Pleasing the masses

Some of you have been understandably slightly miffed at the generally poor relaunch of the site: admittedly, I am too, so I feel your pain. The reason for the shitness can be placed down to my current distractions with other things – namely, A-levels and such, though some of you might see my wish to place emphasis on the wonderful thing called life as unforgiveable.

As such, however, I will be making an effort to get the site back to its former glory. How? Over the next 3 days I’ll be sorting out a proper update schedule and working on content in advance once more in order to get back into the swing of things and actually kick myself in order to churn stuff out.

The new update schedule will be posted next Monday, when it begins to take effect. The next 3 days will be uneventful for the site – expect no updates while I work at getting stuff done. It’s not ideal, and means that temporarily the lacklustre relaunch becomes more crap, but it is for the greater good.

Info dump

Here’s more information you may or may not care about! This time, it regards our brand new comic series, The Biased (which hasn’t been as successful yet as our Halo-themed Boring Comics, but it’s early days yet). For more information about the site not related to The Biased, scroll down a ways.

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Anyone who’s reading The Biased will notice that it comes in a wonderful chaptered format. You may, then, be wondering just how many chapters, and/or how many pages per chapter there will be in the story that I’m aiming to tell in The Biased.

I don’t know exact numbers yet because I haven’t written ahead far enough to be sure, but at the moment I’m estimating between 6 and 8 chapters to the story. It may be more and it may be less, but that’s the ballpark figure you can expect. Pages per chapter-wise, I can’t tell you; that’s going to vary on a chapter-by-chapter basis unfortunately. Originally I had expected chapter 1 would be 10 pages, but so far it looks like it will be more than that. So it’s anyone’s guess for now.

What that does mean it that, given the current update schedule, unless I ramp up or slow down production on The Biased, the storyline will likely take around 8 months to a year to tell. That’s a long time, even with regular updates, but I don’t see a change in the rate of production, especially while I’ve got a job. If the website gets profitable, and then gets profitable enough for me to be earning over £15k a year from it, sure, I’ll drop the job and work solely on the site. At the moment though, it’s still in the red (or black, whichever it is when you’ve spent more than you’ve earnt).

Anyone that does take note of site features, though, will notice there’s been a tendency of late for longer-term projects; Twist’s release run won’t be finished until around February 2009, the A-Z of Why the Internet is Shit won’t end until early 2009, the Boring Comics storyline has been going since July now and won’t finish until sometime in October probably (or later). Hm…

For anyone wondering if I’ll do a machinima based around The Biased, the answer is a vague ’stay tuned’.

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Concerning the rest of the site, there are some new things coming in October which I might have held off to the Winter update, but compiling a list of things I want to add, I’ll be snowed under when December comes. Expect a new section of articles (probably), a mailing list and possibly RSS feeds – though the feeds will probably be held until December to be released with the CSS version of the site.

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Real life-wise, nothing much new to post. I’m selling another Amazon voucher, so if you want that, head over to here to stand a chance at grabbing it. The voucher’s value is £10 but it’s going for £9.50 at the moment with two bids, so you’re making a 5% saving by buying it. Auction has 1 day left!

The onset of Autumn

I’ve now got a job, which I’ve been working since Monday, and so you’re not really seeing a massive amount of blogposts anymore. The reason being is that I am exceptionally busy; so busy, in fact, with work and structuring my daily exercise, that I get up at 6am and don’t finish everything typically until almost 7pm. As such, as of last weekend I’m now working on all site content a week in advance, and so as of writing this, all the written content for next week has been sorted and finalised, and hopefully more visual content will be sorted out today and over the weekend.

September’s hits, so far, have been … fucking atrocious. Seriously. At the rate September is going, it’ll be lucky to hit 4,000 hits. Which is a bit weird really, considering we’ve now got meta tags everywhere so more people are likely to randomly stumble across us, but oh well, c’est la vie. I’ll be working on advertising and such when I can be fucked. Woo for a weird reader-base that seems to come and go!

I haven’t yet looked at anything for doing a CSS-based website, but plan to this weekend. I may even put up test pages at some point which some viewers will be able to see via some means. I won’t go into that in too much detail yet, as it’s all preliminary plans for a new feature coming before the Winter update (which I will begin to elaborate on in October), but if you’re interested you will be able to see mock-ups of the new site – which will undoubtedly be redesigned due to the wealth of new features I will have.

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Autumn is here, and walking home from work I’m starting to see leaves everywhere. There aren’t a whole lot yet; the coverage is less of a blanket than a light peppering, but it’s nice to see and the Autumn days with reasonable weather are something I’m looking forward to. The smell of the air is nice too – now I’m in the downstairs bedroom, I’ve got the backdoor open to smell it. It’s awesome! But also mildly chilly, and as I know from doing my jogging at 6am, it’s cold this time of year and getting colder.

