Late Night Fiction

Now that I’m in college, things have been changing. Mostly old habits, but one thing that will change is my sites. And by that, of course, I mean FlashStuf. It’s always been geared at my own age bracket, and a quick demographics report courtesy of quantcast.com confirmed that the teen crowd is really who my site attracts. Well, I think it’s about time for a change so I’m starting to, continuing over the next few months/years, move up an age bracket into the “young adult” audience for FlashStuf and out of the teen audience. How I’m going to do that isn’t quite obvious after only two days on my own, but that is the direction I’m headed in.

If you are a FlashStuf visitor or have some ideas that could really take us in this direction, just drop a comment.

Life FlashStuf, internet

I’ll be heading to the Outer Banks today for the next week, so there won’t be any updates to FlashStuf and probably no new posts either until I get back. However, as you might’ve noticed from my last post, I can make posts from my phone now; so if I come across anything worthwhile, you all shall be the first to know (or, second).

Personal FlashStuf, vacation

Well, relatively long. If there was one thing that has been consuming my free time in the past few weeks or so, it’d be Futurama. I recently, er– discovered –all 72 episodes so I’ve been spending what time I don’t spend interacting with the outside world, watching Futurama.

But otherwise I’ve been gathering some much-needed energy to finally finish the next major release of my Easy Site Package. I’m aiming to have it done by mid-August, but if not it’ll be September at the latest.

As for FlashStuf, I went wild on it today, fixing up the broken registration form (no new users for two months?– OH!) and making a fully mobile version of FlashStuf Profiles, with a few fixes to the desktop site. However, I’m making yet another (hopefully the last) blog for FlashStuf.com and the development I do on it. It’ll also be open to contributors, for the one day that we finally decide to expand. Anyways, it will be at blog.flashstuf.com, hopefully soon (once the subdomain finally clears– I think 1and1 is having problems today).

Personal FlashStuf, Matt Baer Design

Apparently, according to websiteoutlook.com, FlashStuf is worth $3,774.10! I’ve seen the regular stat and demographic sites, but one placing an actual value on a site.. Well that’s pretty cool. You can check out the details here, and look at the value of any site, such as the apparently $1.2 billion Google.

Internet FlashStuf

You know, the biggest confidence booster is when you have something you’ve created, can share with the world, and it is something people actually like. The regular people. The everyday bloggers from anywhere in the world. Seeing a link to my site is like getting a high-five just for being damned awesome.

And it doesn’t even matter I’m not at the status of the big-leaguers. The Game Sloth’s, the ABS’s, that doesn’t matter to me. I’m content with my couple-thousand visitors a month. The numbers don’t even make a difference to me because in that sea of thousands I have some loyal fans, and a lot of ones I don’t even know about. And just the fact that they’re there makes it all worth the while. I know a few good people like what I serve with FlashStuf and well if not, I get a good enough amount to where I can mess around all I want and still get it out to 20,000 or so in a month. It doesn’t get much better than that.

Thoughts FlashStuf

You can even have Firefox 3 launch FlashStuf Mail whenever you click an email link on the web. To do it, first log in to your account, and then paste this code in the address bar of that tab (and hit Enter):

javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler(”mailto”,”https://mail.google.com/a/flashstuf.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s”,”Gmail”)

Click Add Application, and you’re all set! To keep it this way, simply click an email link and then pick Gmail, and check “Remember my choice for mailto links” (you can change this option at any time through your Firefox preferences).

Technology FlashStuf, Software, tricks

I’ve set up a service that allows you to check that latest content on FlashStuf through text messages. All you have to do is text FLASHSTUF to 41411 and you’ll get a list of the newest content.

I’ve yet to really dig deeper to see all the things I can do with it, but I’m planning on making it a little more in-depth and adding things like polls and other interactive features.

Internet FlashStuf

Now that I have a computer again I’ve gotten back to working on my Matt Baer Design CMS package. So, at the same time my focus is moving away from FlashStuf, unfortunately. I can develop it locally now as well (making it a lot easier and to make changes and add features), but it’s becoming less of a priority as it’s been developed enough to run by itself. Besides adding new things, the only thing needed to keep FlashStuf going is new content and new users. So really, that leaves me with taking care of adding any new content submitted manually.

It’s also summer for me. I “officially” finished high school yesterday, and now I’m pretty much left to my own means until college in the fall. And being unemployed since the beginning of last week, well, I’d say I have all the time in the world to do all these things I do. So all in all, even though FlashStuf is moving towards the bottom of the to-do list, I’ll have plenty of time to finish this package up to the status that FlashStuf is, at which point I can move back to what the “viewers” want, and get working on FlashStuf again.

Projects FlashStuf, Matt Baer Design

It seems nowadays that people don’t always know how to follow the rules. Or rather, that there’s a lack of respect for them. You could argue they were born not knowing those rules and they “don’t know better;” or that they just never learned of or that there are consequences to certain actions. Or maybe they know of those consequences, but just decide that they’re insignificant or they’ll get to slide.

Whatever the case may be, it’s a shame people see things this way in everyday life. I was listening to a country song yesterday; in it, one of the many lyrics “we don’t lock our doors, when we leave the house” to which I responded “you don’t live on the east coast”– half-way just being funny but the other half being serious. Because although I’ve never had someone break into my house or steal something out of it (that was a lie, a worker who was building the extension on our house stole my mom’s class ring that was sitting out), it happens everyday. Now, everyday in the sense that it is commonplace, as commonplace as say, teenagers getting into accidents. And at least to me, it just seems like there’s an “I can get away with it” mentality among the masses.

Now by running an entertainment website, you basically open up a public playground. People can bring their children and sit and enjoy, socialize, see the scenery. Those children can also play among the equipment and enjoy hopping around and such. But it’s not only the parents and small children that visit the playground, kids of all ages can. And being a playground, there is no supervisor to make sure you abide by the 4 feet or smaller rule. Anyone and everyone has free reign (until the cops get called, but that’s later). Oh, and those cameras sitting idly by on the wall? Oh pay no attention.

Read more…

Life 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.

Internet development, FlashStuf