Site Updates

Nichiren 03/09/10 8:54 AM - Implemented temporary shoutbox from Shoutmix until I build my own. Shoutmix is too limited.

Nichiren 03/08/10 10:44 PM - There was a problem with deleting stories that has been resolved. User was unable to delete stories. Also fixed sidebar so that if the user is not logged in and clicks on any of those links, the user will be redirected to the login page.

Nichiren 03/06/10 2:58 PM - Added a latest videos section on the homepage but made everything customizable by the user as to what shows up on the homepage. Also tweaked the DB tables to use composite keys where it made sense to do so. Tweaked banning a little bit as well as the moderation system.

Nichiren 03/02/10 11:23 AM - Updated the Winglin importer to allow the user to import a story that already exists in the user's directory. The imported story would simply overwrite the old story. Added a who's online section on the homepage as well as a link in stories to view who has subscribed to it. Finally gave in and put in the ckeditor in the edit profile section. I also moved all the site images and css files to S3 while grabbing the minified jquery file from the Google CDN.

Nichiren 03/01/10 9:08 AM - Winglin is back up today! Just marking it here to see how much traffic will dip from now. Re-tested and made a fix to the Winglin importer and set the timeout limit to six minutes instead of the previous three. The navigation has been re-styled due to user reports that it was being completely ignored and one thought it looked like an ad. Also made a fix so that chapters can also have embedded youtube videos. Need to keep in mind that once users start putting in auto-playing music, I'll need to code to disable those.

Nichiren 02/27/10 6:56 PM - Fixed minor errors and warnings. Changed the layout and style of the buttons in the profile, authors, and subscribers/subscriptions views and added a View Subscribers button in the profile.

Nichiren 02/26/10 8:53 PM - Enabled story backup feature in story foreword page. Browse users and who's online now uses divs exclusively. Added a "characters" field and displayed it in all story indexes. Stylized edit and delete links. Finally re-did the view counter. Browse by views actually seems slower now for some reason but at least I record the total views in the story now. Implemented the ability to find out who is subscribed to a user (only on sidebar). Also changed all html entity decodes to use UTF-8 and ENT_QUOTES.

Nichiren 02/25/10 9:38 PM - New layout for story tables (namely, no more tables). Slightly revamped the home page too. All of which should lessen the amount of html being sent to the user.

Nichiren 02/24/10 10:43 AM - Re-ordered chapter numbers with their respective stories to make more sense and added the ability to use the main story image for all chapters. Also, now using chatango at the homepage and in chat but it has issues like disallowing you from using the same temporary name when you leave the page.

Nichiren 02/23/10 2:42 AM - Streamlined user roles and removed unnecessary queries. Still need to hunt for more unnecessary queries (if any). Note to self: you really should get some sort of unit or automated testing going on here.

Nichiren 02/21/10 10:26 PM - Made more speed tweaks today. Trimmed down the profile section and replaced long character strings in profile story descriptions since those broke the layout, removed unnecessary user fields, and tweaked the comment queries. Also gave myself the ability to ban users.

Nichiren 02/20/10 9:52 PM - Added ability to subscribe to a story and get alerts for whenever a new chapter is added. Also made featured stories change every weekend instead of set days of the month which would be easier to maintain going forward. Also renamed "Favorite" sections to "Subscriptions", displayed the number of subscribers to a story in the foreword section, marked all completed stories as "completed!" in the story title, unmarked email alert fields of users whose emails are invalid, moved search box from sidebar to banner, and changed the default browse index for views to 24 hours instead of "All Time". Spent the rest of the day making speed improvements by restricting description sizes, optimizing sql queries, using less php to parse text, and removing unnecessary javascript (local time conversion). Most speed tweaks were done in the home page and the browse pages and I've so far brought down the average memory footprint of the site from 100 MB to 30 MB in Chrome. Need to wait and see if it holds.

Nichiren 02/19/10 6:59 PM - The chat section was having problems so I changed the chat to use the shoutbox instead.

Nichiren 02/18/10 8:02 PM - Implemented profile views today.

Nichiren 02/17/10 11:29 PM - At long last, I finally decided to implement "Previous" and "Next" links for each chapter of a story. AznNews4U suggested the feature months and months ago and it was Dolce that reminded me about it. Hope it doesn't cause too many problems. Also, the Browse button on the nav now points to an alphabetical listing of all stories on the site.

Nichiren 02/06/10 9:56 PM - Finished the Winglin story importer. Made some changes to how stories are created and chapters are added to accomodate the importer so watch out for any errors in these areas.

Nichiren 02/02/10 3:10 AM - Changed FCKEditor to CKEditor to try and mitigate a reported issue where the user was unable to type into the story body. Still need to monitor if this solution is successful.

