Friday, July 28, 2006

Guru's Journey...
Guru's bow-legged meditations, atop an elderly peak, and sustained for two months, culminated in a dirt-and-grass-stained letter, air mailed by hawk. I crinkle it open and read:

Dear Adam:

Long I have thought; far I have seen. My site is dormant, a new host I must channel.

Sincerely,
GURU

I nodded silent, and went to work.

Thanks to Massin, we have a new backroom method of adding and editing quizzes. Thanks to Sangome, we're going to have a new quiz editor. The combination will lead to a firestorm of activity on guru.theOtaku.com.
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Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Hm...Rethinking theOtaku.com's Main Page
I'm thinking, what if we made theOtaku's main page simpler to emphasize network fandom and moved news/updates to another page. We could have headlines linked on the main page.
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Tuesday, July 25, 2006

Cleaner Thumbnails
Massin and I did some housecleaning the other night. We cleaned all the thumbnail layouts across all the sites. Time-consuming, but quite worthwhile.
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Saturday, July 22, 2006

Going Minimalistic
Right now our 'theOtaku' header and logo take up 170 pixels. WOW!

James is working on a revamped header that takes up only 50 pixels. You won't have as many options at the top (Anime Hubs, JukeBox) and it'll be much simpler, but with every page refresh you'll see more content without having to scroll.

After all, when you're browsing the site, you're not browsing the heading, you're browsing the content.
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Friday, July 21, 2006

Recruiting Season...
Going to need someone to take over Guru updates...this is a really tough/important task because:

(1) Guru is one of our most popular sites. It's also the most widely linked-to.

(2) There's a LOT of moving parts involved with approving a quiz. It requires:

- Solid English/writing
- An artistic eye
- Knowledge of HTML
- Extremely detail-oriented
- Strong anime knowledge

Ideally we can get Guru to the point where it gets submissions every single day.

And we don't have to make every quiz "What ___ Are You" - we could have trivia quizzes too. The new editor would have to lead that task, probably being a role model...

If you're interested, hit me up. If you've published quizzes on Guru before, you're already in the running.

Also saw two juicy cockroaches today. Would be distressed, but I'm moving in a week, so definitely not my problem :-).
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Thursday, July 20, 2006

Popularity Ranking
Noticed the backroom's main page was taking too long to load--isolated the problem as being the popularity ranking script. So I took it down for now...

Are there any parts of the site that always seem to load a little slower than everywhere else? Now's the time to share.
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Wednesday, July 19, 2006

Much Love
Everyone give Massin a round of applause :). If you don't know why, visit the wallpaper and ecard main pages.
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Tuesday, July 18, 2006

Art of Otaku Contest and T-Shirt Pricing
...Talk about a successful run thus far.

I don't know how the heck I'm going to decide which one wins, there are so many great/creative entries :-)

What I do know though is that this won't be the *last* such contest we have.

A lot of people have been clamoring for how much I'm going to charge for our upcoming T-Shirt...

I'm going to try my best. But the fabric/white ink we're using is expensive to print. And order fulfillment/shipping/merchant processing sits on top of that. I'd much rather give you a high quality shirt than something generic that costs a little less.

I could easily slash 20-30% of the cost by going with cheaper material/ink. But then it would fade quicker/not be comfortable/etc.

One thing I can say is that the price *will not* top $29.95 (shipping/fulfillment/taxes included). Consider that that highest possible value.

I'm going to do my best to bring it down from there though. And if you're an Art of Otaku customer, I'll try to pass along a small discount as well. Also, if you order more than one shirt, you'll only pay one shipping fee.

(Oh and people who opt for this will get a discount on all future stuff we do as well...)

Finally: Our mailing list didn't work, heh. I'm gonna have to find an alternate solution.
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Monday, July 17, 2006

Always Testing, Testing, Testing
Apparently putting a link in a top bar on every page of the site yields a pathetic # of actual clicks. I think people are so focused on the content of each page they just gloss over the stuff at the top.

That was one test I did. In case you're curious, a link at the top of every page is worth exactly 100 clicks. A link on the main page however in a news item is worth 2-3X more.

Then I tested whether a 'sign up' page that's full of text/benefits/etc. would convert people to sign up better than a simple page that shows me sad. The rate was about the same for both of them, so I kept the one that was more fun :).

I sent out a newsletter email today. But sending emails has become so unreliable of late. I'm sure probably 40-60% of recipients won't get it. These spam companies really ruin it for all legitimate people...

Let me know here if you received it!

I'm hoping to find a better service to host our newsletter...and somewhere that won't charge like $1,000 a month :-).

Oh, and if you visit the fan art site...we're back to 8 recent pics. Thanks Massin.
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Sunday, July 16, 2006

How to Get 24 Hour Advance Notice On Tees
Since we're doing a limited print run of these shirts, I really want our most interested visitors to get one.

Because they'll probably go quickly, I created a page that lets you sign up for advance notification of launch :-). So you get a 24-hour head start on it.

You don't have to sign up if you purchased Art of Otaku though...I'm giving all Art of Otaku readers super-advance notice...and will probably throw in a small discount.

Hope to see you there. ^_^

check it out

Also: If you auto-submit fan art, you can now preview and edit it before it goes live :-).
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