Archive For 2011
Majin Planet is one of those anime music video fan pages that has been around since December 13th 1999, started by the former webmaster Majin Mebs. Back then the website was about two things, Dragon Ball Fan fiction and Music Videos. There is a long history with that and one of the biggest sources of drawing in the fans has been I don’t give a crap what you think idea. An evil SOB so to speak.
Back in 2005, the current then webmaster Majin Trunks, decided that I was gonna be the best person to take over running the website. You see Majin Planet had always had this history up to that point of going from one webmaster to the next. The site would go down due to hosting issues and then come back up. It was even released with as new site a few times.
Here I was, taking on the helm of this mega website, I mean the fan base where hardcore, they care about, loved to hate the site. I found that early on I was really looked down on because of the choices and way I ran the site. Which I understand, how would I feel? You know? One thing I always promised Majin Trunks was, that if he ever felt I wasn’t doing the site right he could come take it back. As you can guess that idea got harder and harder for me to really do the longer I had it, and the more I felt like Majin Planet became my site. The site I wish I always had from the start when I started XfireSystems.com in February of 1999.
Such ideals and wants is what lead to what was sort of mis-fire on my part a year ago when I mistaken him on a public forum for wanting to be apart of the site over what I mis-read as “wanting it back” which lead to a few screw ups on my part. Hey you know it happens, people don’t get enough sleep, are stressed out and it’s never a good thing.
In any case all is fine, and I made a promise to myself, the fans and to him that I was gonna bring the site back to the core that it was, Music Videos and revamp the site in the image over the next few months.. here it is a year later and as you can see, the same site still exist and it’s dead. The traffic still comes in some what, but the forums which I moved no longer are active, the emails really don’t come in anymore.. so what to do?
Majin Planet is Dead…
Or..
Is it still alive?
It’s still alive people, and that whats this little post is about, the development of the new site. Which at this moment I will not make any promises that oh yeah sure I can get it done finally by December 13th of this year. No, what I will promise you that I will put all other projects I have on hold, even development of this site to get Majin Planet back full force into the Neckar Unrivaled Network, not as just another sub-site, but as a massive website. Which is the idea. The network ideal is simply something to help me go from one site to the other in the admin panel nothing more. Each site are and will be treated as if they are all on different hosting servers.
Today I’m gonna talk a bit more about a subject that I have had an up and down relationship with over the last I dunno 10 years when it comes to running a website. This goes far beyond your standard what looks good vs what sounds good. There is nothing worst in the world than having to deal with something bad, or even to have something so good but it has nothing to offer, it just looks pretty.
As a webmaster you can learn a lot by looking at content and design as a balancing act. There are some aspects that you need to consider when thinking of the most important parts of your site. This goes to anything you’re doing, we’re your writing a blog about games, writing reviews or sharing stories. The end of the day, your followers will be the ones who decided if your worth a few clicks or their hard earn money to buy your product.
Design vs Content
In truth, you can’t have one without the other. A really bad-looking site will drive people way in the droves BUT if they have the secret to the meaning of life you would never know it. The same could be said for the latter. Even with that there are some things you need to remember when you write your new entry.
- Don’t write post that are simply just a copy-paste ordeal. Never steal someones else hard work! It’s fine to report on news if that’s what your about but try being the first one to post it.
- The biggest mistake most new blogger make is trying EVERYTHING they have and lose focus on what they are doing. Focus on one or a few subjects your good at and go from there. Remember doing too much of any one thing will be more harm than good.
- Sell your content not your ads. It’s fine to try to sell your products if that is what your about, but if your writing a blog your CONTENT is what makes you the money. A good number of blogs are only out there to make money, write to educate.
- Always try to understand your target market and post related to it. Never blog just to feel like your blogging, you lose all respect by doing it.
On the flip side you have design, like anything design is the clue, you can’t have your cake and eat it too. When you think about it like this, if you have a poorly design site, no one will read your content. If you have a good design but poorly written content your just gonna find yourself on the show Lost with no way of knowing if you’ll ever be found.
So then what is the balance? The balance is simple, you need to choose what goes where and how they balance between each other. You need white space to give the human brain time to process, too much if it and it’s like trying to explain physics to a kid with ADD.
