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David

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  1. David
    April 20th. A magnificent day for history.
    1534 – Jacques Cartier begins the voyage during which he discovers Canada and Labrador.
    1792 – France declares war against the "King of Hungary and Bohemia", the beginning of French Revolutionary Wars.
    1861 – American Civil War: Robert E. Lee resigns his commission in the United States Army in order to command the forces of the state of Virginia.
    1918 – Manfred von Richthofen, aka The Red Baron, shoots down his 79th and 80th victims, his final victories before his death the following day.
    1939 – Adolf Hitler's 50th birthday is celebrated as a national holiday in Nazi Germany.
    1946 – The League of Nations officially dissolves, giving most of its power to the United Nations.
    1961 – Failure of the Bay of Pigs Invasion of US-backed Cuban exiles against Cuba.
    1972 – Apollo 16, commanded by John Young, lands on the moon.
    2013 – 231 people create an account on Elder Souls.

    Brought to you by Stool Brory, Co. Why did all of those people suddenly sign-up?
    I guess you do sort of need the context of what was going on leading up to that. Very well...
    Sometime in the evening of April 19th: Brodo Swaggins discovers someone has uploaded a leaked ESO beta footage video to Youtube. He quickly watches it, downloads it for personal lulz, and then posts a thread about it on ElderSouls.com.
    10 Minutes Later: YouTube removes the video.
    10 More Minutes Later: Blake gets on his knees and begs for the video, which he now can't watch. A merciful bro, Brodo Swaggins uploads the video on ElderSouls.com. Coincidentally David had literally just finished the new video library database here. Probably some conspiracy, but moving on...
    10 Minutes following 10 More Minutes Later: Brodo uploads the video to the new video library so people can watch it onsite.
    David watches the video and then goes to sleep because it is now like 4am or something.
    David awakes at 2 PM, only to discover the video is getting hundreds of hits an hour from random guests, sucking up dozens of gigs of bandwidth in short periods of time. He initially laughs, and then realizes he has shitty shared hosting and this will potentially ruin him. He smacks a "Elder Souls Members Only" restriction on the video, thinking this will stop the onslaught of bandwidth.
    People just create an account and continue watching the video anyway.

    Do you have any statistical factoids that no one will actually look at?
    As a matter of fact, I do. Here's how many hits we were getting on a LIVE scale, meaning how many people were clicking something at any one instant...

    Here's a picture of how many hits the video was getting every 60 minutes.

    The hour/instant numbers don't make sense because I took the photos at different times. Just bear with me... Anyways...
    212 people on the entire site, and 63 on the video. Now, the video was a 20-minute large-ass file totaling something like 150 MB. Let's just assume the worst case scenario: every visitor to the video downloads the entire damn thing. 150 MB is equal to about 0.147 GB. 63 people watching this in a 60-minute period comes out to 9.261 GB hourly.
    In 24 hours (one day for the scholars among us), this equates to over 222 GBs a day. This is a problem, mainly because this site generally averages something like 20 GB for an entire month.
    Remember that this is from the video ALONE. This doesn't even account for the extra visits to the rest of the site the video was leading to. I decided to restrict the video to stop the burning, so to speak.
    This all culminated to result in something magnificent... Two hundred and thirty one acconts. In. One. Day.
    And? I'm not impressed.
    Do you like charts?
    I love charts.
    In that case, maybe you'll enjoy this before-and-after graph.

    Please explain what I'm looking at in an unnecessary condescending tone.
    As you wish. Anyways, as you can see prior to April 20th ElderSouls.com was bringing in an astounding 1 new account per day. This all changed on April 20th, when the internets discovered that we were basically the only site that bothered to upload the leaked footage.
    I bet that made us pretty popular.
    You have no idea. Here's a snap-shot of the "Members Online" list in the 24 hours following the member-only restriction on the video.

    Damn. I bet that came close to some kind of record here.
    Sort of. The previous 24-hour record was 45. 318 almost got there.
    You don't have to be a dick. I was just trying to make conversation.
    Whatever. I don't get paid enough for this.
    So just how far into the interwebs did this little Elder Souls explosion go?
    Far enough that we got our own 4chan thread, basically. I'm not kidding.

    Dear Diary,
    Today OP was a pretty cool guy...
    For some reason I don't see b-tards being too happy with the whole account restriction thing. After all, it's not like we had hard-core gay furry pornography.
    Well, there was this guy...

    Lel. Who didn't see that coming?
    Shut up! Between him and the following account name registrations...
    ihatethissomuch
    dontwanttomakethis
    Noneofyurbidness

    ... I took a kick in the feels.
    I'm sorry. So I bet this day became the saving grace of Elder Souls, which was bolstered by hundreds of fresh accounts every day into infinity and beyond. Right?
    Well, not exactly... Here's the rest of the registration graph in the days following.

    On the bright side, we have been fairly constant at about 10 new accounts on the weekdays, and 18 on the weekends, since the fateful explosion. It still beats the 1 we were getting previously.
    And you never got shut down for bandwidth over-consumption! All's well that ends well, eh?
    Yeah, I guess. I miss having 300+ online at once, though. Those were the days...
  2. David
    It's been a long time since I've bothered to document any changes/updates that have either been completed or are in the works. Mainly because no one ever reads/responds to these blogs.
    Since I miss the days of 2-3 new, original blog posts a week, I figured that I may as well take the plunge and post a quick one of my own.

    The Header
    Remember the days when navigation consisted of bookmarking "View New Content"? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

    Nothing really fancy here, but you knew that already. You've been staring at it for months, after all. But if I didn't include ancient changes I would have nothing to write about here, would I?
    At any rate, since the purpose of these is to generally explain why I changed what I did (because fuck change, damn it), I suppose I'll delve into that...

