Monday - January 21, 2002
[Piro] - 01:31:22 - [link here]
It's late, it's been a long week (and a long weekend) so i have to keep this rant a little short - no time to write a long explanation of what's been up since we went down ten days ago. It's not ENTIRELY over yet, either - there might be a glitch or two this week, but hopefully everything should be smooth sailing from here on out.
In short, we had to change our hosting much sooner than we expected and were caught off guard. We were able to move the server fairly easily, but the server needed some repair, on both the hardware and software ends. I spent nine days working hard to reduce the bandwidth of all the elements on the site, catching as many errors and whatnot as i could. Largo busted his ass to get the forums upgraded and online (we will be adjusting the color scheme in the future to match other site revisions), and right now we are watching our bandwidth use with total horror - even after all the work i put into it (reducing most of the site by more than 1/2, 2/3 in most cases) the bandwidth we have been using since the archives went back up is... far more than we thought it would be. ugh.
With our hosting change, our hosting expenses have also gone up dramatically. We don't really know where it will settle out at, but we are keeping our fingers crossed. Before people start asking, we will NOT be asking for donations or having a paypal donation button - MT will survive like any other good property, based on it's ability to sell a reasonable amount of merchandise. If you would like to support MT, please visit our store and buy some swag :)
Oh, and if you are interested in advertizing on Megatokyo, please contact us.
As far as the comic itself goes - we felt that today's little gag was a good way to get back into the swing of things. Yes, we really did have a bad RAID controller. It's gone now. It won't hurt the server anymore. I have also taken the downtime to get ahead a tad, so you can look forward to the next installment of Chapter 2 to show up on Wednesday.
as always, thanks for all your support, patience, and kind emails regarding our recent downtime. Megatokyo is still strong as ever - and hey, these little blips are part of what makes MT real. It's flawed, it's not perfect, and neither are we.
but that's part of what makes us Piro and Largo. Unfortunately. :)
Friday - January 25, 2002
[Largo] - 13:33:00 - [link here]
Man… what a crazy ride…
First up, the most important news, Bioware and Interplay have settled their differences as outlined in this press release. Which means Neverwinter Nights now has a publisher again, and will soon be in my game starved hands.
What this means for megatokyo? Well more updates for starters – at lease until the game comes out, then Largo may disappear off the face of the earth for a few days, but never fear, I will return with treasures from the far off region of the sword coast, treasures such as screenshots! and… umm.. you know, important stuff.
Due to the recent downtime of the site, which was just frustrating on a multitude of levels, I’ve got a linkitage backlog I need to dump, so here goes.
[begin link spew 1.0]
Dave Kellet, one of our own webcomic brethren and author of Sheldon, has made good and hooked up the fine folks at United Media Syndicate. Now don’t worry because this isn’t the Syndicate[tm] with the cyborg implants, chain guns and trench coats. This is the friendly kind, that can publish you and sometimes even pay for your work. Sheldon is a great comic and so it’s well worth your time to click here.
Earlier in the month, I visited Ohayocon, and got stuck on the strangest of panels… unfortunately for me, Strangefour of the webcomic Beta, was in the audience and captured the event in this comic.
Normally, when I visit conventions, I get a little run down, having only our comic to talk about with fans, but for a change of pace – I was asked to host a website design panel, man was that a blast – I was able to spend an hour talking about the virtues of Apache, PERL, PHP4, and MySQL. I even got to sneak in some of my own personal rules to follow about how to design a good relational database… The audience was subjected to me drawing out the various tables and schema that make our site’s backend. ah… it was so refreshing…. I should give up my day job and just teach… hrm.. Great Teacher Largo…
Speaking of webcomics… Just Weird, which holds true to its name, felt that perhaps I should spend a bit more time answering my email, as shown here.
As Piro pointed out, we are doing more advertising on MT, and the rates are pretty affordable, even for just the average joe lynes to buy. We’re trying something a little new compared to most sites, and offering ad banner impressions at a reasonable cost, with discounts for higher volume. email here, for more details.
In my spare time… what little there is, I managed to help out our friends at PvP by settling up their forums this month. It’s good to see them back up, the PvP community seems glad to have them back.
I want to thank Magus of #megatokyo for doing some UBB debugging with me, and for working on a sweet stylesheet, which I’ll add to the list of available stylesheets in the forums later today.
All things considered, 2002 is looking really good for MegaTokyo, with a book in the works, a site redesign later this year, and some special projects lined up in the coming months – it looks like a very good year ahead… Indeed!
… or check into a psycho ward, whichever comes first.
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