Nichiren 01/27/10 7:36 PM - Made a MASSIVE update today to ALL of the pages on the site to clean up HTML/CSS code so Nichi, if something doesn't look right, refer back to this date! I also just realized that the new tagbox will always cause me to fail the HTML 4.01 Strict standard =(

Nichiren 01/21/10 3:06 AM - Managed to trim the global css file by 7 KB. This makes me happy. I could minify it but it's a PITA to make quick changes. Added a tagbox in the sidebar using a thirdparty tagbox service (this should be kinder to my bandwidth than using one of my own). Also fixed a bug in the browse users section where there were multiple results being returned for the same profile.

Nichiren 01/14/10 12:08 AM - Ugh. I just found out that one of the images hasn't been linked properly for over a month now. There has to be a way to test for these things. Anyway, I just added the ability to un-favorite. I'm surprised I left that out of the original plan.

Nichiren 01/12/10 5:10 PM - First dev update for the new year! I made a minor overhaul to the browse user section so that users can be more easily found by the first letter of their usernames. The default sort order for the main user page is now by most recent login time. I've also made image verification checks in the view pages for the profile and story pages. The verification already exists when a user first enters their image but sometimes, those images are taken down for one reason or another so they end up showing up as broken images on the site hence the need of image verification on the fly. I could not implement this in the browse user section and the gallery, however, since it increased page load times dramatically. I just might have to write a script that periodically checks everyone's images and automatically removes bad links but that's something I'll have to think about some more.

Nichiren 12/19/09 9:46 PM - Finally got to make an update after a month (apparently 10 minutes short of a month) and what an update it is. The gallery section is up and it should be a good update for people who like to read books based on the cover. I also fixed the image validation for the stories to prevent broken image links. Apparently I only had it in place for the profiles and not the stories. Oops. Hope this update is problem free.

Nichiren 11/19/09 9:56 AM - I'm sick today so this is one of those rare mid-day updates. Made static domains for images to parallelize downloading of static elements. Also consolidated and minified the major stylesheets and moved most of the javascript calls to the bottom of the pages. These were all done to try to increase page loading speed. The larger images in the affiliates section are also gone now to conserve bandwidth. Fixed bug in profile section due to karma points and decided to htmlencode the about me and interests profile areas. Finally, added .htaccess hotlink protection to site images (except affiliate banners of course).

Nichiren 11/16/09 12:19 AM - I've tweaked the featured story picker algorithm a bit and it also now disallows a user to become the featured story more than once within a 5 week period. I've also implemented a karma point system to help users quantify their chances of becoming the next featured story as well as hopefully bolster the number of comments made on this site. I've also placed the most popular tags on the front page.

Nichiren 10/09/09 11:00 PM - Made a few minor design tweaks yesterday to make the look more uniform across the site (same font, color, etc - see sidebar). Video tagging is now fully functional and works similarly to story tagging. I think all these changes should tide me over for a while until I get another crazy idea in my head.

Nichiren 10/07/09 11:34 PM - Implemented the browse by tags area of the video section. Should be easier to find categorized videos now. I just need to add the ability for users to add and remove tags for a video and the whole thing should be set.

Nichiren 10/05/09 12:43 AM - I made changes to the video section so that the submitter or moderator can edit the video details. Also, changed the banner image as well as other minor design tweaks since I realized that my bandwidth utilization more than doubled since I instituted the last banner image. I think it looks a lot cleaner now too.

Nichiren 10/04/09 12:21 AM - I managed to put up a new videos section. Not my best work coding-wise (I was getting tired) but I think it works pretty well. Some adjustments still need to be made. It's taking a lot longer than I thought but this'll be done soon. Hope people like it.

Nichiren 09/17/09 10:42 PM - It's been almost a full month since the last time I've updated this page and that's probably both good and bad. Good because it probably means that I'm starting to get to the point where I'm satisfied with the site and bad because it probably means that I'm also getting lazy. Either way, I set up a new affiliates section that should be filled up soon (hopefully) and a bit of a new design with the banner designed by aznews4u. Also started advertising a bit through AdWords. Hoping to break 300 users by the end of the year!

Nichiren 08/18/09 10:29 PM - I went over the "slow query log" and it seems that the overwhelming majority of slow queries originate from the home page. I think I've tracked the cause down to the fact that I display whether or not the author of each story is online as indicated by the asterisk next to the name. The reason for this is that the query returned duplicate rows (ex. when the same user is logged in through different browsers/pcs) so I used the sql keyword "DISTINCT" to only return me unique rows but I think that only masked the fact that my query still returned more rows than I really needed. I don't think the login indicator was all that important on the homepage anyway so it is now off production. I still left that indicator on the user profile though.

