9 September 2005

Slowly Moving to The UESP Wiki

The past few months have seen the site Wiki (www.uesp.net/wiki) slowly grow to contain the bulk of the existing site as well as some new content. I've added a notice to the top of all pages and hopefully people will start to use the Wiki pages more, and the older static pages less. The site bandwidth and speed seem to be ok so far even though I haven't enabled any sort of caching system for the Wiki. I'll continue to monitor the site stats over the next few weeks/months to see how the increasing load on the Wiki affects things (if at all). If all goes well I'll 'officially' move the site to the Wiki pages, redirect the main page to the main Wiki page, and post a larger 'moved' notice on the pages.

Recent Stats

Recent site statistics (rough values given):

Hits per Day: 100,000
Files per Day: 80,000
Pages per Day: 30,000
Visits per Day: 6500
Bytes per Day: 2.5 GB

We've seen a large increase in the number of daily visits in the past few months (from ~2000 daily visits) likely due to Oblivion.

28 March 2005

The UESP Wiki: Thanks to everyone's suggestions I have setup and started work on the UESP Wiki at www.uesp.net/wiki. It's actually been up for a month or more as we slowly transfer the original pages to Wiki articles and have been making good progress (considering I haven't had much time lately). Feel free to take a peek or create an account and add/edit a few articles if you wish.

12 January 2005

To Wiki, or Not to Wiki: Someone suggested looking at a Wiki based solution for the site. I have actually been thinking about moving towards a wiki format, though mainly for the Tamriel section, but expanding the idea to the rest of the site is intriguing. Wikis are definitely more content oriented than the other CMS solutions, but its not a perfect fit in terms of how I'd prefer to organize things. I suppose its unlikely I'll find anything perfectly suiting my needs, but I don't want to rush such a major design decision either. Feel free to send me any thoughts you might have.
Site Errors: I finally realized I have access to the sites error/access logs so I've been going through them and fixing stuff like broken links, misnamed files, etc...

10 January 2005

Looking for Help...

Thanks for all who offered any sort of help to the site. If I haven't got back to you yet I while soon (I seem to be way too busy lately).

Content Management Systems (CMS)

Several people suggested I move to using a CMS such as Xoops, Mambo or Post Nuke (to name but a few). I've taken a quick look at all three, setting up test sites and playing around a bit. I like the general concept of a CMS though I'm not entirely sold that they're the right thing for the site (I could put on my old, grumpy webmaster guru mask on and complain about them but I'll spare you the agony...for now anyways).

The main obstacle right now in getting other people in to help maintain the site is collaboration. I've always just kept the entire site on my hard drive, edit pages in a text editor (GUI what?) and then FTP the modified pages to the site. This method doesn't work well when many people are editting the pages (I could merge the changes manually but that doesn't help free any time). Just about all CMSs would allow multiple users to edit pages but I really don't need all the extra fluff (which is mostly useless for this site) the systems offer.

What I really just need is a simple document management system that would let multiple users work on the site at the same time (either with an online editor or signing out and merging documents). I haven't found anything that fits the bill, though, but if someone has any ideas just drop me a note. I'm sure I could roll up a very simple PHP/SQL system that allows online editting but would rather use a free/open source alternative if there is one.

Of course, I'm still partially open to using a CMS system if someone can just sell me on it. I'll be continuing to play around with them to see if its possible.

3 January 2005

Looking for Help...: If you're a Elder Scrolls fan with basic knowledge of html or SQL (or even want to learn them) drop me a quick note. For an idea of stuff I'd like to get done, take a look at the Future Ideas page. The only requirements are really just being an ES fan and being able to commit some time (though I'll likely let you do as much as you want to).

29 December 2004

Merry Christmas and all that: Back from the holidays and into the swing of things again...
International Oblivion Wishlist: A little late, but the UESP is one of several websites that have joined together to help compile a wishlist for the upcoming Chapter 4 ES game (organized by MoonRider from Adamantytowa Wieza). So...if you have any suggestions/ideas feel free to Send Them To Me and I'll pass them on.

4 December 2004

Morrowind Map/: Fixed the Morrowind Online Map so it works again.

1 December 2004

Oblivion!: Updated the Oblivion section of the website with basic information and some screenshots (nothing new). If you haven't seen them yet take a quick to see the amazing graphics.