The status of FlashStuf
FlashStuf has become more and more difficult to maintain with the same methods I’ve been using all these years. All the coding, updates, and news (to name a few) is done manually, by me typing it all in. Now I’ve been spending all of my free time in the last few months on a complete site package that’ll allow anyone to maintain a full-blown website. What it does is gives you a pretty text editor to edit your files with, and the rest is taken care of. On the other hand, when I want to add a new animation on FlashStuf, for example, I have go through an unnecessary amount of manually-editing steps:
I start by creating the movie/game viewing page, using a program I created in Flash to generate the code. I then move on to a PHP script I created to generate a commenting-, relative-date- enabled news entry, and open my home page file and paste that in under the news section. I copy and paste in a new line item under the Newest Content section, subbing in the title, artist, and page info. I then have to update the full list of all the site flash content (the games or movies page), and right now if it’s a big artist’s work, I add a link to their page as well. Oh, and did I mention the RSS feed?
What I’m getting at here is the beauty of automation, especially when tailored to the needs of a specific site. When I created FlashStuf over 4 years ago, I had not planned for the extensive collection of content it would eventually become– manually updating the site on a regular basis was completely doable. But now that it has grown, there needs to be a more efficient way to maintain it if I want to keep all our loyal visitors. So, once I’m done with my biggest time-consumer of a website package, I’ll be re-designing FlashStuf, inside and out.
However, with all these changes, there’s just one thing that I’m stuck on and that will never change about FlashStuf– it’ll never become a portal-like website, such as Newgrounds. As great as it is to submit your work and have it on the internet instantly, I think a lot can be said about how difficult it can be to find flash content that instead seems to come and go like a fad. The biggest thing I want for FlashStuf is to have a great collection of content that will always have a home here, and always be easily available to anyone, even those not trying to stumble upon it.