Nichiren 08/16/09 3:15 PM - Implemented member spotlighting on the front and profile pages. Maybe it would encourage people to put up avatars of themselves. Either way, it's always nice to put your users in the forefront of everything you do.

Nichiren 08/15/09 9:47 PM - I made a few minor changes since the last update here. Posted updates on this page have been getting fewer these days. Maybe that means I'm almost done (yeah right). Anyway, implemented a password reset feature to head off anymore requests for password retrieval. I couldn't do it anyway even if I wanted to since I one-way hash all the passwords. I also finally placed location fields in the profile section. It took a lot longer than I thought it would but at least I now have ready-made location solutions for my future projects. I'm feeling up for another site redesign but I wish I had some help with it. I still have a few more things to do though before then.

Nichiren 07/19/09 6:56 PM - Implemented ability to search through site using Google's search box. Also made more tweaks to the site ads to make them more appealing. The browse tags section has finally been revamped. I've eschewed a proper tag cloud for a simple table layout sorted in alphabetical order with the story counts next to each tag. Figured it would be easier to search for stories that way. I've also fixed a bug in the registration process where first time users don't show up in the "Who's Online" section.

Nichiren 07/18/09 6:40 PM - Allowed ability to delete comments from stories and walls. Story and profile owners as well as the respective comment owners are allowed to delete these comments.

Nichiren 07/11/09 1:01 AM - Managed to get chat to work a few days ago but it's down now due to some issues that my webhost is dealing with. Unfortunately, they've been having a lot of issues lately and I've been experiencing increading amounts of downtime. I might have to start looking for other webhosts.

Nichiren 07/05/09 2:47 PM - Modified the profile wall a little bit to include a "View all xx comments" link at the bottom. This is to prevent very long comment walls on profiles so I have the profile wall restricted to 20 comments.

Nichiren 07/04/09 11:37 PM - I gave everyone a friends list so people can keep track of the people they know here. I think it's about the right time for one since I'm seeing a lot of friendly users about. Hope this feature helps.

Nichiren 07/03/09 10:26 PM - I changed the way that sessions are handled to give the site a few more capabilities one of which is the ability to determine the login status of a user which should be evidenced by the new "Who's Online" section and the orange asterisks appearing everywhere. Also put in some new validation for story titles that they at least be three characters in length and that the title does not already exist in the system.

Nichiren 06/28/09 8:25 PM - Several new enhancements this weekend. You can now view the comments that you've made in other stories on your profile. Also, you will now be alerted at login whenever you have new comments on any of your stories since you last logged in and the profile page will also indicate which stories have the new comments. Visiting the associated story will no longer cause the story to be marked in the profile page. The new anonymous icons should be pretty obvious as well. Pretty minor stuff really. Still have a few major interesting things in the works. Sometimes there's such a thing as having too many ideas...

Nichiren 06/23/09 10:24 PM - I've made it a requirement that anyone posting a comment must be logged in to do so. This would enforce accountability on statements made and also cut down on spam. Thankfully, these haven't been problems yet but I think it's a good policy going forward.

Nichiren 06/21/09 7:02 PM - Added a sprinkle of Ajax to the front page that would automatically update the latest stories without an explicit refresh. It took a little doing but it's not really a major update since the stories aren't being updated fast enough for it to be useful which is also why I have the refresh rate set at 30 seconds. I'm actually hoping the front page wouldn't hit the auto-refresh too often since it's just a bandwidth drainer. Anyway, all this is really just a precursor to another interesting Ajax add-on that I'm planning on implementing site-wide so stay tuned.

Nichiren 06/20/09 10:54 AM - I changed the editor from TinyMCE to FCKEditor which would hopefully mitigate the issues that some users were having when updating stories. Also fixed a minor bug where a story's "complete" checkbox was not properly being set.

Nichiren 06/17/09 12:44 AM - Just added a browse by users section and fixed a bug in the profile. Slowly getting the fundamentals implemented and it seems like everything is pretty stable. After I get all of the basics done, it's on to the flashy stuff. That should be interesting.

Nichiren 06/12/09 12:35 AM - Implemented the browse by past featured stories section and fixed a bug where the addition and deletion of a tag for a story was not working properly. Also fixed the lack of rounded corners for IE8 a while back. At least IE's as close as they've ever gotten to implementing proper web standards but their newest marketing page irks me (as much as it would any sane web developer). Incidentally, I found this little gem mocking Microsoft's antics. Ironically, the mock page ranks higher on a google search for "IE8 comparison page" than the genuine page itself. I wonder how long it'll be up before it gets taken down.