    The Logo
    Since I know the majority of you have alzheimers here's what it used to look like.



    Sort of bummed the logo is now gone from the top, but I have OCD about things being symmetrical. My reasons for switching it up are actually that petty for most things.

    The Category Menu
    This is the black fade-in/out thing that no one actually uses. Did you notice it even changed? Probably not. Want to know what did, after months of arduous planning, engineering, and development?
    I got the drop-down columns to light-up in white when you hover over a sub-element.



    I also re-ordered everything so that it, you know, made some sort of logical sense. But no one cares about that.

    Fa-Fa-Fa-Facebook Likes
    Every day, as soon as I wake up, I jump out of bed and sprint to my laptop. I then quickly load the site to see if we've received any new Facebook likes. The number 37 once again appears before my eyes and I just think to myself, "There's always tomorrow."
    This has gone on for 4 months.
    Meanwhile, rival sites have been created from scratch, thrown up a Facebook page, and are now over 1k likes over the same 4 month period. It made me sad.
    Following a few hours of frustrated crying I decided that I NEED MORE LIEKS and that EVERYONE should ALWAYS have to STARE INTENSELY at the facebook like counter as it scrolls with them ON EVERY PAGE AT ALL TIMES.
    It's been 2 weeks now and we still have 37 likes.

    Buttons, Lel
    To quote Blexun, "somethingsomething Fancy somethingsomething I'm gay." At least that's what I think he said.
    The main point is that the buttons are, like, beveled and stuff, man. Here's what they used to look like.



    This was all fine and dandy for damn near a year, if not longer. Then, one fateful day, I accidentally copy-pasta'd the CSS for the above buttons into itself.




    The resulting abomination was surprisingly appealing, and it is now....



    A wild incompetent Admin appeared! God used Buttonception. It was super effective!

    David vs. "Where's Lydia?"
    Once upon a time someone posted the 15th thread about "omg lel I lost Lydia wut do?" After writing painfully detailed "If you did X, then you must now Y" solutions 14 times, I typed up about a paragraph in all caps tearing the person a new asshole for daring to not just search for an existing answer.
    After finishing my rant, I realized that since we switched to the new skin, I had never re-added the search function.
    So here we are. People are now able to search everything to their heart's content. The Lydia threads have at least slowed. Brad continues to post pictures of himself pooping dildos in the Premium forum.
    This is all because some kind soul told me to re-add the search bar through a Lydia question.

    Social Media
    This was added because I liked the little grey-scaled icons next to the links. Yep, that's the only reason. In fact, as Jake pointed out a few weeks ago, the Youtube link goes no where. Because fuck you for clicking it.

    The Footer
    I was sort of annoyed with the boring black line at the bottom of every page, so out it went. I was pretty happy after another several weeks led me to the final result below; a boring black line with a boring gray line on top of it.



    Did you know that hovering over our logo not only causes the thing to fucking GLOW, but clicking it will bring you to the top of the page? Of course you didn't. You really need to slow down and just smell the roses, man, it's the little things in life like this you need to appreciate.

    We Have a Privacy Policy
    No part of our website is structured to attract anyone under 13. NO. PART. OF. THIS. WEBSITE.
    Please disregard all textual references regarding video games.
    Please disregard all images regarding video games on this website, especially the 8 million pixel HD background image.
    Please disregard the gray-scale theme, clearly intended for the Male Under 25 demographic.

    Please disregard this website. Also don't sue me and stuff, because all I have are empty pizza boxes and unused condoms filled with taco sauce.

    © 2013 ElderSouls.com
    I will sue you, though.

    The Background
    It has snow-capped mountains and trees and things. Also it fades into dirt. That's sort of cool. I guess.

    So? Why am I here?
    I don't know, man, this is pretty pointless. It's also 4:20am (huehuehue) and I don't know why I'm still up. Here's what all of the above changes have added up to, though.
    Here is the old. Click to enlarge, obviously.

    Contrasted with the new that I started this blog with. You are now shocked. Just try not to seize up and die in amazement because I only have 3 readers and need all of you.
  3. David
    Since statistics are always interesting, I figured I'd post the following table highlighting the most popular articles on Elder Souls. I was going to sort them ALL by author and tally the views to create the biggest pissing-contest cluster-fuck possible. Sadly I lack any easy way to do this and am already procrastinating work, so I'll just do the top 12 (because screw top 10 lists).
    The following numbers are based off of the articles only, and do not take into account topic views (some of these articles have 10,000+ topic hits).
    [table] [th]Article[/th][th]Article Hits[/th][th]Author[/th]
    [td]Skyrim: Master Conjuration, Smithing, and Enchanting[/td][td]119,122[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td]Marriable Characters in Skyrim[/td][td]42,112[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td] Words of Power: Locations and Information[/td][td]33,471[/td][td]Blexun[/td] [td]The Different Types of Gamers[/td][td]24,387[/td][td]Squishy[/td] [td]Skyrim: Dragon Priest Mask Locations[/td][td]24,035[/td][td]Blexun[/td] [td]How to Get Married in Skyrim[/td][td]23,032[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td]Boosting Armor, Weapon, and Item Stats in Skyrim[/td][td]22,164[/td][td]Blexun[/td] [td]How to Cure/Become a Vampire in Skyrim[/td][td]13,638[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td]Hearthfire - Where and How to Buy Property[/td][td]13,064[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td]The Dark Knight Rises - Plot Holes and Problems[/td][td]12,172[/td][td]Traaginen[/td] [td]This Week in Gaming: Releases, iPhone 5, and G4[/td][td]10,812[/td][td]Deathirst[/td] [td]8 Sites That Probably Aren't Worth Your Time***[/td][td]9,792[/td][td]Blexun[/td] [/table]***There is some serious Skynet-esque bot action going on here, methinks.Following the top twelve are my "Fastest Ways to Level" guide at 9,291, Unknown's two table-based articles at ~7,850 each (they are weirdly close), and then the Gaming News stuff Squishy and I have done.
    Things to take away from this...
    Original content is king unless you're Deathirst. By this I mean that 'Gaming News' articles are good because they can be mass-produced but individually never get high view totals.
    If you're wondering how I got a rather shitty guide (compared to the others) to 120,000 views and blew away the competition, it was because I posted links to it on forums and Yahoo Answers many times. Networking your stuff works.
    Is this a Skyrim site or something?

