On the Issue of Updates...

Last month, May 2006, was one of the busiest months in my website's history for both updates and page traffic. I might not have even noticed if it hadn't been for a recent overhaul of the Geocities user interface that puts your site's page views right on the log-in screen. However, seeing those (by my standards, anyway) big numbers next to the newly updated pages on my modeling projects and my model combat warship gave me cause to look and see what attention other portions of my website have garnered. What I found was eye-opening: Most of my gaming and anime reviews have been looked at less than 10 times each, and all those hits were from right around the time the article was posted.

Now, this troubled me somewhat. These reviews are some of the most time-consuming updates that I do for the site. Games, especially the ones I tend to play, are so complex that in order to do a decent review I feel like I either wind up talking about nothing but the most general aspects of the game or dissecting it in detail. I get trapped between these extremes, neither of which are satisfactory as one says nothing at all and the other requires much more time to write than I have to devote to it. Thus, reviews are the most time consuming updates for me to create (which includes not only the actual writing of the article but also the formatting and posting). Unfortunately, the statistics page seems to tell me that when I write anime or video game reviews they are read by very few people, to the point that I am now questioning whether or not it is worth the effort to write them.

On top of this concern, timeliness has also become an issue. I am simply not up to getting a new game and putting a review of it on the website in a few days. Right now, I'm lucky if I can finish a game in a month or two! For example, I am currently working my way through the excellent Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance for the GameCube. This game came out last fall, I got it as a Christmas present, and now that it is June, I have actually gotten around to playing it. As my naval career heats up, I can only imagine this situation will go from bad, to worse. Admittedly, this issue is more of a concern for video game reviews than for anime reviews, as anime is much less tied to a fast-paced release schedule.

So where has all of this lead me? Well, I have said before on my About page that I'm not out to get enormous traffic for my site. However, I suppose that that's not entirely true; while I'm not out to get thousands of views per day or some such nonsense, I do want my website to be helpful to others who share my interests. When a page only got 5 or 6 hits, with the last hit months ago, it tells me that page isn't being very helpful! Thus. I think my major effort for the foreseeable future will be put towards documenting my model building efforts and my experiences with the warship club. The video game and anime sections aren't going anywhere, but most of the future updates to those sections will likely come in the form of articles rather than reviews.

By: Andy Rucker

If you wish to comment, feel free to email me! andyrucker@gmail.com