Swizzle
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Subject: Various Improvements
I've made various improvements to the site over the last two days.
- User accounts can now be requested. Please remember that you do not need an account to view and download all of the games on the site. The accounts are for people who may want to add content to the site, or use advanced features (create their own collections [lists of resources])
- The collections feature is now hidden while using the site as a guest. Having it shared across thousands of visitors made it useless, and the search engines loved to create blank collections (in the hundreds!). Hopefully this will also improve performance when we get large spikes of visitors.
- The "Themes" page (our home page) is now titled Categories to be a little easier to understand for new users.
- Ads: Games being sold on Amazon now have purchase links. If the game is sold on GOG then a purchase link will only display for that site. The Google adsense banner has been removed and replaced with a GOG banner which I will rotate often to keep it fresh. The GOG banner at the bottom of the pages have been removed, and banners will now only display on the game pages and download screen. I'm trying to keep a balance of keeping the ads targeted to what visitors will be interested in and as unobtrusive as possible. Unfortunately, it costs money to run the dedicated virtual server I use and I need to generate some revenue to keep the costs reasonable for me.
- We are currently have around 1,720 resources on the site. I'm hoping to hit 2,000 this month!
I just noticed an additional milestone has been reached - today we passed 100,000 downloads.
- User accounts can now be requested. Please remember that you do not need an account to view and download all of the games on the site. The accounts are for people who may want to add content to the site, or use advanced features (create their own collections [lists of resources])
- The collections feature is now hidden while using the site as a guest. Having it shared across thousands of visitors made it useless, and the search engines loved to create blank collections (in the hundreds!). Hopefully this will also improve performance when we get large spikes of visitors.
- The "Themes" page (our home page) is now titled Categories to be a little easier to understand for new users.
- Ads: Games being sold on Amazon now have purchase links. If the game is sold on GOG then a purchase link will only display for that site. The Google adsense banner has been removed and replaced with a GOG banner which I will rotate often to keep it fresh. The GOG banner at the bottom of the pages have been removed, and banners will now only display on the game pages and download screen. I'm trying to keep a balance of keeping the ads targeted to what visitors will be interested in and as unobtrusive as possible. Unfortunately, it costs money to run the dedicated virtual server I use and I need to generate some revenue to keep the costs reasonable for me.
- We are currently have around 1,720 resources on the site. I'm hoping to hit 2,000 this month!
I just noticed an additional milestone has been reached - today we passed 100,000 downloads.
This post was edited on 2009-10-10, 16:40 by