    This isn't fair to a lot of the newer stuff that's been published, but yeah. I'll save the views/day and what-not for another day.
  4. David

    Ongoing Home Page Updates

    By David,

    It's been awhile since I've worked on the site, so after having finished up the first round of midterm exams last week I figured I could donate a decent amount of time to it this weekend. Fortunately I've gotten a few things done!

    Home Page Updates
    Most of you probably haven't noticed the new, less-cluttered look for categories and article blocks. I wasn't sure if I liked it at first, but the look grew on me after I looked at the redundancy of the old double-boxed in style we used to have.






    The old on the left, and the new on the right.

    I finally got around to fixing the gallery feed that was on the home page as well. Those of you who are keen observers (or, you know, actually visit the home page occasionally) probably noticed that the feed kind of died and stopped working for a few weeks. I managed to fix it and still wasn't happy with it - what's the point of having a gallery feed that just lists the user who uploaded the last file? It was pretty pointless. I ended up re-doing it completely; the final product was an automatic/manual image rotater that will display the last 10 or so images that have been added by our members. Hopefully this is a little more useful/interesting.





    Y u no get on me for not fixing this sooner?!

    Probably the most obvious change is the new status feed that lays on the right hand side of the article slider. I'm not really happy with how it looks right now, so it will probably change soon, but for now this is what it looks like...





    Because all guests want to know stranger's status updates.

    Yeah, I'm not really sure about it from a guest perspective (why would they care?), but eh. I mainly wanted to shrink the slider down a bit so the images filled it up more and had nothing else to put there. After having filled the "nothing else to put here" space up with the status feed, I still had more "nothing to put here" space and re-added the old social media buttons. Those will probably stay in some format even if I move them around or change the buttons; after all, since adding them we received a new facebook like in like 30 minutes! But yeah, if you guys have any better ideas just leave them in the comments.
    There were also a few other miscellaneous updates, mostly bug fixes and spacing consistency changes. "View New Content" now points directly to active forum topics instead of your current application (which would have been recent articles). If any of you want to log out and view the home page / article pages as a guest I could use some feedback on that perspective. Or really even if you're just a normal member as I have a different page layout as an Admin.
    I have also removed Disqus as a commenting system because guests never used it even though it was pretty much amazing. I figured we may as well just use our old normal system if guests aren't going to comment either way. At least now it's not going to be confusing with two different systems.
    That pretty much wraps up what I've accomplished today. I do have a few more things I'd like to change around (forum reorganization, article category structure, etc) in the next day or so; if I get to it, I'll probably post a new blog then. In the mean time, leave your thoughts below!
  5. David

    New Home Page

    By David,

    Those of you who navigate to ElderSouls.com instead of having the forums bookmarked have probably noticed that we have a new home page installed at http://eldersouls.com/. I am MUCH happier with this new layout (although it is a ways from being finished), primarily because the width is fixed. Fixed width layouts allow every user to see the same design regardless of what screen size or resolution they're using; this makes designing something that looks halfway decent much better. It's also easily viewed by most mobile phones now.
    I've also installed Disqus as a replacement commenting system for Guests (currently on articles and the content system only). This might be temporary depending on what I get for feedback, which I would really appreciate - especially suggestions for improvements. There's still a few issues and bugs, but those should be dealt with soon enough.
    Thanks for your time, and remember to feel free to leave comments!
  6. David
    The Gallery and Blog applications have both been updated. Gallery had a rather massive overhaul and as a result there are some issues with the dark skin I'm aware of (though they're just visual and don't affect usability), so if you want to check out what it should/will look like use the Light skin. Hopefully I'll fix whatever issues there are relatively quickly.
    Here is a list of improvements; each bullet links to an in-depth write-up by IPB if anyone is interested.
    What's New for IP.Gallery
    In addition to many fixes for reported issues, the following changes have been made:
    Redesigned Navigation
    We have redesigned the navigation and structure of Gallery to provide a more traditional navigational approach, while retaining a more social approach for those who desire it. Global albums have been changed to "categories".
    More Administrator Control
    Administrators now have better and more fine-grained control over moderators, albums and images.
    Miscellaneous Features and Enhancements
    pInterest integration; improved shared media image presentation; set as profile photo expanded Gallery-wide; hidden and unapproved ambiguity improvement; SEO improvements
    Navigational Changes
    Changes to albums and ability to list members, albums or images in the special member albums category
    More Miscellaneous Improvements
    RSS feed enhancements; notification improvements; homepage enhancements based on client feedback

    What's New for IP.Blog
    SEO and Microformat Improvements
    Improvements have been made to better optimize IP.Blog for search engines, and implement relevant microformat meta data.
    Promotion
    Ability to auto-share to Facebook/Twitter on entry creation; better image handling for sharing to Facebook; ability to auto-follow entry on creation; reputation integration in user profiles; integration with quick navigation panel
    Moderation and Miscellaneous Improvements
    Consistency improvements; custom block improvements; inline moderation enhancements; better category management

    In addition to software improvements, I've added new categories:
    Das GIF Haus - A place for all of the best GIFs.
    Image Hosting - Where people who add images to their articles should host their stuff. Otherwise it will likely be lost after a short period of time because people tend to hot-link or upload it to crummy places like imageshack. Premium Members are also able to host their own stuff.

