Late Night Fiction Or is it?

31Aug/080

The Future

Now that I'm in college, things have been changing. Mostly old habits, but one thing that will change is my sites. And by that, of course, I mean FlashStuf. It's always been geared at my own age bracket, and a quick demographics report courtesy of quantcast.com confirmed that the teen crowd is really who my site attracts. Well, I think it's about time for a change so I'm starting to, continuing over the next few months/years, move up an age bracket into the "young adult" audience for FlashStuf and out of the teen audience. How I'm going to do that isn't quite obvious after only two days on my own, but that is the direction I'm headed in.

If you are a FlashStuf visitor or have some ideas that could really take us in this direction, just drop a comment.

16Aug/080

Outer Banks

I'll be heading to the Outer Banks today for the next week, so there won't be any updates to FlashStuf and probably no new posts either until I get back. However, as you might've noticed from my last post, I can make posts from my phone now; so if I come across anything worthwhile, you all shall be the first to know (or, second).

5Aug/080

Long time no see

Well, relatively long. If there was one thing that has been consuming my free time in the past few weeks or so, it'd be Futurama. I recently, er-- discovered --all 72 episodes so I've been spending what time I don't spend interacting with the outside world, watching Futurama.

But otherwise I've been gathering some much-needed energy to finally finish the next major release of my Easy Site Package. I'm aiming to have it done by mid-August, but if not it'll be September at the latest.

As for FlashStuf, I went wild on it today, fixing up the broken registration form (no new users for two months?-- OH!) and making a fully mobile version of FlashStuf Profiles, with a few fixes to the desktop site. However, I'm making yet another (hopefully the last) blog for FlashStuf.com and the development I do on it. It'll also be open to contributors, for the one day that we finally decide to expand. Anyways, it will be at blog.flashstuf.com, hopefully soon (once the subdomain finally clears-- I think 1and1 is having problems today).

10Jun/080

Currently

Now that I have a computer again I've gotten back to working on my Matt Baer Design CMS package. So, at the same time my focus is moving away from FlashStuf, unfortunately. I can develop it locally now as well (making it a lot easier and to make changes and add features), but it's becoming less of a priority as it's been developed enough to run by itself. Besides adding new things, the only thing needed to keep FlashStuf going is new content and new users. So really, that leaves me with taking care of adding any new content submitted manually.

It's also summer for me. I "officially" finished high school yesterday, and now I'm pretty much left to my own means until college in the fall. And being unemployed since the beginning of last week, well, I'd say I have all the time in the world to do all these things I do. So all in all, even though FlashStuf is moving towards the bottom of the to-do list, I'll have plenty of time to finish this package up to the status that FlashStuf is, at which point I can move back to what the "viewers" want, and get working on FlashStuf again.

26May/080

You know you’ve made it big…

...when your site comes up in the Google Suggestions search box in Firefox.

madeitbig

Aww yeeah. Add a "T" to that "flashs" and you get flashstuf.com as a suggestion too.

That's what I'm talkin' 'bout.

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8Mar/080

Cause and Effect

It seems nowadays that people don't always know how to follow the rules. Or rather, that there's a lack of respect for them. You could argue they were born not knowing those rules and they "don't know better;" or that they just never learned of or that there are consequences to certain actions. Or maybe they know of those consequences, but just decide that they're insignificant or they'll get to slide.

Whatever the case may be, it's a shame people see things this way in everyday life. I was listening to a country song yesterday; in it, one of the many lyrics "we don't lock our doors, when we leave the house" to which I responded "you don't live on the east coast"-- half-way just being funny but the other half being serious. Because although I've never had someone break into my house or steal something out of it (that was a lie, a worker who was building the extension on our house stole my mom's class ring that was sitting out), it happens everyday. Now, everyday in the sense that it is commonplace, as commonplace as say, teenagers getting into accidents. And at least to me, it just seems like there's an "I can get away with it" mentality among the masses.

Now by running an entertainment website, you basically open up a public playground. People can bring their children and sit and enjoy, socialize, see the scenery. Those children can also play among the equipment and enjoy hopping around and such. But it's not only the parents and small children that visit the playground, kids of all ages can. And being a playground, there is no supervisor to make sure you abide by the 4 feet or smaller rule. Anyone and everyone has free reign (until the cops get called, but that's later). Oh, and those cameras sitting idly by on the wall? Oh pay no attention.

31Aug/070

Simple Mistakes

I was going through my site today when I realized all the flash pages didn't show in Internet Explorer. I instantly knew what it was. Only because a week ago I was working on another site that wouldn't display a simple ad I created. Every time I had looked at my site I just figured it was Flash running slow. Turns out when I use the object tag, for the movie parameter you gotta specify the path as well as in the embed part. Luckily I had gone through that little run on the other site I was doing a week ago because I knew the problem instantly.

Thing is, the hits on FlashStuf have been steadily decreasing since right around the very beginning of January, when they were their highest. They were just falling for no apparent reason. When looking at my code of where the pages started going wrong, the very first incompatibly-coded page was made December 26. It all made sense.

This just shows how regular, constant testing is always necessary (though I'm usually pretty good about this). Especially when it's dealing with my site's main content. I must've lost tons of visitors because they figure most of the games and movies and stuff they came for isn't even showing up. Granted it was 63 pages that needed the change, but that's a huge deal considering my 150ish flash pages. Luckily I can attribute the hits-drop to that and some other reason I have no idea of. Basically, this has taught me a lesson. And I'm working on tons of other features for the site now that I know nothing big is broken (I won't be wasting my time).