One Year on The Skyrim Blog

• Posted by Paul April 1, 2012 - 721 views

  So here we are, one year after the site made its first faltering steps onto the Internet on April 1st 2011.

  What a journey it has been. When I started the site it was only ever intended to bridge the gap between then and the launch of Skyrim. It was constructed on a Wordpress installation on (very) cheap UK-based web hosting. I was literally making it up as I went along, because I'm not a programmer and didn't really have a clue what I was doing, having never built a site before.

  In those early weeks it was only Nakia, who I knew from another site, that ever commented - and probably only to make me feel a bit less insecure! It was actually three weeks before we had another commenter stick his head above the parapet - still one of my all-time highlights on the site. Soon after that we caught a lucky break when someone mentioned the site on Bethesda forums, traffic increased overnight and people started throwing in the odd comment. We were underway!

  With the release of Skyrim drawing close the question of what to do with the site came up, especially as the hosting and the software were proving woefully inadequate to handle the levels of the traffic then coming to the site. After a lot of debate and hand-wringing, the transition to the Ning platform took place in mid-October, the new site attracting over 1000 members within a week of going online.

  Of course, activity levels have tailed off since then. That was only to be expected. Where are we now then? Here are the facts of it:

  • we get anything between 3000 and 3400 site visits per day
  • anything between 150 and 200 members login per day
  • over any seven day period about 400 to 500 people log in

  So whilst activity levels have subsided since the crazy days of November we still have plenty of people coming here, and a reasonable amount of activity.

  Naturally, there are always questions about the future. Sometimes the site seems very quiet and this is partly due to our unique design - much of the activity happens in the Groups. Even though we now have the Activity Stream up at the top, it is still somewhat tucked away, and gives the impression that not much is going on. There's nothing we can do about that (other than the Activity Stream) since there is no way to feature Group activity as we can with active Forum threads.

  One possible solution would be to move the site to a Forum-script Platform such as Invision Power, where the Groups could all be dedicated sub-forurms. That cannot be done on Ning, since the forum module is extremely basic and low on features - frankly it is barely a forum at all! But there is a risk involved in that because although we could export the members list and the forum posts, the blog posts would have to be copied over manually and I'm not sure that people like Bilal, Vix and Kynareth are going to want to 'cut and paste' pages and pages of blog posts across.

  However, despite those issues there is a possibility that I might have to go down that route, just to have a site that better reflects 'where we are' nowadays with site activity and the number of active participants.

  Nonetheless, for the time being, it seems we are stuck with Ning. It's not cheap, it doesn't really do what we want, but its what we've got for the time being. Better the devil you know. eh?

  In the meantime one thing that needs to happen is a bit of a 'spruce up' - getting rid of a few inactive groups, tidying the blog section, bringing in some new hosts to replace those who have become inactive on the site etc. I'm going to be working on that this coming week, so if you are currently active on this site and would like to be a host then either get in touch or wait to be asked in coming days.

  Here's to the future...