    It just so happens that our licenses for these updates ran out awhile back, so I had to repurchase renewal rights to the software inorder to get these updates. Since renewal prices run about $210 a year, I'll just take this moment to say all Premium Member subscriptions go toward the site and really help me out. You can also donate any amount you want if none of the Premium Member tiers are right for you, or if you're already subscribed. I'd also like to thank Deathirst for donating $15.00 and taking over the hosting costs for August with it.
  7. David
    Home Page
    I'm not sure if you've noticed, but I've recently begun turning what was previously our articles/content database into our new home page. You can see its current state by clicking here.My main goal is going to be to ultimately set that as our overall home page so that eldersouls.com redirects there instead of to the forum index as it does now. Obviously this is a ways off, and I need your help in choosing what feeds to have on the page. As of now, we have feeds for recent articles, topics, and blogs. I can add pretty much whatever type of feed you can imagine, whether it be from a specific forum, member, "your" content, etc. Some input would be nice.
    Eventually I hope Elder Souls generates enough unique content to make bookmarking and viewing that page daily practical for the website visitors. I believe that there are ultimately two types of users: those that bookmark the main page and check about once a day, and those that bookmark the forums/become involved in the community personally become power-users. Hopefully with the new home page we'll eventually cater to the former a bit.

    Article Updates
    It began with me taking a tangent and re-designing the article headings/titles to be more professional, like so...


    Which was clearly a large improvement over what we had previously...



    This led me to decide that we needed to start standardizing the format of our articles to appear more professional, and so that we didn't have various ugly colors such as the ones I used in my first Skyrim guides. Blexun used equally ugly colors, as did everyone else who ever made a post on this site.
    But wait! They're not ugly! Well, you're right. There's just one problem when you make things various shades of orange/blue/red/etc: it looks great on the skin you're currently using, but what happens when you turn on the all-white "Light" skin? What happens when I upgrade the site or completey change the default layout?
    Answer: everything either looks like shit or is impossible to see. That's bad for obvious reasons.
    Luckily there is also a solution: implement html through custom BB codes so that one single format can be used for every article, and automatically be changed to match whatever CSS the skin the user is... using... has. Yeah, you probably don't understand that because I don't really either but let's just agree it's cool and move on.
    Anyways, Blex and the other Publishers are about to get used to the new custom BB codes I've invented...



    Oh, yeah. I also already re-made the guest messages to reflect these changes as seen in the picture above. As you can see I've already used the H1 in this article. It's the standard BB code thing that everyone knows how to use...

    [h1] HI THINGS GO HERE [/h1]

    [h2] THINGS ALSO GO HERE [h2]
    The H1 tags are actual HTML elements and Google pays a good deal of attention to them. They should be used as your main headings (which means sparingly) and be made up of your article's main keywords. H2's can be used as much as you want and function as sub-headings.
    After I finished all of these shiny new things I was excited and wanted to write an article to put them on display. Before I get into anything else I'm going to have to step back a bit and explain the last few days of hectic panic experimenting that I've found myself in after writing my 3,500+ word article, The Dark Knight Rises - Plot Holes and Problems.
    I wrote the article. I submitted the article. I made something like 73 revisions (actually this is accurate D:). Here we are, right? Nope.
    I first split the article into 6 different pages to show off the new multi-page articles I haven't explained yet. You make one article with multiple pages if you're having a hard time keeping up. Anyways, I thought this was cool. Considering the multiple clicks allowed me to gather 4,000+ pageviews on the article in 4 days (for comparisons sake it's taken 8 months for other "popular" guides we have to get there, this all goes back to timing your article when the topic is popular).
    Oh, yeah. That reminds me: the article was vaguely successful. Whenever I looked at it there were 10-20 guests reading it. Google graced me with a top 3-5 ranking and people flocked to it. It was our most popular content, even beating out the Catwoman Lesbian thread and Skyrim Water Freezing. It was serious business.
    This all peaked on July 31st and I essentially sat home and F5'd the article stats all day in my underwear. Following that, Google decided to bitch slap me down to page 2 and the hits all but stopped. This caused me to panic and do some stupid things, such as...
    I re-did the page titles of all articles to be more search engine/people friendly. A good move long term, maybe, but it made Google angry and it dropped me further.
    Panic v.2.00 caused me to change the layout from 6 pages to 1. This is because multiple-paged articles are only indexed as far as the first page, so I figured 90% of my content wasn't getting counted by Google. I decided to lose the 6 pageviews per read and try my luck with just one page. Again, good idea long term, not so good short term.

    So there I was, getting like a couple of views every few hours. I was pretty bummed, but kept stupidly trying things that made the situation worse. I invented a new BB code! Page Jumping! Aye, it's as fun as it sounds. You can try it out by hitting the "Go to the Top!" and "Go to the Bottom!" links I've added to this blog entry.
    Go to the Bottom!
    This is a little bit hard to use, so I'll explain it for Publishers here. You'll only be able to use this when submitting articles or blogs.
    Create an anchor for the link. This is where your link goes to. It uses the following BB code...


