an artist to upload at once...

There's also a question on user experience. Let's say we offered 1280x800 wallpapers. We have 100,000 wallpapers now without that resolution, so if you're browsing, looking for 1280x800 wallpapers, how do we help you sort through it.

One question: How does Microsoft Vista handle wallpapers? Is it the same as XP - anything I should know?

On another note, James' design concept for a new version of theOtaku is complete. I'm excited about it, though implementation will certainly be a long-term challenge.
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Tuesday, April 24, 2007

What are some adventurous/"cool" things to do on a weekend?
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