The onset of Autumn also means the upcoming onset on Winter, and that means Christmas, which is a fucking awesome time of year even if you discount the presents and just think about the atmosphere, the decorations, the lights and all the fantastic plasticky fake fir trees and such you see everywhere.

Presents are nice too, obviously, though.

The Update is Upon Us

Or, it is if you’re not reading this between when it’s posted and I upload the new stuff. So, if you’ve happened upon the blog and there’s nothing on the site to say the Fall update is here (you’ll know when because the index and recent updates pages will have big bold messages), go away for now and come back later.

The last part of the Fall update process took a bit of slogging through, as I had to work on a bunch of content for the new sections – Not-So-Nice Nursery Rhymes, and The Biased (though The Biased has been up since mid-last week for feedback from HBO users). As such, a few features I’d hoped to include in the Fall update – a better way to browse Media entries, and a contact form to replace the current e-mail option – haven’t shown up yet. The Media browse page should hopefully come at some point this month as a staggered part of the update, and a contact form will become part of the upcoming Winter update – which will ideally be mainly focussed on re-releasing the website in CSS format.

For anyone interested on that front, I’m hoping to rebuild the website once a year, around Winter, in more and more advanced levels of code. Currently we’re sitting in comfortable old HTML, though a CSS version of the website is coming in December with any luck, and hopefully something higher level next year. Similarly, next year I hope to release a version of the website designed specifically for mobiles and other such handheld devices. More news on that in early 2009 though.

Concerning back-end things; meta tags are now in place on most of the webpages to improve finding the site on search engines, though it’s not true for all yet; chapters of novels still need to be updated to include tags, as I left this today as there’s fucking millions of the things.

The Fall Update

The Fall update, which has been spoken about at your uncaring eyes and ears, will be released on Monday in its fantastic entirety. That’s the 8th of September; for all those unaware of dates and how the progression of time functions.

Because I’m so nice, here’s a quick list of changes coming in the update, in bullet-point format to avoid elaboration:

• New update schedule
• New comic ‘The Biased’ set in Halo universe
• New integrated chat
• New section in fiction ‘Not-So-Nice Nursery Rhymes’
• Fixed header and ads on Pixelated Anne pages
• Discontinued Reviews section

All these wonderful changes will be fully detailed in a page telling you just what’s come to the site in the form of this hideous and yet wonderful update.

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X-Con, for those of you interested in getting it, is not actually here. Apparently it’s coming out tomorrow. If any of you are disappointed at this news, let me know and I’ll inform you of Stuart’s e-mail address and you can lynch him via electronic mail.

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I’m currently running some auctions on eBay; 2 for my mum, 1 for me. So, if you’re at all interested in Lladro ornaments of girls or swans, look no further than my mum’s auctions, linked back there. If, however, you want to score a £30 Amazon voucher for less than £30 (currently you’ll have to bid £29 on it), click here.

Site stuff, then real life stuff

First and foremost, I forgot to talk about this previously when I discussed upcoming site updates; when I update the site in CSS in December – assuming I do, as I hope to be able to – I will be implementing skins next year, which will be very nice and lovely if you don’t like the current design but would like me to do a tonne of work on alternate designs just to make you feel happy and such.

The September update will also see some ad pages thrown into the mix. There won’t be too many, but I’ll be adding them in various hotspots just between pages, to help get some attention and cover hosting fees – though my AdSense stuff has served over 13,000 page views, the click-through rate is 0.11%; thus I have currently accrued less than $4. This does not cover the $10ish (£4.99) monthly hosting fee. Thankfully, I will bless you with text very big and obvious that will allow you to skip ads to head to the content you’re wanting.

September will also see a brand new, more serious comic series, and will likely separate most of the Halo-themed comics from the Boring Comics series. No update schedule yet, but I’m working on the story and I think two updates per week will be likely. It will reduce Boring Comics to a once-per-week update cycle, though I may add an extra day for the comic so production doesn’t slow down horribly on the middle child.

Also; as I said, July got over 4,800 hits in total. August, in its first 20 days, has matched this and so I expect to surpass 6,000 hits this month.

In reference to yesterday’s post; I was told by the owner of HBO, the site featured in Boring Comics #13, that he found it funny, so though Monday’s offering did not please, Wednesday’s offering got a laugh from the man, so at that, I am pleased with myself. The Wednesday comic, perhaps in light of a positive remark from HBO’s Louis Wu, is now this month’s most viewed in a single day, too, so I now know I can either write crap or write gold to draw in views, though nothing in between. Oddly, this is not helpful.

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Just lately I wish I hadn’t adopted the Xbox 360 when I did.