    [jumpanchor='option']CONTENT HERE[/jumpanchor]
    The "option" is the key you're going to need for step 2, so remember it. It also turns into a link in the URL so it should reflect what you're pointing it to. Content is just whatever you highlight or write in; it's what everyone sees as the name of the link.
    Create the link. This is what people click to be taken to the anchor...


    [jumplink='option']CONTENT[/jumplink]
    Again, the option is important and it needs to be the same as the anchor you want to send it to. For example, using "tag" in the link will take you to the "tag" anchor. These things need to be unique and can only be used once or you're going to have a mess.

    Go to the Top!
    To get the looping effect you're going to have to wrap the text in an anchor AND a link. I use the effect in the example above as well as in the TDKR article. You're going to have to be somewhat careful in using these; example being I didn't realize there's a "top" tag in every page automatically so it didn't work until I figured out I had to use something else.
    My next move was to re-design the article sheet I posted above for a third time...



    I figured if Google was going to continue to kill my ranking I may as well go for the social media boost. I added a bar containing the whole nine yards there, as well as at the very bottom of the article. This actually worked pretty well and as you can see I had 26 Likes and various other views feeding off of them over about 8 hours or so. I just wish I had done this when I was actually getting heavy traffic.
    Anyways, this brings me to where we are now. My TDKR article is pretty much dead in Google and there's usually not even 1 guest reading it anymore. The good news is that most of the changes I've made should really benefit us in the future, and I think all of the Publishers will see the benefits of it immediately.
    Please leave suggestions and comments below!
  8. David
    New Features and UpdatesRevised Content Page
    Our old "Guides" page has really been showing its age for a long time, and I've been meaning to re-code it for months now. I've finally gotten around to it, and although it's no where near where I think it needs to be, I believe it's much better than it was before. To better reflect the content of the page, I've renamed it from "Guides" to "Guides & Articles" (this will probably just be shortened to "Content" when people become more familiar with it). This change has also caused a slight re-ordering of the navigation bar, so that's why it was done if you've accidentally been clicking on the wrong application recently.
    Article Image Slider
    First up is a dynamic script that rotates articles and their descriptions alongside a large, related image. It has the usual features: automatic transitions, dozens of transition animations (some work better than others), manual controls, etc.





    The script in action, with all of its automatic glory.

    It's a pretty nifty addition, as it's able to pull the necessary information related to the articles out of our database automatically. It might not excite the standard guest much past whatever visual appeal it has, but as an Administrator I'm really excited about it. It only had a price tag of about $3.00, so as soon as Blexun stated he was in love with it I knew we must have it.
    New Block Designs
    To make a long story short, our old content page had a myriad of issues that began and ended with the blocks that featured articles. They had a horrific Web 1.0 look, wrapped unevenly, and always looked pretty messy in general.





    An example of our old look.

    After finally tiring of it, I spent a good two days and far too many hours trying to redesign the page. I made a lot of progress, and ended up with numerous different looks that I believed all look fantastic. Unfortunately, after implementing many of these designs I discovered just how impossible it was to look good on screens that were either small or have low resolutions. On my widescreen 1080p display, the blocks looked much different with one design than they did when I switched to a monitor with a 1024x768 resolution. A design would look fantastic on my high-res screen, only to look horrible on those with low-res. The low-res designs looked awful on high-res screens. I went back and forth for what seemed like ages, and I ended up trying to make a compromise so we have something that doesn't - at the very least - look horrible on either one.
    The end result should look more or less the same on all displays, and fortunately eliminates many of the ugly bugs that the previous incarnation had (in theory).





    The new look.

    Blocks should generally remain the same size as other blocks and center their contents, regardless of slight variations in screen resolution and size now. If you have anything 1024x768 or above, it should look pretty solid. I'm interested in hearing feedback from people as I can't really test this myself.
    Again, this is probably going to change eventually. I was much less happy with it than I was with a few of the other high-res looks, but the fact of the matter is that it's nigh impossible to code something that's going to look the same to all users. Different operating systems, browsers, screen resolutions, color settings, and many other things all factor in to vastly different looks. You end up having to try to go for the lowest common denominator, and more often than not it doesn't scream sexy as a result.
    Article Submissions
    Pretty much all of this is going to fly right over everyone's head, but I'll include it for the few of you (Blexun and future Editors) who care or will be using this in the future. The rest of you can hopefully just be convinced that I do occasionally accomplish something here.
    Form Redesign
    In one of those rare instances I'm actually trying to make something look worse in-order to improve usability, I've changed the article form to include way too many <HR> (horizontal rule) elements so publishers can actually see which directions go to what form.





    Part of the form required when adding articles and guides.

    Having done that, I also changed many of the fields and directions to be more self-explanatory. I've included the requirements for the images, maximum character lengths, and explanations of all options. Hopefully it helps make it all seem less daunting.
    Article Template
    As seen in the form above, I also created an option for an article template that I've custom coded for our content. Depending on whether you select "Generic" (normal articles) or "Skyrim" (everything somewhat related to Skyrim, obviously) guests will see one of two different footer messages automatically added to the end of your article.
    First of all, the default Generic...



    Or the often-used Skyrim version...



    In the future I expect the templates to be drastically different, but for now the guest footer message is all I've included.
    Custom Images and Advertisements
    If you were paying attention to those last two images, you probably noticed that we now have pretty sexy new images promoting Elder Souls. These were all made by our RuneScape Category Moderator, Anarchy, who was kind enough to devote his talents to us for free and has so far made us several different versions...