Most web users visit a website in under a min, the first look of the site, the top half, your banner, your links, your first header of your latest post for the day is WHAT is the most important aspect of your website. If you can not hook them in that moment, your first impression, you have lost them and its time to move along.
Where to go from here?
Think of your website as a store in a shopping mall. People come to the mall looking to buy, trade or well eat! The same is true for the internet. People come online to either be entertained or informed and to buy. Your goal is one of those, you can try all three if you know how to balance it.
It depends on your market and your target. Clearly if your about history you don’t want to have too many active ads or things that move too much on-screen. This can cause the eye to wonder away, which is how ads work to draw you in to click it.
You may have noticed if your one of the few lucky ones or maybe unlucky to see my website Warcraft Focus Center and ask yourself. “What happen?” Well that’s a good question and it comes down to why I end up closing any website, lack of time, drive and need.
I started the website as sort of way to break Warcraft from my main site here. I was kind of feeling like I was turning this blog into that, which is not what I wanted. I think any blogger out there will tell you, pick on subject and stick to it. Well I like to start about more than just a few subjects. Does that mean I shouldn’t just pick one of them and let the other posts I have go away into nothing? No.
Tell me what you think? Do you think it was a good idea to make this site about so many subjects? Form posting my fan fiction stories about Unrivaled Wars, from posting reviews to post like this. Gaming? Movies? TV? So much.. where to go?
Being lost at Sea
I have a feeling a great number of my readers or those who simply come by and check out whats this site’s about are lost. The name itself doesn’t speak anything to them. Neckar Unrivaled. What does it mean? I know.. I’ve had this question come up and I’ve ignored it. I’ll come out and tell you what Neckar Unrivaled means, and why I pick it for this site’s name.
The idea of the site was about the things I am about. Neckar Unrivaled is a character I made up, for my fan fiction Unrivaled Wars. I know you might find it silly, it’s not my work. It’s a fan fiction. Combing many stories and characters into something that is new and different. To tell a story for the most part. Maybe I’m just not clear, but I’m not a one subject person. I have many passions and things I want to do.
Perhaps this is why I’ve never had a really popular website other than Majin Planet. It was about one thing, Anime Music videos, it did have junk, like the information sections, the contests (not really junk) but it was about music videos. This on itself I believe is why it was such a big website a website I sort of killed without really meaning too.
Does this mean I’m done?
No, I’m still gonna keep making my content and making my post. I’m not going to just stop because I’m not getting the comments, I’m not getting the views I think I should get. Funny thing is maybe my content is getting just what it should get. Something to think about. This is the reason, the reason I closed that website.
Feeling like I needed to fill a hole that was missing, turns out that I really don’t care as much as I wanted to think I did. Which is fine, that happens sometimes and it’s better to just cut my losses then to try to stress myself out. The one tip I can give you about blogger or just writing in general, if its way too hard to write something then you more than likely shouldn’t.
Where does this leave us? Let me know in the comment’s below, I liked to know if you think closing the site before giving it a chance was a good idea. I also like to know what you think of this website. Are you just confused? Lost or what? I like to know any feedback is welcome.
Today’s review is gonna be about Hostgator, web hosting that I have used in the past for my old blog RichardArellano.name and Majin Planet. So you might want to know some basics about web hosting. The first thing I want to tell you, is there is no such thing as ‘unlimited’ anything when it comes to hard drive space and bandwidth. This is something that many web hosting now claim to offer. Mostly in terms of shared hosting, I want to stress this I’m speaking about their shared hosting given that is what I was using.
I want to also point out right off the bat that I’m giving Hostgator a good review, I think that for what they offer they do stand far above the others and would recommend them to anyone. As you can tell I have banner’s up for their hosting, but that’s not to say they don’t have their flaws, like anything as you as the customer looking for hosting can decide.
Hostgator is a privately owned web hosting company founded in 2002. According to Hostgator official claims, they provide hosting service for more than 1,000,000 websites and lead in hosting reseller accounts with over 20,000 resellers.
The biggest feature for any web hosting comes down to quality of their support. My current hosting, Hawkhosting offer really quality support and what’s more is I never EVER have any issues. The main reason I ran into any sort of issue with Hostgator was you can guess, Majin Planet and simply keeping the site online due to traffic.
