Site History 2009
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December 4, 2009: So I've started two new programs under WeirdSpace. One is a database for looking up publications. I'm not going to focus much on the U.S. comics. Other sites have that part covered quite well. Danish and German comics however are not covered all that well, so in the spirit of adding something new to the Internet, that is where I've started. I just finished the first part of the Danish comics, getting basic info out there. Now comes the details. The German comics are only getting started. I've got the basic structure done and will presumably start uploading in a week or so. The second project is public domain stories. It's fairly new, and I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with that part of the site. Google and Project Gutenberg have the english publications covered quite well, but other languages like Danish are somewhat sparsely covered, so again, in the spirit of WeirdSpace, that is where I've started. It's still very new and I'm still working on making things look right.
September 13, 2009: Haven't had the time to work on the site like I usually do. After I did the Mr. Men characters, I wanted a break from those characters, but they are very popular, so I've started on the Little Miss series. Last time I added the characters as I got the pictures done, but it was very time consuming in regards to updating the existing bios. This time I've started with the basics on all the Little Miss characters and uploaded those. As I get the info and pictures I'll add this to the pages.
April 10, 2009: The drop down menus in IE turned out to be a major hassle. I liked the drop down menus and decided to make them for IE too. Here however it required a javascript. It took some time to get it right. The examples I found were making things much more difficult than they needed to be (spaghetti programming... jeez... why do they insist on doing that crap), so I needed to get them tweaked before implementation. When I did this, IE 8 hadn't been released, so at that point I could select between IE and javascript and CSS for all the other browsers. Easy, except if the IE users had javascript turned off, I needed a third version for those users. Gotta love Microsoft for making it easy for us programmers *sigh*. So, at that point I had three versions of the navigation, one for IE with javascript on, one for IE with javascript off and one for everyone else, which was more than 50% of the users.
While working on implementing this nightmare of a programming routine, IE 8 was released. This version of IE was sufficiently HTML compliant to be able to use the CSS version of the menu. Yay... except the required the rutine I was in the middle of implementing to be changed again. This time I started considering the difference between the number of users having javascript off and the number of those users using IE versions lower than 8. As it turned out it was 1 in 1000 users. In other words, very few users would be affected by no having the version of the menu for IE users with javascript off and as IE 8 would the implemented, the number would drop. This I could use. Removing 33% of the programming lines in the menu made it way easier to work with. It took a lot of time to get the menu implemented on all the pages, but it looks nice and it works fast and smooth... but what a nightmare to get it done.
The new menu system allowed for having links and logos in the menu pane and still look cool, so while I implemented the final version of the drop down menu, I also put in the random selection of publishers to be shown. Later I've also started adding a hard coded links and logos to the specific publishers or official sites for the characters, if they are still in business.
March 1, 2009: One of the few good things from the forum I had was the reviews, and obviously they vanished with the forum when I took it down. Now they are back. Not sure how to organize them, but at least now they are back, and I'll get back to writing them. Also I put back the link pages. Can't put my finger on what it is, but going back to basics feels like a good idea. A new feature on the site is drop-down menus. I had to work a bit on that one. It's a technical thing about CSS drop-down menus and IE6 not being able to use those, so I had to detect the browser and have a javascript to handle those visits. Other programmers have used this approach, it's how I found out about the problem and the solution, it's just not very beautiful from a programming point-of-view. Eventually as IE6 is phased out, I'll remove the script.
February 23, 2009: Back in December I tried changing the site layout to something more like a modern wiki-site. Google promply rewarded this with a sharp drop in visitors to almost none. Yay!... I have yet to understand why. I did succeed in getting the number of visits from Google up again for a while, but fumbling around like this is annoying a counter productive in regards to what I'm trying to do. So, new design once again.
January 14, 2009: Overhauls... gotta love them... I tried ShareThis, and the idea seemed like a really good one at them time. Almost no-one bookmarked pages, I think there were 3 or 4 bookmarks in all, and getting in to see the results was insanely slow, and at times I couldn't access the data. I'm sure for some sites it's a great idea, but for this site... What a waste of time and bandwidth. I also tried having a forum on the site. Quite a lot of viewers and spammers. No-one wanted to participate in any discussions, but the reviews had a lot of readers, and one of the daily chores was to remove spam. Out went the forum and I'll be adding a review section to the site. Accessing the forum was also a royal pain. The server was unstable and slow. I don't know what they are doing a IX Webhosting, but the server stability has really sucked in the time I've used them. According to Google Stats, the access time for my site has dropped around 50% by going back to One's servers, and the access time has become stable. That was not the case at IX. Speaking of Google Stats. New java script for the tracking code. Guess who has to change the codes on all the pages... I'm so happy... *sigh*
January 4, 2009: So... 2009... Wonder what will happen this year. I found one of the Mr. Men books this christmas (Mr. Clumsy). Quite a lot of fun to see those little guys again. Fætterfolket as they are called in Denmark is one of the funny ideas I remember from my childhood. They were never a big thing in Denmark, and today they are almost forgotten, but they made an impression on me, for some reason. I found some of the old cartoons on the Internet. Great stuff. Simple entertaining stories told with a British accent... Hilarious. I simply had to show the characters here on WeirdSpace, so I'm working on them right now.