Website priorities

So, after my epic fail with my new Fancy Lala fanlisting (I didn't get it done in time, so it got removed from The Anime Fanlistings), I decided to focus on getting my existing websites shipshape.

The problem? I have 8 of them. That's right, EIGHT. Well, nine if you count the one-page domain hub for starry-dreamer.net (starrydreamer.net). Not to mention the various projects past and present on my web design portfolio site (every piece there is live), this blog, and another Blogger blog I'm working on (and which I will reveal soon - though if you've read my Blogger profile in the last month or so, you already know about it, since it's hosted on the same Blogger account as this blog).

Two of these 8 sites are fanlistings which only need to be updated every couple months to satisfy TheFanlistings.org rules. And if I can finally figure out a PHP fanlisting management script setup for those sites, that process will be easier to do. Even though I took a class in PHP, I still have trouble understanding the code for those scripts. ^_^ Anyway, these two sites are Come Fly with Me (a fanlisting for the TV show Pan Am) and Singing Soldiers (a SeraMyu fanlisting and a subdomain of my SeraMyu fansite Myu Corner). So hopefully those sites won't be much of a problem.

Most of my sites are under my personal domain, starry-dreamer.net. That base URL simply hosts a Flash page I made with stars featuring the various subdomains of that domain. I need to make a non-Flash version of that page for mobile. The domain is referred to as The Starry-Dreamer Galaxy. The "stars" of the Galaxy are: Come Fly With Me, Liquid Mercury, and Ayeka's Palace (which hasn't been moved to the galaxy yet).

Other than that, I have my author site, my web design portfolio, Myu Corner, and my new website PokéSideGames.com, a website devoted to Pokémon side and spin-off games. For a total of eight.

And, unfortunately, I am even more insane than that, because I am planning another site for a near future release. This site would be a complete redo of my planned PGSM fansite Sparkle Moon and would focus only on providing transcripts, my original intention for Sparkle Moon being that it would house PGSM transcripts, something that has been missing from the Internet since the fansite Shingetsu-PGSM went down. But now that the new anime is on its way, plus the fact that my friends at Miss Dream are almost done translating all the PGSM episodes, I have expanded this idea to include transcripts for each PGSM episode from both the TV-Nihon sub (the fansub of PGSM that most fans are familiar with) and Miss Dream's subs, as well as...*drumroll* TRANSCRIPTS OF THE NEW ANIME! Yep, I am going to attempt that. The scripts will come from the simulcast (assuming the simulcast has subs, which considering it's going to be supposedly simulcast worldwide, I'd be really surprised if it didn't) and from Miss Dream's subs (since they've already come out and said they are going to fansub the new anime). Why two sets? Well, for comparison's sake really. Plus, the site will feature transcripts of the PGSM omake segments and the Pin Spot interviews, which not even Shingetsu has!

This project is already begun; I have transcripts written up for Acts 1-3 of PGSM (which I did a while ago when I tried to make a HTML version of Sparkle Moon for a school project), for two of the Pin Spot interviews (Azama Mew and Komatsu Ayaka), and for the "Make Up!" special that aired a week before the series started. These are all based on TV-Nihon's subs though, so I still have to do the Miss Dream versions. But it's progress!

I still have to actually MAKE the site these will be on though. I suppose I could use a CMS for this (to take off the coding burden for the most part). But I am wary of using a CMS. One, because I don't know how to make a CMS look custom. Then again not a lot of people do - heck, there are people who get PAID just to create customized Wordpress blogs/sites (one of the girls in my Web Design 3 class did this for a living). And two, because I am at a stage where I would like to enter the web design industry, and thus I would like to prove my skills to potential employers. (Especially since I got a C in Portfolio Development, which means, from my teacher's POV anyway, something about my portfolio site must suck, cause I worked REALLY HARD in that class - with that and my other two classes, I literally had no life for the last 2-2 1/2 months of the semester). I suppose I could try to incorporate a JavaScript slider and stuff. And maybe a MySQL database for the transcripts themselves - well actually no, MySQL still stumps me. I was supposed to use it in my final project for my Dynamic Web Development class and it didn't work out. (Which reminds me - the video tutorials for that class, which I downloaded so I could have them for future reference, are currently trapped in Megaupload hell...I uploaded them there for backup purposes when I was rebooting my laptop, and now I can't get them back...grr). I don't know, I'll have to think about it.

Then there is my huge project known as The Anime Guides Database. This is barely started and probably won't debut for a little while. It's essentially a wiki for spoiler-free episode guides for anime series (and eventually anime films - both those based on series and standalones - and manga series). It will, hopefully, finally satisfy the desire I've had since I first got into anime 14 years ago to make a site that really encompassed all my anime/manga interest (well, ALL my interests really, not just my anime/manga interest, but I tried personal sites for that in the past and they didn't work out). And, being a wiki, I won't have to do all the content creation work, because a wiki is, by definition, collaborative.

The reason this won't debut for a while is that I know nothing about running a wiki, let alone writing for one. I wasn't even going to make it a wiki at first; I was going to make it a site with a forum attached to it through which people could submit stuff, similar to how Miss Dream used to be set up. But when I ran this by my friends on the Miss Dream staff a while back, they said a wiki would be a better idea. So, since they seem to be more web design-savvy than I am, I am going to take their advice and do a wiki instead. Most likely I will use Wikia or MediaWiki for this, since the existing fan wikis on the net (Wikimoon, Wookiepedia, Bulbapedia, etc) usually use one of those two methods.

So what I intend to do is to join some of the anime-based fan wikis - Bulbapedia, the Precure fan wiki, etc - as well as maybe similar fan wikis like the Winx Club wiki and the Avatar the Last Airbender/Legend of Korra wiki. As just a writer/participant. So I can learn the ropes. And also possibly make friends I can then invite to be part of my wiki in the future. Besides this, I did some research and found books on the subject, which I intend to find again & re-consult.

So at some point I may have 10 sites to take care of. Am I insane? Yeah probably. And it'll only be worse if/when I get a job as a designer and have client work to do too. I read somewhere that potential employers like it if you do personal web projects because that shows them you're self-motivated or something. But it will still be a lot of work.

I have been thinking of making sites for my planned Music Land Maestress, Sailor Grimm, and Enchanted Supermarket stories too. But I may make sites for those using website builders like Wix, since they're likely to be small sites. If I feel the need to make them bigger later, I can do that and host them on my own domain. Music Land Maestress I want to do first since I've decided to make it my NaNoWriMo project this year, and NaNo is coming up pretty soon (1st of November). That is if you can put your writing up at such a place...I don't know how NaNo works exactly cause I've never actually done it before. The other two sites, therefore, will come later. Especially since I'm starting to think I should take Gina Biggs's advice and seek out an artist partner for Enchanted Supermarket (since that's intended to be a web comic). As for the Sailor Grimm story (whose actual title is "Soldier of Hameln"), I need to at least finish Grimm's profile soon (by Halloween) so whoever gets me in the Secret Santa thing I entered Grimm in on DeviantArt will have something to go off of for his/her drawing.

I wrote priority lists for my website work, based on to-do lists I wrote up back during my vacation in August, on the one day I went and hung out at the CSUSM library for several hours to fight my boredom without spending a lot of money and also get some work done. I will try to get on it tomorrow (or today I guess).

I did pray about this the other day. I just felt a prompting to do it. I don't know where it came from. So I did, and I felt less anxious. Well, until I started writing this post and realized I am probably insane. But hopefully this will be a learning experience for me to get me to trust God more. We'll see.

Well it's late. Good night!