Friday, March 31, 2006

Trigun Reference Hidden Below
Read this wonderful feature article on GunXSword. Gail is the panda now, dawg.

Did you notice the images strewn throughout the article? I wrote some code that lets us insert them faster than Vash can down a box of Krispy Kremes. We have to keep our feature stories fresh; can't have paragraphs and paragraphs of straight text.

I was thinking about tags today. I'm really excited about them.
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Thursday, March 30, 2006

Caption Images?
Anyone want to comment here linking me to a good caption-ready absurd/funny anime image? Would save me a little time.

PS: Lots of amazing articles forthcoming.
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Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Lessons From This Week's Poll
I'm stunned. This week's poll was, by a huge margin, our most popular ever. Here are my guesses why:

(1) It's ridiculous, fresh, and entertaining

(2) It has to do with relationships

(3) It's slightly 'edgy'

(4) People really love their anime characters

You can obviously expect more silly polls in the future.

Would I date an anime character? No, but then again I'm not really in 'date anyone' mode.
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Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Adam Meets Accountant
I learned a lot about accounting today. Spent over an hour talking to a CPA I hired to file my taxes. I talked to him a lot about the site, Art of Otaku, etc.

What was the end result of our talk?

(1) We're going to incorporate. This has three purposes: First, it will allow me to save some money in taxes next year. Second, it will let me limit my liability, so if someone sues the network, I won't personally go bankrupt and have to sell all my anime/possessions/accrued souls of banned myO members. Third, it has a certain "professional" aura to it.

Velegant Media, LLC. here we come!

(2) I'm going to spend more energy on bookkeeping and will deduct many more expenses. This will help me grow things while also helping limit my tax burden.

All in all it was a fantastic talk. I've always been drawn more to the technology/marketing/editorial side of things than the accounting/financial side. And that's a shame because accounting can be fun if you do it well from the start.

In other news, the poll I posted on theOtaku is getting some surprising results...
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Monday, March 27, 2006

Adam Tackles Big Picture Issues
There are a few big-picture issues I've been thinking about lately regarding the network. To aid my thinking, I'm going to make a series of very long blog posts and ask for your feedback.

Here's the first such blog post. The topic is using TAGS versus CATEGORIES/HUBS. The next topic will be on how to handle fandom auto-submission.

Note: We could do tags on blog posts as well.

Enjoy!


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On Tags and Categories

One of the hallmarks of web 2.0 is the proliferation of “tags.” Tags are, simply enough, linked keywords on a person’s works or profile. For example, someone might upload a photograph and “tag” it with the following keywords:

Mountain, ocean, scenic, photosmart camera

Viewers of this work can then click on any of the keywords and be transported to a list of all photographs on the site that are also tagged with these keywords.

It’s pretty easy to see how we could use tags on our site. You could upload a Naruto fan art, for example, and tag it with:

Sasuke, Naruto, Fight, Yaoi

Then when someone views your fan art, they can click any tag and see all fan art on our site that’s also tagged with “Sasuke” or “Fight” or “Naruto” or “Yaoi.” Even better, we can then link all wallpapers, ecards, cosplay, etc. tagged with any of these words to the fan art piece.

Imagine being able to go to:

http://www.theotaku.com/tags/Sasuke

and seeing all our content that’s been tagged “sasuke” – pretty cool, eh?

Currently, we do let you search by keyword, which leads to roughly the same result. The advantage of tags though is that (1) It’s faster than search, (2) It takes the work out of thinking of what to search for, and (3) It can be universal across our site.

Tags can also allow grouping, so you could see what keywords are most popular.

Some sites even JUST use tags with no categories. And the thought did cross my mind for replacing our hub system with a purely tag-based system. After a lot of thought though, I’ve decided against this for two reasons:

(1) User Experience: With a tag-based system, we couldn’t offer an elegant browsing feature. No drop-down menu with all our categories, for example.

(2) Spelling Differences: People will inevitably tag the same anime or character with different spellings.

One person could tag a dragonball fan work with “dragonball,” another could type “dragon ball,” and a third still could type “dbz.” Thus, a user who wants to see all dragonball fan works would have a LOT of browsing to do to see everything.