Nichiren 06/04/09 6:41 AM - Made a quick fix for IE 8. Don't know what to do about the lack of rounded corners now though. Still have to find a fix...

Nichiren 05/31/09 8:37 PM - We will now have a featured story on the front page every 7th, 14th, 21st, and 28th of the month. The featured story is not chosen by anyone (no one human I should say) and is actually picked out through an algorithm I created based on various weighted factors. I can't divulge what those factors are since someone can potentially game the system but I will give the hint that the more active you are on the site, the higher the probability would be that your story would be the next featured story. For example, the amount of times you comment on other people's stories is ranked rather highly (*hint hint*). This feature took a really long time to implement but my hope is that it would get people to talk to each other more and have this place become more like a community of authors instead of just a place to post stories. More updates to come soon!

Nichiren 05/27/09 11:31 PM - Just a quick update tonight for a feature that aznews4u has been asking for: news story commenting! Stop by the news story section when you get the chance and check her stories out! That was pretty much it for the mandatory enhancements on my list. I'm going to start working on a new feature that I'm pretty excited about. Stay tuned!

Nichiren 05/25/09 11:42 PM - If you tried logging in sometime tonight and it gave you an error message, sorry about that! I've finally managed to grab some time off to work some more on asianfanfics.com. I've completely refactored the code for most of the sections in the site to try and make it a lot more maintainable in the future. I've also included a few minor visual tweaks that should help with usability. No one should notice anything drastic but I made some massive changes to code and organization so if anyone notices anything weird (like stuff not showing up!), please let me know as soon as you can!

Nichiren 05/17/09 1:09 AM - Remodeled the news section to actually contain real news (site updates are now under "Updates"). Also fixed IE bug in user profiles.

Nichiren 05/14/09 8:52 PM - Hey guys. It's been a while since I've made an update (I'm swamped with work these days!). I just added a "Completed" section in the "Browse" pages. You should be able to browse those stories that are marked as completed. Thing is, it doesn't seem like anyone's completed a story yet! So if you have any stories, you can mark them completed by editing the foreword or the chapter and there should be a checkbox there to mark your story completed. I also added more security in terms of the users now having to enter their password whenever they delete a story or chapter. In other very unrelated news, I also got hooked into watching one of Rainie's dramas (Miss No Good). I haven't laughed like this for a TV show in a long while.

05/07/09 11:23 PM - Oh Internet Explorer. How I loathe thee. Fixed another IE6 bug today. Just the standard messed up box model. By the way, I implemented a new Browse Views section so you can restrict browsing the views by day ranges. I also see that someone wants a real news section instead of my semi-daily rants on my IE angst. I'll see what I can do about that.

05/03/09 10:48 PM - Busy couple of days. Fixed a few more bugs today mostly regarding the "Most Viewed Stories" section but it's mostly squared away now though and I can thankfully scratch that off my TO-DO list. Exhausted now so off to a nap. Just a few more features to go...

05/03/09 1:29 AM - I've made a large number of updates which mostly concern the browse pages. Obviously, each category is now broken up into their own pages. I've also had to revamp the inner workings of how each story's views are recorded and I ended up temporarily breaking things for a bit but everything should all be fixed now. Please let me know if you manage to find anything that seems out of the ordinary for you. Thanks!

04/29/09 11:06 PM - Added a "Most Commented" section to the browse page and had a friend tweak the logo a little bit because the old one (don't know if you could even call the old one a logo) just looked weird. I'm glad that my list of features is slowly getting implemented and I should have most of them done in just a few days. Maybe then I could actually spend some of my time spreading the word about the site! In the meantime, help spread the word!

04/27/09 10:58 PM - Added a "Most Viewed Stories" section in the Browse page, made some SEO tweaks, tried to adjust the site ads to keep them from displaying those annoying personals (I'm decently sure no one here clicks on those...), and did some minor coding maintenance. All in a day's work. One day when I'm out of bugs to fix and features to implement, maybe my news section would actually be filled with real news! Someday...

04/25/09 2:16 PM - Woo! Redesign! Took me a few hours to figure out a good minimalist layout and I still need a real logo but I think it turned out okay. I still have a lot to do but I'm pretty much out of things to write about. Oh I was watching Dhani Tackles the Globe on Travel Channel the whole time I was redesigning this site. Great show. Maybe that's where I got my inspiration!

04/23/09 10:58 PM - I just made a major overhaul of user profiles yesterday and today. You should now be able to view all of a user's stories on their profile as well as be able to post a comment on their wall (presumably to let them know how awesome their stories are!). Give it a try and feel free to let me know how things are going for you. My username is Nichiren. Keep on writing and I'll have a few more features (and maybe even a site redesign) in store for you sometime soon!