Obviously, I love the console and though it has seen a red ring of death and had to be replaced by the wonderfully quick Microsoft staff, it’s one of my favourites things. It’s given me hours of fun over my host of games, provided me a fantastic Xbox Live experience far surpassing that of the original Xbox and a tonne of great features.

Still, when I bought it, it was £279.99 – though I got it in a £299.99 deal with two games and an extra controller (which broke earlier this year, incidentally) – and was, as I bought it at the end of 2006, the 20GB model lacking a HDMI port.

Nowadays, you can snag an Elite – a better looking black version of the 360 for less than this, and it not only has an HDMI port, but a hard drive six times bigger than my own. Not only that, but you can get the model I own, albeit with the added HDMI port, and now a 60GB hard drive for £179.99. This is £100 less than what I paid, and it is a substantially better deal, both due to decreased cost and spectacular improvements.

This, of course, does not affect you, as you don’t care that I’m jealous of all the people buying 360s right now and heading into the future. I just wanted to complain.

I downloaded the ten-day trial of World of Warcraft after almost two years of delaying it. I, unfortunately, like it, though I’m hoping I get bored by the end of the trial, as I’d rather not spend £8.99 a month on a game that I may become hopelessly addicted to as so many others have. I’ll post my server at some point, and if you don’t mind hanging with a low-level character (currently I’m level 7) in Goldshire or areas around there, post a comment and I’ll hook you up with my details.

My Sea Monkeys tank arrived yesterday, and in roughly eight hours I’ll be putting the eggs in. So that’s cool. Tsubasa Chronicle volume 4 didn’t arrive, though, so I’m hoping the bastard shows up today. If you would like to please me, feel free to check out my Amazon wishlist, where you could, if you are so kind, snag me a copy of volume 5 of Tsubasa Chronicle, thus stopping me from having to wait a month or so before I buy it. You can also buy me a copy of the first volume of Great Teacher Onizuka, which I’m told is funny, or perhaps even a copy of Tomb Raider: Anniversary on the 360 for me to play after I’ve puzzled my way through Tomb Raider: Legend.

Alternatively, if you don’t like buying things for other people but you do like buying things for yourself, look no further than the Boring Internet store, where you can currently score yourself a pillow depicting the Queen’s true identity, or a wonderful set of coasters topped with the happiest seagull in the world.

This post has a fucking tonne of tags.

Upcoming site updates, stats

In case the title did not deter you, this blogpost concerns site updates; if you are hoping for news on the things I have acquired as of late in real life, check back another day.

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Starting September this year, in addition to the daily updates I do for the site, I will also be doing seasonal updates to overhaul various things and keep the site clean. The first of these, the September 2008 update – the Fall update, we shall refer to it – will be released around the first or second week of September.

So what will this update include? Well, not a great deal as there’s not millions and millions of things on the site that need addressing yet. However, here are the couple of things you can expect:

The Pixelated Anne pages will all be updated; these have incorrect headers (from the original code when I built the website, when I didn’t bother with a proper site header but instead a teaser-style shitfest) and two more ads per page than other pages. Anyone that saw the thesecretsauce page that came online the weekend before the site went live will know that originally there were sevral extra ads on each page, though these were removed due to horrible load times. However, as the Pixelated Anne pages were uploaded in advance the week before the new site went live, they were not updated.

The Chat function is something I’ve hated since I released the new site update, but because I promised it, I kept it in. I don’t like the non-integratedness of it, though, so I am hoping to replace this with a Flash-based chat integrated into the site design. I’m hoping for one, also, that you won’t have to sign up on, and can instead just jump in.

The Reviews section will be ‘quietly’ discontinued in September to be replaced with another version of it at some point. The reviews present were written from a marketplace review site, not for this, so they come off stilted compared to the majority of the content on the site. At some point I will have further news on the updated version of the Reviews section, but it won’t be back until December at the earliest.

The Fiction: Silly Poems section will start a release cycle of Not-So-Nice Nursery Rhymes every Saturday, in addition to the existing update. This is both because it’s something I find quite interesting (and sadistic) and because at the moment I see weekends as weaker updates; the Saturday content has existed for months and is just released for the small number of readers the novel has, and the Sunday content is not my own, merely scraped up from around the net.

As for future updates; I’m hoping that, by December 2008, I can release a rewritten version of the site in CSS to reduce load-times and begin possibly laying down code for an ARG (alternate reality game) called Who Killed Tobias Stanhope? which, ideally, will crop up by this time next year.

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The site has been open since April, and so I figured I’d post some of the stats for the first four months of activity. These below are unique visits per month, then an average per day in brackets.

April 2008: 1831 (61.03)

May 2008: 695 (22.42)

June 2008: 1321 (44.03)

July 2008: 4803 (154.94)

From now on, I will release monthly hit stats in this blog.