Archive for the 'About Me' Category
December 8th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
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!
November 20th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
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. ]
November 8th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
My First Web Project
Videogames have always been a major hobby of mine, which seems to be the case with most Computer Science enthusiasts. A lot of my free time was spent on Nintendo’s NSider Forums, which unfortunately lacked the ability to see a list of members sorted by the number of posts that they had made. While it may sound strange for people to desire seeing a list of members sorted by their post count, this specific forum had a lot of dedicated members, and post count was an indicator of how much time you spent online.
After searching all over Google for a free web host, I finally came across one that offered 100 megabytes of storage and 3 gigabytes of bandwidth per month. I was still fifteen years old at the time, and my programming skills were restricted to just Visual Basic at the time, but I knew enough HTML from my days in Junior High that I decided to give a shot. My goal was to create a list of the top 100 members with the highest post count.
My first attempt was rather inefficient, but accurate, nonetheless. I didn’t know how to use databases at the time, so I would manually run my script once and then save it as a text file for public viewing. I used a PHP function called file_get_contents($page), which returned the HTML output (source code) of the page specified. I then parsed out the post count in PHP and manually sorted the results. I did this on a weekly basis at first, and my little subdomain quickly gained popularity. Who knew that such a list would be so valuable?
Taking advantage of my growing user base, I decided to code a PHP-based chat room for my website. Upon registration, users were free to post messages to a page that would have to be refreshed in order to see new results (all of this information was still being stored in text files). In order to ensure that people would continue returning to my website, I implemented a ranking system. Members would gain their own personal rank based off of how many posts that they had made in the chat room, much like the ranking system at the Nintendo forums, the source of all traffic to my site.
The chat room was yet another success; it was very uncommon to arrive at the page without anyone to talk to. It wasn’t perfect, but it was mine, and I was very proud of what I had created. Little did I know that trouble was right around the corner.
November 7th, 2009 by Joe Majewski
While the majority of articles that I write are both informative and helpful to others, this particular entry is a little different. I thought it might be a good idea for me to write about how I got to where I am today in regards to web design, computer programming, and the like. This is going to be a lengthy article, so I decided to split it up into different sections placed in chronological order. Let’s start from the beginning:
Getting Started
I remember when I was just thirteen years old, a curious youngster looking to expand my knowledge with computers. I didn’t accomplish anything that was too extraordinary at this age, but it was only the beginning.
I had joined the local Computer Science Club at my Junior High School, and this consisted of weekly gatherings in the computer lab where we would learn basic HTML. I was fascinated with the idea that I could write a few basic lines of code in Notepad, but then open the same file with an Internet browser and have it look like a web page. Having understood everything that was being taught in the lab, I desperately wanted to learn more.
It was during this time that I did a lot of research on web design for my own personal benefit, and web design started to become a true aspiration of mine. Nothing that I created at this age was published on the Internet, but I still had a strong desire to gain a website of my own some day.
I took my first programming course when I was fifteen years old. It was a year-long course about Visual Basic, and the HTML that I’d previously learned didn’t offer me any sort of advantage over the other students in the class. I was overwhelmed at first, as this was something that was completely new to me, but I was no quitter. After much dedicated practice, I soon grasped these basic, fundamental programming skills and was able to create some pretty cool stuff. I will go into a few things that I created a little bit later in this article.
I recall the instructor once offering an automatic `A+` in the class to anyone who was able to create a game of Tic-Tac-Toe with a computer player that was programmed well enough to never lose to the opposing human player. I returned to class the next day with my working program, but the instructor did not follow through with the deal, which still bothers me to this very day. Needless to say, I still got an `A` in the course.