04/20/09 11:04 PM - Sorry Internet Explorer users. Accidentally modified a few files the wrong way and the layouts got messed up in IE for about a day or so. I usually have Firefox, Chrome, or Opera running and I didn't notice the change in IE until someone pointed it out. Hopefully everything is back to normal now. Just out of curiosity, what are the chances I could convince all of you to switch away from IE? Us web devs would be eternally grateful.

04/19/09 6:51 PM - The story tagging process has finally been refined and should be a little bit more intuitive. Adding and deleting tags is now possible from your main story page going forward. At some point in time (when there are more tags), I'll have to make the tag cloud actually look like a tag cloud...

Update 11:32 PM - Figured I'd do a little extra today and give you the ability to enter a main image for every chapter of your story. I'll tweak this a little further in the future but the main reason I kept it to where you have to manually add the image url to each chapter is for the case where you might actually want to have a different main image for that chapter. By the way, I also added a story view counter at the bottom of the foreword page. It counts all the times a user views your foreword and any other chapters of your story.

04/18/09 4:40 PM - I finally got around to figuring out how to convert all of the UTC dates to your local timezones so you shouldn't be seeing "inaccurate" dates and times for your postings anymore! It honestly took a lot longer than it probably should have and it definitely felt like I just hacked it together due to my rusty javascripting skills. Please let me know if your posting times are inaccurate for you via the contact form and I'll try to fix it right away.

In other news, I'm pretty surprised that asianfanfics.com is #3 in the google search for "asian fan fics" and #4 for "asian fanfics" considering we hadn't even been indexed until just a few days ago. It's a testament to google bot efficiency I suppose. Nevertheless, seeing that made me think about SEO and I decided to do at least the very basics in proper SEO work to tweak the results a little more favorably. Search engine rankings don't really interest me too much considering I'm aiming for this site to be passed on through word of mouth but it certainly helps.

04/12/09 11:15 PM - I spent most of today researching flexible and easily customizable forum software and ended up deciding on smf. I'm pretty happy with it so far and the interface has been intuitive for the most part. My only issue now is that you have to re-register again in that forum which is a bit of a hassle. I'll try to figure out a good way to automatically register a user in the forum when they sign up for asianfanfics.com but for now, please feel free to register there as well and let me know your feedback!

04/11/09 - Finally added the contact form I've been wanting to add for a week now. I've also managed to validate most of the site in HTML 4.01 Strict which I'm currently patting myself on the back for. I say "most" since I can't account for invalid html in user generated stories. It was a real PITA.

04/10/09 11:08 PM - Made a lot of bug fixes today. Unfortunately ended up putting a lot of restrictions on story tagging since some issues weren't being handled very well by the program. Also created a news section so I don't clog up the front page with my boring updates! I really hope that that's the last of the bugs and I can finally move on to some enhancements this weekend. A forum would be nice sometime soon...

04/10/09 1:52 AM- Made another change to the layout (both columns on the left now) since I noticed that a lot of your pictures weren't showing properly due to the layout. Hopefully I'll have some time this weekend to add the features that I've been wanting to add. I'll probably ask for help sometime in the future for someone to help design the spot where "AsianFanFics.com" is right now up in the header. It's looking kind of lonely and bare.

04/09/09 12:01 AM- As some of you using IE may have noticed, I've done an overhaul on the page layout and the rounded corners should show now. The main content column in the center is no longer fixed in width so those of you with larger monitors can resize your browsers to get more text on the screen. I made a couple of other tweaks that aren't worth mentioning and I'm planning on moving the right hand column to the left hand side so it doesn't mess with the images you guys post as long as there are no objections. I still have a lot more features and updates planned so stay tuned.

04/08/09 01:48 AM- Just made a few minor but important updates today. I auto-stripped html tags from the short descriptions because stupid me never realized that bad tags in the description would mess up the main page layout. Also, I enabled the ability to comment on stories anonymously (which was more of a pain than it should have been). If there doesn't seem to be any more bugs *crosses fingers*, I'll start working on a contact form so you guys can at least let me know of any bugs on the site, problems you're having, suggestions, or to just let me know what you think!

04/05/09 - Welcome to the newly opened Asianfanfics.com! Asianfanfics.com caters to writers of various different types of fan fiction ranging from celebrity fan fiction to more obscure genres of fan fics and we have specifically designed this site with reliability and ease of use in mind. As writers ourselves, our primary focus is on the author and we seek to make your experience as effortless as possible. Feel free to read more about us here.