Year In Review 2005: ImAFish

ImAFish 7

I had been getting fed up of ImAFish 7 for a couple of months but wasn’t really sure what direction to take the site in. As ImAFish was more for the articles and my sub site was for personal writings people were getting confused and large areas of the site hadn’t seen content changes in months. I had got lazy when it came to writing articles mainly because of how long a good in-depth article takes to write in order to draw visitors in.

I knew something had to change so I went about merging ImAFish and my sub site together. I wanted to show a more personal side to ImAFish especially how popular blogging had become and how it was acceptable for someone’s blog post to form an article.

ImAFish 8

I came out with an early version of ImAFish 8 at around Easter time but most of it used the same code from prior ImAFish versions, the articles and blog sections lacked basic features that I needed to go forward.

ImAFish 8 had a good start but it seemed unfinished, the backend required loads of coding and I was more interested in producing content rather than writing code. The answer came to me one day when I came across Boastology, a free blogging script that you could install on your site then customize to your needs. It contained everything from RSS feeds to user management and the ability to make custom templates.

I imported all my blog posts into the script but soon realized it would be perfect for the articles too, this proved to be quite a bit more work to import one database to the other but after a lot of effort everything worked well.

I created my own template based on the ImAFish 8 design so that the Blogs looked and felt part of ImAFish and soon we had a small dedicated group blogging away.

Gallery

With ImAFish 7 I had a small gallery script I wrote in PHP that was pretty lame, it was ok for hosting a few pictures but wasn’t very scaleable and lacked many useful features.

For ImAFish 8 I decided to find a gallery script online, after some careful looking I came across LinPHA, a full gallery management system that would resize and syndicate images for me.

After using it for a few months I decided it was using too much disk space and bandwidth so I decided to get a Flickr account and upload all my photos there. It’s still not ideal but when you have 2gb of photos (and growing) Flickr is ideal, you just don’t have much control over advertising and page layout.

Hacked

In October the forum got hacked and defaced, unfortunately it caused a bit of damage with user ranks however luckily no posts of user accounts were damaged. The forum has done well in the past year however has not seen much growth.

Advertising

Finally this Christmas I have been trying to improve the advertising revenue from the website by tweaking various pages. ImAFish has come along way in the past year and is a much better site than it was a year ago.

Now ImAFish has a good base I want to concentrate on content, we have some great media pieces from the past year and hopefully in the next year we can build on these. I have an article mostly written as well hopefully brining more people to ImAFish.