    These will slowly replace/rotate with existing advertisements in various locations on the site.
    Staff Updates
    Going right along with our re-worked articles system, we've recently introduced a new staff position: Publisher. This name isn't final, but I expect it will stick around a little while longer unless someone comes up with something more suitable soon. Anyways, this position will be primarily tasked with writing and submitting new articles to our database. Our most recent (and first) promotion to this position is Squishyman, who has already completed a fantastic article, The Different Types of Gamers.
    Open Positions
    We're always going to be looking to acquire new volunteers who are interested in writing and publishing their own content, so if you're interested in this position I recommend checking out our most recent staff application.
    Miscellaneous
    Last (and also least), was a small change to our forum navigation. I replaced "Elder Souls" on the forum tree navigation with a small home symbol. I don't know why I'm even including this; probably to see if anyone actually noticed it. It solves some issues with wrapping on low resolutions, although the benefit is probably negligible


    .


    A small, cozy home button.

    Please leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments below! I will be reading all of them.
  9. David
    Facebook has been tanking downhill as fast as Myspace ever since it opened to the general public. Nowadays (at least in my case), my facebook "friends" (most of whom I neither know nor like) do little more than spam my feed with religious and political debates, game spam, idtiotic fake accounts, and the recent "LIKE/SUBSCRIBE TO RECIEVE 2000 FRIENDS LOL". It's a disgusting, horrible place that needs to die now. Facebook will be dead soon, and the cool people will migrate to Google Plus. A year or two later, it will be overtaken with the next wave of users: the preteen girl and "adult who doesn't understand the internets" demographics. Following this, it too, will die.
    In the meantime, I'm creating a blog. It may turn into a facebook blog of hilarious stupid shit people post, it may never be updated after today. Either way, though, I'm looking for people that are interested and want to run the blog with me. Hopefully we can all share laughs at our Facebook friends' expense regularly from this point onward.
    I'll start by providing the following....





    My great-great-grandparents passed away the other day. I'd better just cease to exist because anything else is impossible.

    You don't even need to believe in evolution to face palm at this. Public education at work.





    Here's a graph I made in Paint in 4 seconds explaining how this is possible for those of you scratching your heads.

  10. David
    User Feedback PollSappy Explanation
    Here at ElderSouls.com we care about you, the user. This is a fan site with user generated content, after all, and we wouldn't be going very far without any of you. That's precisely why we're having a feedback poll on this blog to get some answers on ways we can improve the experience here for everyone. It's a pretty basic poll, so if you have any additional comments or suggestions you're encouraged to leave them below in the comments (or make a new thread if they're substantial).
    Sappy Emoticon Providing a 1,000 Word Synopsis of Our Relationship
    Let's keep it PG for the kids.

    ES Statistics with Google AnalyticsDid you just do that on purpose?
    What?
    You know, rhyme with the orange title.
    Since when did you start becoming a bolded alter-ego instead of a sub-title?
    I don't know, man. I was just wondering.
    Well maybe you should stop doing that and get back to work, none of those headings make any sense... And yes.
    Okay. Chart?
    Chart.





    Visit statistics for ElderSouls.com from April 10th to May 10th.

    My favorite part is the 60% drop off after April 22nd.
    Who asked you, anyways? But yeah, I don't know. Google released a new search algorithm around that time and it wasn't particularly fond of us. On the bright side, we've bounced back rather nicely in recent weeks. The far left side of the graph was pretty typical before that random huge increase that occurred after April 13th. The cause of that, you ask? Well...





    ElderSouls.com is the #1 search result for the bug.






    A Moderately popular thread with 5k+ views in a couple of weeks.

    The Google gods smiled lovingly down upon us simple mortals, and blessed us with a #1 at best, high at worst search ranking for that specific problem. We're really important now, apparently.
    I want to know more about that giant, sexy peak that happened on April 22nd, dammit!
    Okay, okay. Calm down. I'm not sure if you're my schizophrenic anti-personality or a demanding Blexun on the other end of an IRC conversation.





    Statistics for April 22nd, 2012. Teh best dai evar (for now).

    Yeah, I don't really know. Can't complain about those results, though, even if they were only a one-time thing up until this point. See my Introduction to Site Metrics entry for more details on what, exactly, the hell it is any of that Latin means. Few things to take away from this...
    That bounce rate is horrible. Hooorrrriiiibblle. It means ~70% of people are landing on their first page and leaving before navigating to a second page on this site. I think that's more an ailment of our situation (forum based on Gaming) opposed to any serious indication that something's going wrong.
    700+ individual people visited the site on that day.
    You can't tell from this chart, but Elder Souls is exponentially more popular every Sunday compared to the other days of the week, and surprisingly always has a decent output Monday. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
    That is a pointless and poorly place pie chart.

    Well, enough of statistics. Due to popular demand (people bitching on other blog entries when it's not included), I bring you what you've been waiting for...

    Hilarious Search Queries
    Tiger Sharks
    Yeah, seriously. I don't know. All those searches get pointed to TRR's Achievement of the Week thread where the off-topic conversation of the century occurred.
    Mother Fuckin' Tiger Sharks? People Google that? Bitches be serious?
    Apparently. TRR actually made it to the very 1st page of Google's images with that beauty (and the rank is rising several per day...). The funny thing? It's not even a Tiger Shark...





    TRR's Tiger Shark.