Categories solve this problem because everyone submits works to a DragonBall category. Some people do mis-categorize, but by and large it’s a minority of works.

Categories though have some weaknesses of their own, as we’ve seen.

(1) “Miscellaneous” gets SWAMPED. Since there are a zillion smaller anime going into one category, the miscellaneous hub gets swamped with so many diverse works it becomes practically useless.

(2) Adding a new category going forward. If we want to add a new category, it’s really, really tedious to migrate works from the miscellaneous category to the new category.

It seems to me that the BEST way to approach categorization is through a two-way attack:

(1) Allow people to tag their works AND require them to submit to the necessary category.

(2) If their category isn’t listed, have yet another text field that says “Anime (if not listed)”

The second option could easily replace our “suggest a category” link. And it would be better since it would rely more on actual use than on people’s requests. The section would also make migrating fan works into new categories much easier.

Now, by default, older fan works won’t be tagged. And that sucks. We COULD run some insanely intensive queries to convert the description/titles/keywords across our site into tags, and while I have an idea in my head on how to do that, I’m terrified at the prospect. If something’s wrong in the code or query it could have dangerous consequences. Plus it would take forever to run. So that’s a consideration.

I know how to go about implementing tagging on the site. I know how to design the database tables and the queries. So that’s not a problem.

My final thoughts: Let’s do it!!!
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Sunday, March 26, 2006

The long-awaited hub update has arrived. What do you think?

Our handy dandy server guru took care of that annoying myOtaku error across the sites. It was a database issue.
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Friday, March 24, 2006

   Major Hub Update Forthcoming
I got struck by a flash of inspiration today and got started on some hub magic.

I'll be secretive, but it's going to be something a lot of otakuites have been asking for for a long time; I already did most of the work, there's just a little polish left.

Also, how about that caption news post? 77 comments so far. Not bad; but it can take a while to find a good picture. Anyone want to help me with that? Just one really good/funny/absurd picture a week.

Also started learning Japanese as I set out to do. It's amazing, learning new words is much easier than any other language I've learned because the 1,000+ hours of anime/Japanese films I've watched have made me recognize a lot of them.
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Thursday, March 23, 2006

   Looking Back
Check out this blog post from November.

When I wrote that post, our traffic had been declining month-over-month for most of 2005. This was my fault entirely; the network really took a back seat in my life and it showed. We sucked! We lost between 10-15% of our visitors, a ridiculous number given our traffic.

But when I wrote that post, I was determined to win back your trust and thankfully had some great editorial talent to back me up. I summoned the energy I had when I founded the network

In addition to the dozens of editorial and technological enhancements we've made, I'm pleased to report that we've won back *every single visitor* we lost and then some. Compared to when I wrote that blog post, our audience has grown 23%. March will be our best traffic month on record, so far a full 7% above February, which was our previous best month.

So how will we continue to grow? By a combination of big-picture initiatives and *constantly* fixing/enhancing the small things.

*Raises glass to our news team*
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Wednesday, March 22, 2006

So I've started learning how to play the piano at last. It's been fun, I'm having trouble pulling myself away from it!

Being able to play classic video game tunes is one of my motivating factors. I downloaded the sheet music to Legend of Zelda and am slowly pounding away at that (it'll take some time). I've also started seeing a professional instructor every so often (to anchor me).

Now here's a promise: When I can play it perfectly, I'll record and upload an mp3.
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Tuesday, March 21, 2006

   I was roped into writing another article for the advertising magazine today. The deadline is tomorrow morning and since the lighting in my apartment sucks, I trekked over to McDonalds do type it out on my laptop.

(I'd do it in Starbucks, but their lighting is even worse than my place!)

I do enjoy writing the occasional article though; it's a nice change of pace. I think writing for theOtaku has helped a LOT in that pursuit; and hope Gail, Dagger, and Lady Katana can say the same thing. ^_^

Here's a cool thing, using the new permalink technology, I can now link you to the most popular blog posts of the last 24 hours. They are:

http://www.myotaku.com/users/night_shade2/posts/717558
http://www.myotaku.com/users/devil_inside/posts/717712
http://www.myotaku.com/users/full_metal_hughes/posts/717715

Wow, that's a lot of comments per post.

(Also, happy first day of Spring / Persian New Years)
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