Starwolf’s Fansite Developer Diaries

March 3, 2009

More under the hood

Filed under: Web Developer, Developers Log — Starwolf @ 11:05 pm

Some fairly exciting happiness of late, I got around to checking the google analytics, discovered that I am getting a lot of traffic. :)

I have decided to add some advertising on the site, to help support the hosting.

Working on a new skin for the background style switcher. :)

Doing some overdue under the hood cleanup… typo fix, CSS work, that sort of stuff.

January 4, 2009

I’ve been working on the Rails…

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 8:48 pm

More cleanup under the hood stuff today. I redid the ad for the Enhanced Edition, did some minor changes to the appearance of the left rail on the home page, and have been updating content on the rails on a few pages through the site. Nothing exciting or dramatic.

January 1, 2009

A little work under the hood… nothing to see here…

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 9:47 pm

Just cleanup work today, going through and cleaning up some of the underlying code. Nothing really visible on the site itself, unless you look closely.

October 16, 2008

talking to musicians….

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 12:09 am

OK. So, I was planning to work on the site tonight, but instead we went out to dinner with some friends. for the record, El Jalapeno, in Lakewood, Ohio, has fantastic food and great prices.

Anyway, both couples have bands in the family. Joe has an all original band, Pitt, Jocko and Rita have also their own band, plus they know other bands….. So… I mention, by the way, I have this fansite, and I am seriously looking for all original music inspired by the game, The Witcher. And I will hook you up with what this game is about, my fansite, the official site, the free game demo, etc etc.

Joe practically climbs across the table. His band practice is tomorrow night. What kind of music do you want? Tell me about this game. Here’s some ideas I’m having right now… here’s the kind of music my band is doing…..

Rita is like, right now our drummer can’t play due to an injury, but we are interested, our guitarist can also play drums, and by the way, we also know these guys in another band that might be interested….

And my husband has also promised a song…..
Long story short…. watch in the upcoming weeks, for EXCLUSIVE free all original music inspired by The Witcher.

October 13, 2008

Code cleanup: browser battles

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 11:48 pm

Started chipping away at the broken layout issue when you resize IE6. Known issue, just hadn’t gotten around to it because I was too busy working on content.

OK, so you wont see what I’m doing yet, its all under the hood, just moving around some code, rewriting some code…. the problem is when I rebuilt the site in a hurry, I just hacked my existing Holy Grail fluid layout (web CSS coders will know what I mean). So naturally, it mucked it up in IE6. Over the next week or so, I’ll be finishing the cleanup and applying it to the existing pages. Most people wont see a lot of difference in the appearance while I do this.

For those who’s livelihood involves testing your websites in multiple browsers, I heartily recommend Browserpool, available at www.browserpool.com . It is a resource in which you can live test your site against a wide variety of web browsers. (Prepare to cry).  Free registration for the free trial version. They also have a paid version. The free trial version is slower, and they have a limit on the number of free users at any one time. Awesome, wonderful product.

September 24, 2008

google analytics and documentation. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 10:25 pm

Sometimes, maintaining a fansite is BORING. So. After the 5 month hiatus from the site, followed by several weekends of frenzied redesign and overhauling of the site, lets just say that my site documentation was just a teensy bit outdated. Just a bit. Aaaack.

 And while I have webalyzer with my webhosting service, its not the friendliest thing to read, when you just want to do a quick check that shows the number of unique visitors to the site. Its not like this is a huge money making site that I need to know all kinds of statistics on, for all the google ads everywhere. I just want to know, hey, I had so many visitors to the site this week that WEREN’T ME. So today, zzzzzzzzz. Open each page. paste in the google code. document that the page exists, after actually visiting the page to verify that, halelujah, it didnt secretly explode from CSS code that somehow secretly decayed overnight when I wasn’t looking.

So, I’m bored. But it needs to be done.

September 22, 2008

Hello From The Witcher Weekly World News!

Filed under: Web Developer — Starwolf @ 10:26 pm

For those who want to see behind the scenes on what goes on with a fansite, drop in for a visit, and I will keep you (sortof) updated. This is basically my developers blog. It is currently not terribly shiny, not much skinned or anything, but hey, I had actually forgotten I had added a blog to the site and while I was doing actual maintenance on the site (how badly are pages broken, how much needs updating, etc… lo and behold, I FOUND THE BLOG!!!! So, my wonderful visitors, if you happen to wonder why someone would be insane enough to build a fansite, or if you wonder about what it’s like behind the scenes, drop on in for a visit.

What you can expect to see in here:

My site maintenance logs. My site “to do list”. Random diary entries. Anything I think is vaguely interesting (to me at least, and maybe my mom), but doesnt quite make it to the rest of the site. Developer’s commentary. Shopping lists. Random ideas for what I want to add to the site. (You get the drift).  OH, BTW…. if anybody from CDProjekt RED is reading this, this blog is my concept of “something unique for the fansite that other fansites don’t have”. However, if you are from some other fansite…. just move along now, nothing to see here, nothing to see…..

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