Joe Majewski

Minor Update

Now that it’s summer vacation, I have a lot more free time aside from work and web programming. I tend to play a lot of videogames, and although I haven’t purchased anything in quite some time, I should have no problems finding things to keep me entertained, as my backlog is rather large.

Final Fantasy 13 has nearly 110 hours clocked, and I’ve got only a single mission yet to complete. I’ve also been playing Final Fantasy 4 and Final Fantasy 10, and recently got my Final Fantasy 11 Online account reactivated. Thus, in terms of Final Fantasy games, I am completely “booked”.

Other than that, I also still need to complete Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story, Demon’s Souls, Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, Grand Theft Auto IV, Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Final Fantasy X-2, Fallout 3, Diablo 2, Zelda (both Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks), Pokemon Platinum, and Kingdom Hearts 358/2 Days.

I’m sure there are many more games on my “to do” list, but there’s no reason for my readers to know my entire catalog, is there? It’s been about a month since my last entry, which I can attribute to some financial issues which I recently began dealing with. Starting now, my time online should increase drastically, as will the time I spend working on my new browser-based RPG game.

So for those of you wondering what happened to the author, here I am, and all is well. Expect lots of relevant content to come, and business as usual shall proceed.

Now that summer vacation has begun, what games do you intend on playing? Not a gamer, then what summer projects do you have planned? Comment below and leave a synopsis of your summer-to-come.

Thanks for your continued support, friends!

This Blog is Now Above Average

I’ll keep this one short. I remember reading somewhere awhile back that the average blog achieves 48 articles before being abandoned. I would like to proudly announce, that with the inclusion of this post, I have now written a total of 50 articles on this WordPress blog.

That’s right. I rarely decide to make a blog post that isn’t very informative, but this special milestone deserves the attention. I might as well toss some other statistics into the mix while on the topic:

This blog has amassed 50 posts, 2 pages, 18 categories and 47 tags. Only 28 comments have been approved, while about 1,000 have been submitted; that’s a lot of spam. The WordPress installation was made about six months ago (at the end of October, 2009), so that’s an average of one blog post every three or four days since launch.

This blog has been receiving between 30 and 50 unique visitors per day in the past couple weeks, but prior to the recent spike, it usually receives around 10 unique visitors each day. This can be attributed to my addiction to Final Fantasy 13 on the PlayStation 3, and the half-dozen articles that I’ve made regarding the game. My Final Fantasy articles have been receiving a lot of traffic, but I can only assume that it is a temporary boost that will return to normal once the game has been out for a couple months.

Six months and 50 posts later, and here I am. It’s exciting to know that I’m now above the curve, as I worked very hard on this blog in the last six months, and it’s finally paying off. Most days I’ll come up with something to write about that I have to research a little bit, but today has been a celebration of an important milestone. Cheers!

Surprise! Arena 2.0 is in Development

Here’s to a new project in the works, which many are sure to be excited about. I can’t reveal too much information right now, but this installment will be written from the ground up and will be very different from the Arena that many readers are familiar with.

I’m will not be the sole creator of this game. It is being designed by Jon Hemstreet, a co-worker of mine, and programmed by yours truly. I will provide much more information in the coming weeks as things develop, but I wanted to drop this bomb to remind you that Arena is NOT over.

Questions, comments, inquiries? Leave a comment below.

How to Increase Member Activity and Community Size on a Website

Back in the day when I was first learning how to use PHP and MySQL, I decided that I wanted to use these skills to create a browser-based RPG much like Kings of Chaos, X-Kings, or the countless other games of similar nature. My installment was titled The Arena, and it was the single most successful game that I have ever created to this day.

The objective of this game was to build an army of soldiers and increase your stats to gain a high rank in the leaderboard. This game grew in size and became bigger than I could have ever hoped for; it was not unusual for there to be 40 people online during it’s peak times. So how does a developer cause a community to grow to such capacities? Here’s the trick…

The reason that this game became so popular was due to a little programmer’s trick known as the infamous referral bonus. I’m sure most readers already know what I’m talking about; a referral bonus gives users an incentive to invite other people to a website. When users would refer someone to the Arena, they would gain units to their army and gold (the game’s currency). In addition, if the person referred was an active member, they would naturally gain more units due to the player’s activity.

When developing a website, it is extremely important to give user’s some sort of an incentive to stay and invite others. For example, if you run a forum, members will be more likely to come back if you log the number of posts that they make. Users like to see numbers that show how much time they have spent on a given website. The more statistics you log, the better. Perhaps you could give users the ability to edit their posts after they achieve a certain postcount milestone.

Creating a leaderboard is also a handy trick to increase activity on your site. People enjoy seeing how they stack up against other members of a site. If you cater to your members, they will reward you by coming back to your website.

Keep that in mind, and happy developing!

My Journey as a Webmaster (Part Three)

[ Part One ] [ Part Two ] [ Part Three ]

The Birth of NFreak.net

For quite some time things were going great; better than I ever could have imagined. Traffic to my website was constantly on the rise, and I had even developed a small user base of my own; people who would come to my website on a daily basis to socialize. Little did I know that struggles were on the horizon.

The three gigabytes of bandwidth that I was allowed each month started to develop into a huge issue. The first time that it maxed out, people were prevented from coming to my website for almost a full week. This was extremely stressful, as I wanted to ensure that everyone would continue to return, and taking someone away from something for a full week can make them lose interest. Not only that, but I also didn’t want the potential of my website to be limited by bandwidth issues.

But alas, so came the first of the month and I was back in business. I became more and more alert of my precious bandwidth, and I was able to estimate what day of the month that it would go down. This process continued for about two more months before my birthday rolled around along with a new web host and a domain name of my choice. Coincidence? I think not.

I chose the name NFreak.net because NFreak (as in Nintendo Freak) was my nickname on the Nintendo Forums. I kept this new website a secret while I spent the next week or so moving everything to the new web host and making myself a legitimate template. I now had 20 gigabytes of bandwidth per month; about seven times more than I did before.

The website had a great launch, and within weeks I had more than doubled my traffic. Once things had settled down, I went back and consulted with my friend PHP and decided that my top posters list desperately needed an upgrade. I stepped it up a notch, and implemented a cron job that went off every eight hours to update the post counts. There was also a second cron job that triggered once daily and created a separate list for the top posters of that specific day. This little perk allowed for people to see exactly how many posts they made that day, along with their position relative to others. More importantly, it finally gave me a break from manually performing this task everyday, which consumed a good fifteen minutes on average. [ Part four is coming soon. ]

[ Part One ] [ Part Two ] [ Part Three ]