So what’s so special about Hostgator?
- Reliable server with guaranteed 99.9% uptime
- Host unlimited domain
- Unlimited MySQL and POP3 email account
- Room to grow
- Environment Friendly
You think for the price tags of their servers, there is no way you could really host unlimited like that. Also 99.9% uptime is pretty much just a tag all hosting company have. Because the truth is, if the servers go down, they are down. In any given time frame, within a year’s time if you try to count how many times your server went down, counting downtime they do, installing new software, reboots, etc is it really 99% uptime? I’ll leave that one for you to decided.
In the end, all of this is just being picky and you want start a blog, you don’t want use blogger. Having more control over your content, what you have and the service is far more than anything. That is why I recommend using hosting, even if its cheap hosting. They have a ton of Promotions giveaways and codes, more than any hosting I’ve seen in my early days with DellHost.
Hostgator is a really good host, they give you what you pay for, if your website is small, growing and your just starting out. If your someone who needs something with more power, your likely not looking for shared hosting. They do offer their own servers at a cost but I can’t speak on that. What I will tell the reason I left was due to my website out grew them. You might say they have room to grow, they do but I outgrew shared hosting and I was not willing to pay 200+ a month for a web server when I didn’t feel just in doing so.
Have you ever used Hostgator? I want know what your opinion, so leave me a comment below.
I didn’t get to test out Diablo III at all before its release coming next year. I really wished I would have gotten a Beta Invite, but we can’t always get what we want. I really want to play Diablo III, given I was a big fan of Diablo II. I tell you now I have like five copies of that game.. Given I played, my brother played and his friend played with us. Then I end up losing the copy of the game and after months of not playing, you want play. I don’t know where it’s at? I just pick up another copy of it.
So lets look at this, shall we? Diablo III, whats gonna be new in Diablo 3? Well I can tell you from what I’ve seem read and heard it’s not gonna be very much different from Diablo II. The biggest thing I think is gonna be the Auction House. Something that I play in other games, sort of as a mini-game to the main game itself. I really enjoy it and the one thing that stands out here is you can make money!
The game takes place in Sanctuary, the dark fantasy world of the Diablo series. This world was saved twenty years earlier by a handful of unnamed heroes in Diablo II, heroes who, having survived the onslaught brought by the armies of the Burning Hells, have gone mad from their ordeals. It is up to a new generation of heroes to face the forces of evil threatening the world of Sanctuary.
Players will have the opportunity to explore familiar settings such as Tristram.
Yeah you heard that right.. you’re gonna be able to trade in-game items for real cash. This is gonna be fantastic for me and for you. What this means, is I can make money playing a video game, which I truly believe is gonna change the way we play games. Also I’m gonna be able to trade items with you. If you play Diablo III, I can run contests (Sort of like I’m doing now) and give away rare items or cash.
Contests Giveaways
The best way I think will be that, if you can post an item on the Auction house, sell it to another player I see no reason you can’t trade items in-game for money outside of the Auction house. This on itself just seems like a good idea to me now. At first I thought it wasn’t and really got turned off from the game, but the fun part and what I released, same with the cub pet. Is I don’t have to use it if I want.
There are a few items floating around in my head on how I could give away cash prices or give away just items in-game. I’m not 100% how it’ll be, everything’s done using PayPal so if your planning on picking up Diablo III or if your like me and gonna be getting a free copy.
In any case, I’m gonna try to offer you some in-game items or maybe $5 or $10 bucks for maybe collecting a really rare item in-game. There will be PVP in Diablo III and I look forward to that as well.
What Class?
Well seeing as I generally like to play long-range classes or support/pet classes I think I’m gonna lead out starting with the new class they added in Diablo III, The demon hunter. I don’t know about you, but reading the info about The demon hunter just seems.. that is gonna me. For those of you wondering what the class is here is a short list.
- Combines elements of Diablo II’s amazon and assassin classes.
- Uses crossbows as their main weapon and throw small bombs at enemies.
- Can use arrow skills such as Chain Arrow.
Not too much end up being revealed on the demon hunter or that I can find. In any case, the video they released really got me hooked and this was a bit I think before the talked about the auction house which as I said turn me off. I’m really gearing up to play next year and I think it’ll be fun and different from what I’m doing now.