    I guess when school kids across the country don't understand why their pet Tigers aren't sharks and die in the water, they can blame us for redefining the fish (animal?). Seriously, we're the ONLY site on the first page that isn't a legitimate Tiger Shark. Cheers!
    Well, it's not porn. I'm surprised.
    Yeah, but don't regain your faith in humanity just yet. I didn't show you any of the "Elder Boobs" search results that have been popping up. Want to see the types of images we're competing against?
    What?! No! I'm out of here.
    Fair enough. Make sure you come back as title headings next time so people don't think I'm crazy.
    ....
    ....
    Hello?
    ....
    Well, looks like he's gone, and my hands are starting to hurt. So... Until the next entry!
    Remember to leave comments and suggestions below!
  11. David
    As the site ages and becomes more established, trends in user activity begin to become more apparent. Certain content can be highlighted as exceptional or below par based on hits and user involvement. So far, 11 of the guides submitted by our community have been published to the beta version of our main page.
    The software that runs our guide and article database, IP. Content, has basic stat tracking system built into it. This feature can be used to observe the number of hits the guides have gotten from those searching for related answers (often from search engines such as Google, Bing, etc.).
    To date, this is what our hits have looked like (sorted by date published from newest to oldest)...





    Article hits not counting forum/thread views.

    It's important to note these "hit" statistics don't account for views that happen on a thread-level, and many of the guides listed above have hundreds, if not thousands of views on their forum thread. With that said, a few things stand out and can be inferred from the number of hits each article has received. For one, this all-important number certainly does not always have a strong correlation with age. The others? Well...
    1. Competition from other sites directly impacts your success.
    One of the oldest guides, How to Cure/Become a Vampire in Skyrim, has relatively few hits despite being relatively in-depth and involving a commonly requested subject. Low results from such an article can likely be attributed to a high level of competition from competing sites and related search queries. Searching for an answer such as, "How to Cure Vampirism in Skyrim" yields thousands of results from long-established sites such as UESP, IGN, Gamespot, Yahoo Answers, and others.

    2. Unique content is king.
    Blexun's Boosting Armor, Weapon, and Item Stats has achieved success solely due to the nature of the topic. There isn't much out there on boosting item materials that's as in-depth as this guide, and this makes up for other weak areas. Namely, I did a horrifically poor job of naming the article and providing good meta descriptions, which probably hindered its search engine growth. My bad, Blex.

    2. Content with well thought-out or unique names can capture its own niche of search traffic, despite superior(?) competition from more established sites.
    Marriable Characters in Skyrim, features content that is not unique, nor is it limited to a small number of sites. This particular guide features a table filled with information that's widely available on hundreds of other sites throughout the internet. However, the unique title of the guide captures a common Google search query that many other more established sites didn't use. As a result, it receives an oddly high number of hits.

    3. Search engines matter. A lot.
    Our two newest guides, Enchantment Effects and Alchemy Ingredients by Unknown ProbLem have the fewest number of hits, as expected (they're the newest). New content can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to be indexed by search engines, and as a result will initially have slow growth. In the first few days of publication, neither of these guides eclipsed 30 inbound views. However, as the pages have begun to be indexed by search engines, the number of inbound visitors to these two pages has increased quickly.
    Blexun's guide, Dragon Priest Mask Locations, was for a long time the most popular article on this site as far as search engine traffic is concerned. The guide had unique phrases that were captured by Google thanks to its "different" format. Competing guides on other sites often used nothing more than brief descriptions and a map.

    4. The best articles and guides have content that users will return for.
    My last guide, The Fastest Ways to Level in Skyrim, features neither an easily searchable name, nor something that isn't offered elsewhere. However, the sheer size and amount of content the guide contains makes it highly unlikely that any user will sit and read everything in one sitting, much less absorb all of the information. People often find the guide by searching for one specific skill, read the related section, and then leave. If they believe the information they saw was good, they will return for more later either by bookmarking the page or searching for it next time specifically. This particular article has relatively little "search juice," and instead gets most of its traffic from returning visitors.

    5. Building links on related sites will improve the number of hits a guide receives both directly through in-bound traffic, and indirectly through an improved search ranking on search engines.
    One of our most popular guides, Master Conjuration, Smithing, and Enchanting is the beneficiary of a rather prolific attempt by me to build a following from other sites. I posted numerous links to it on other Skyrim forums, as well as dozens on questions related to the subject on Yahoo Answers. As a result, the guide had a lot of traffic despite having a horribly generic name, poorly organized (although substantial) content, and a low search engine ranking.

    6. Timing matters! Write your guides when the subject is popular.
    The How to Get Married in Skyrim guide explored a pretty self-explanatory subject. Not many people legitimately had problems, nor needed help, with marriage in Skyrim. However, due to the popularity of the game the guide still had very high returns initially. Though the hits have waned with the popularity of Skyrim, it was still well worth it to write.






    "Skyrim" as a trending search query on Google.

    The above graph features Google searches involving the term "Skyrim." As you can see, there's clearly a peak time where content related to that search query is going to be more popular. Timing your articles to match up with peaks in the popularity of an issue is one of the most important steps you can take. You want your articles to be indexed in search engines before there's a surge in traffic; being a day late and a dollar short will yield little in terms of results, even if the quality is there in other areas.
    Summary
    Choose a unique or controversial subject.
    Title your article what you feel you would do a Google search for in-order to find such content.
    Build your article with unique content that people won't be able to find elsewhere.
    You can't have success with articles if you don't write articles!

  12. David
    Always Have a Large Contrasting Title To Get People's AttentionIt would appear as though I am the only one updating their blog regularly. With that said, I should be finishing an 8+ page paper that's due tomorrow instead of writing this... But hell, this is more interesting. I'll also mention that I failed my last organic chemistry exam due to a lack of preparation, largely the result of my failed attempt at keeping you guys moderately entertained on this website for 5 minutes.
    But yeah, I'm not mad no one else is blogging or anything. I'll just keep on self-sacrificing. ಥ_ಥ
    That whole rant was just an attempt to use that smiley in some relevant manner.

