Changing Focus

I have decided to expand this blog to focus on more than just one project. This is going to be about all my web projects, and just what is involved in being a web developer, designer, and administrator.

New Design

After a whole year, I finally redesigned blog-stalk. I was reluctant to do it, but I was making significant improvements to the code while developing a new site with the same code base, and I wanted some of those enhancements on blog-stalk. Although I like the new look more, I was primarily hesitant to revise blog-stalk's look, because I knew that there would be some resistance from members, and I wanted more diversity when showing my portfolio to clients. Having two nearly identical sites really counts as one when clients look at my work.

I released a screen shot several days ago, and I was surprised by the positive responses. I did not get a single complaint until the actual update was released. Two members objected. They claim that it strains their eyes. I'm not really sure if it's their monitor settings, or if they are just trying to justify a purely psychological reaction by claiming a physiological basis. The majority of members liked the revised look. I compromised a bit by lowering the contrast, but now everything looks dull to me. For the new site that I am working on, I am retaining the high contrast.

CMS Garbage

While developing my latest site, I was reminded of why I had to code blog-stalk entirely from scratch. Joomla is garbage and Drupal is only borderline practical for what I wanted. If they had worked better, I might not have needed to do so much coding. It was a good learning experience. I may some day make my own CMS based on the blog-stalk code base.

First Anniversary

Blog-stalk was launched a year ago, but I'm not really in the mood to celebrate. I wonder if it will last another year. I always feel like it's on the verge of dying, but random flurries of activity seem to always happen.

I am currently focusing on other web projects. I'm developing a new site for my internet show and animations. I am also beginning to develop Facebook games. I am not abandoning blog-stalk, but I have become less enthusiastic about it.

Facebook patents the news feed

I'm glad that I procrastinated with this one. I had been planning to provide a consolidated list of blog posts, comments, and photo updates into a single list. That would infringe on Facebook's patent. My site probably already infringes on numerous other patents despite the fact that I created it entirely from scratch. This should not be a problem at all while my site remains small, but I had plans to expand some day.

Crisis

Four days before the 6 month anniversary of the start of beta testing, I had to delete a user account for the first time ever. It was a user who frequently deleted accounts and returned a few weeks later on other sites, but she had refrained from total abandonment of my site. She was an early adopter who joined on the first day of launch and was the most active member throughout most the the nearly 6 month period.

The next day, a friend of hers saw the public dialog preceding the account deletion, which had been a non-confrontational discussion about deletion. This friend then became extremely upset about the fact that I had not yet implemented a system for automatic account deletion. Under the current system, I have to manually delete an account if a user requests a deletion. It made sense in term of prioritization to not develop code for this yet. There are far more important things to develop on this site than features for soon to be non-members. It wasn't as if I had been overwhelmed by requests for deletion. It was in fact the first one ever.

This disgruntled user has declared a boycott of my site until I implement a feature for deletion of accounts. This poses a number of potential problems.

1) This is currently the most active user, which means a boycott by her alone will significantly impact the site.
2) It is possible that her friends will join in the boycott or leave entirely, although they sided with me in the public debate on this issue. Despite agreeing with me in principle, they may lose interest in the site if she is absent, due to the social nature of the site.
3) Allowing any single user to hijack site development priorities sets a terrible precedent. Others may use similar tactics in the future. Nothing good will come out of allowing this.

The boycott strategy itself is somewhat flawed. There are members of the site who definitely would not join her in the boycott. Although site activity will be reduced, it wouldn't really be a punishment for me. In fact, it's somewhat opposite, because someone who would publicly malign the site would be absent. Furthermore, a boycott would compel me to accelerate development of other site features, ones that will more likely bring in new members, rather than the one that she seeks to compel me to create.

New Realization

Women who don't join my site are not truly interested in me. Regardless of what they say or do, they are definitely not serious about a relationship with me if they don't join my site. It's a matter of being interested in me as a person. My site is something that I created and have an interest in. If a woman doesn't have an interest in my site, that implies a lack of interest in me.

I should have been aware of this much earlier. When I like a woman, I want to know absolutely everything about her. I want to immerse myself completely in everything about her. I have recently had a few interactions with women who claimed to be in love with me, but they wouldn't join my site or even look at it regularly. One turned out to be only interested in sex while pretending to be interested in more. The other wasn't interested in me at all. She just wanted some attention.