by Tarot on October 30th, 2009, 7:48 pm
This should probably be separate blog entries, but who cares? I remember talking to some of you about Google Pagerank - a number reflecting a page's relative importance in Google's eyes. Pagerank affects many things, including how high you are on search rankings, how often Google visits your site and updates its index. The value changes all the time, but Google reveals an older version of that number on its toolbar. This 'public' Pagerank is updated 3-4 times a year and is a number from 0 to 10. The update took place last night and Mizahar's front page jumped from 0 to 2. Basically, this means we now have more trust and relevance. Now, I have this love/hate relationship with google (I may talk about this in a future entry!), but it's nice to see a little recognition. I'd like to climb a little more too, before the next update around Jan-Feb 2010. Of course, getting more ranks is exponentially harder (even Facebook's home page is only PR 9), but I think 4 (or even 5) is manageable in the long run. You can help us by getting (honest) links to Miza from other (reputable) sites! Second thing... NaNoWriMo is starting in a couple days, and I've done very little planning. I have a few tentative titles, basic character concepts - I'm thinking the plot will be heavily character-driven - and some scenes, but everything else is blurry. Still, I'm really excited about starting my novel and I thought I'd share something to motivate you guys, as well. As mentioned, Amazon will be rewarding NaNoWriMo winners with a professionally-bound paperback proof of the novel through their CreateSpace self-publishing program. You even have a few... [ Continued ]
57 Comments
Viewed 58590 times
by Tarot on September 25th, 2009, 9:05 pm
As some of you may know, we have been running ad campaigns for Mizahar. Whoa, this guy must be crazy, spending money on something that's not making him a penny -- that's what I'd be thinking of myself if I were an outsider. Yes, Mizahar is a strictly no-profit activity. Most websites of its kind are stuffed with ads left and right, whereas we even removed our banner exchange after we noticed some obviously dishonest behavior - namely, the same barely active site showing up 90% of the time. We believe in providing the best possible experience to our users, not in scraping a few cents with some silly ad scheme. I know from past experience what happens when a guy makes a roleplaying site and then one day decides it's "only fair" for him to make a living off of it -- by lying big time about his traffic and costs to foreshadow site shutdown if his users don't pay him. (Why am I writing about two different scams in one paragraph? That's sad. ) So, Miza will never, ever go that way. Back to the ads, though. I believe in the Mastercard motto - there are things money can't buy (but a Mastercard can, apparently). The best thing about the internet and information technology in general is that it has opened avenues to ordinary people that were previously the domain of mega-corporations -- no wonder the latter now want it back. Single users can make professional music, publish high-quality movies, and influence the masses. And run ad campaigns. Mizahar's campaign costs about a coffee a day at most, sometimes less than that. I haven't been to the movies in 15 years (call it an allergy to the idiots who believe a movie deserves a running commentary. Theirs.) I can just pretend I went to watch one.... [ Continued ]
1 Comment
Viewed 24077 times
by Tarot on September 10th, 2009, 3:15 pm
Top 10 Google searches that returned pages from Mizahar this past week, courtesy of Google webmaster tools...
#1 site:mizahar.com #2 what does maseltoff mean #3 mizahar #4 what does maseltoff mean? #5 curse gnosis #6 gnosis curse #7 what does maseltoff #8 kelvic group #9 mizah coin #10 uldr
I am guilty of the entirety of #1 as I run it multiple times every day to check how many of our pages are on Google (they grow daily).
I do not think any of these surfers were looking for a play by post. We can gather a striking conclusion, though. The people rightfully demand to know who Maseltoff is, and we - not all those faceless corporate sites - have the Answer. Well, Colombina is probably the only one with the Answer, as she wrote the singular mention of a Maseltoff in our wiki.
115 Comments
Viewed 357216 times
by Tarot on August 27th, 2009, 7:53 am
Yes, we were all waiting for this moment with baited breath. Mizahar hits 1729 posts. This number, 1729, is utterly spectacular. Most people use numbers such as 1000 or 10000 as their milestones, but these numbers only actually look special in base 10. 1000 in base 10 is "1111101000" in base two. Really boring. If we didn't have ten fingers on our hands we would pay no heed to "a thousand", but we'd still respect the Hardy-Ramanujan number, 1729, "the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways". Let the celebration commence.
2 Comments
Viewed 46202 times
by Tarot on July 16th, 2009, 1:16 pm
So, phpBB has been updated to a new version, and they're already working on the next. It's at times like this that it really sucks to have such a heavily modified version running on one's site. Pretty much everything has been fiddled with - from the database schema to styles, visuals, permissions, and tons of other components. Some stuff (portal, help desk) I coded from scratch. One would hope this software had plugins that could be put in a folder and swapped in as needed. Ha ha ha. Naive. To "mod" phpBB means copying new files and manually editing code in others. Compared to products such as vBulletin, this approach is ugly and requires more familiarity with php (it IS called phpBB for a reason!) Of course, the upside is that phpBB is generally faster and slimmer than vBulletin (not to mention FREE! As in FREE BEER!), so I guess it's one of those "no free lunch" scenarios. Still, that means I can't just run their one-click update. Even though they have a smart update feature that's supposed to keep your custom code intact, you can never know what will break when you update, and where, until you stumble upon it. I think, for the time being, I will just manually install security updates and study the new features on a case by case basis. 3.0.5 didn't really add much, 3.0.6 will have Atom RSS feeds (though we could install a mod for that today) and more effective CAPTCHA (but our anti-spambot mod is doing a great job of keeping them away... we haven't had a single spambot since its installation). I guess this is just a part of the bigger problem of running a RPG site. It's got needs that are quite different from those of your average forum community. A help desk, easily accessible lore, quick account switch to let people play different characters, a plethora of bbcodes so players can express themselves artistically in their writing, and so on. If you come from another play-by-post, a lot of the features you may take for granted are not included in... [ Continued ]
1 Comment
Viewed 24236 times
|