    Statistics!Hm, yes. Everyone loves bar charts and line graphs. I'm not sure if I'm just simply feeble-minded or if it's the colors, but I'll be damned if they aren't gorgeous little nuggets for my brain. Anyways, I won't disappoint you...





    Click to enlarge.

    This first image I'll be sharing happens to depict the growth of Elder Souls over a period of about four months, from January 1st to April 4th. The specific metric featured is called "Visits", which as explained by Google...
    So basically, this means that half of these "visits" are probably just my constant appearances on the site... Though I usually don't even get 30 minutes in between my numerous check-ups, so this chart is at least somewhat legitimate. Probably.
    There are some interesting things to take away from this chart.
    The first arrow depicts the time that I ran out of money in Adwords, so paid traffic ceased to exist. Prior to this, the site was getting almost no traffic organically via search engines. I'm sure the large drop-off that the arrow is pointing at paints the picture relatively well. What's surprising, is the steep climb in traffic that appeared shortly after this at the end of January.
    Arrow 2 shows the period of 1-2 days that the site was offline. Though the number of unique visitors remained constant, visits did take a hit as you can see. One can assume this was due to people not coming back after they realized we were down.
    Ah, arrow 3. My favorite arrow. This happens to be the statistically best day our site has ever had as far as traffic is concerned, amassing 483 unique visitors. Unique visitors corresponds to the number of individual IP addresses that visit the site a day, so it's a less biased metric that "visits." That should accurately portray the number of people that came to the site, give or take those that used multiple devices (e.g. computer and phone).

    Need moar bar graphz.





    Holy shitstistics.

    The above graph represents totals over the 4 month range noted above. Not bad for a new site, eh? Here are some brief explanations for the more vague terms you're seeing...
    Page views: This field indicates the total number of pageviews for your site when applied over the selected dimension. For example, if you select this metric together with Request URI, it will return the number of page views over the returned result set for the Request URI for your report
    Bounce Rate: The percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page).
    New Visits: The number of new visits by people who have never been to the site before.

    Unlike TRR (which had 90%+ Returning Visitors), ES is largely comprised of new users.

    Search Engine QueriesBut... how exactly do people find the site? Our main source of traffic is known as organic traffic, comprised primarily of visitors from search engines. Here's a small excerpt of a few searches people used to find content on the site.





    As entertaining as always.

    Redneck boobs. The lewdness of internet users never disappoints.
    Y u no comment?
  13. David

    A Few Site Changes

    By David,

    I'll just quickly detail and explain a few changes on the site I worked on this weekend... Instead of studying for the exam that's either going to make or break my life coming up on Tuesday. Ah well, that is life.

    General BadasseryJust couldn't think of a better catch-all term in all honesty, so I wrote the first thing that came to my head. If I'm right it's going to be almost the only thing displayed in the excerpt on the index, so I bet it'll get me a few cheap clicks. Suckers.
    Article Updates

    All of the articles previously had a pretty ugly and meaningless "Closing Message." I've edited the templates of the site itself to eliminate the need for having to write this into the articles. Instead, every article automatically appears with the above message to guests (members again don't have to view it). It's the standard "Join Us/Ask Questions" deal, except in a much nicer and automatic format. Most of you won't care (if any of you), but it's really quite cool when you think about how it's integrated only for certain member groups. Hint: Write some damned articles!
    Guest Permisions
    Guests can now comment on articles, gallery images, and (depending on what you choose as bloggers) blogs! Hopefully this results in a lot more external input from the people that view our site but never post.
    TRR Guest Message
    TRR also has its own guest message, only slightly edited from the ES one shown under the Different Ad Types image. I'm looking for someone to point out 4-5 good TRR-related reasons for creating an account, and after that happens I'll continue to change it.

    AdvertisementsI've taken some time to update the ads located on the site. As members, these changes will result in you seeing far fewer advertisements, as coding changes have enabled me to display the majority of them to guests only.
    Advertisements per Group
    Normal members only see the following advertisements as of now...
    Board Footer
    Sidebar of Index

    Premium Members and staff are still exempt from all advertisements. Guests see everything.
    Color Palette Changes

    As you can see, the new color layout contrasts much more with the rest of the site. I'm experimenting with these effects and seeing how large of an impact they have on views and clicks.
    Different Ad Types

    As I'm sure some of you have noticed, the long and narrow advertisements have largely disappeared from the top of every page. Instead, I've changed the guest message to display larger square advertisements instead of the old ES logo. The main benefit being less advertisements users with accounts have to stare at, since generally the people that are actually interested in ad content are people that are browsing from Google or elsewhere as guests. Hence including it in the guest message none of you see.
  14. David
    Annnd if you're reading this, it means you've mistakenly chanced your way upon the new blog I'll be occasionally updating. I've decided that I can't constantly harp at you users about getting involved with all of the site's features without following my own advice... So, here I am. With a blog! Hint: Make your own.
    Anyways, this blog is where I'll post various analysis, issues, and events concerning ElderSouls.com. It's not replacing the News and Announcements forum. Rather, this is a place where I'll delve into some hopefully interesting statistics, and potentially humorous search results stamped with my trademark sarcasm.
    Speaking about that, I couldn't hold my favorite search query from today to myself...
    Of course, I couldn't let our poor guest down without giving him what he came for... So thanks to hours upon hours on photoshop, I'm pleased to announce that ElderSouls.com now has its own official pair of Taylor Swift legs! Now there will be something here waiting for people who search for such a thing. Enjoy!


    Coming next week... The "katy perry tits" search keyword. Don't worry, Google, I gyb!





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