Site Update

Over Thanksgiving break, I moved BCP from my server to a third-party hosting solution. This will help with the speed of the site, especially making saves as well as up time. On the other hand, there is a small monthly fee for hosting. The fee is based on the bandwidth and storage used. Currently, the cost is low and I'll pay for it. If the cost drastically increases, I may have to ask for help.

We now have 39 responses to our survey. The survey consisted of 10 questions; 8 closed-ended and 2 open-ended. Many of the responses were positive; users were happy with the site and encouraged us to keep up the hard work. If you are a contributor and would like to see the survey data, let me know.

If you haven't noticed, I recently added a new link to the navigation called 'Sets by Name'. This page will serve as the master list of all sets. When adding sets please add them using this page. I came up with a way to auto-populate the 'Sets by Year' pages, so we won't have to manage two separate pages. When adding sets just be sure to add the manufacturer and year to the bottom of the page. I added this code to the template for all new pages.

Maintenance

The site was offline from 7-11:30PM Tuesday night while I was upgrading my Internet connection. I'm hoping the upgrade will make the site run a bit faster.

Two items of business this morning

1) Based on our survey responses, I toyed with the idea of adding a 'Sets by Name' link in the sidebar. I then started listing as many sets that I could think of until I was too tired and went to sleep. This morning I read about categories and how they work. If we tag every set with both the year and set name, pages could be dynamically populated with a list of all the pages in that category. We then would still need to update both the year and set pages. In this scenario someone looking for a set would have to click 3 times; once on All Sets, then on the year (or set name depending on the page), then on the set.The other approach is to continue manually editing both the set name page and the year page. In this scenario, a visitor would only have to click twice, however we would have to manually update the list.

2) Tables in set checklists? What do we do for insert sets with more information than usual? For example, how do we list inserts with cards that have different serial numbers? Should we use a table or a list like below?

===2007 Donruss Elite Extra Edition School Colors===
Unless otherwise stated, 25 of each card was produced.

25     Bill Walton    
26     Nick Schmidt /50    
27     Burt Reynolds /10 EXCH

Any thoughts?

 
 

Multiple-series sets

How should we handle sets with two or three series? Should there be one article for each series, or one article that contains every series? We should pick one way and stick to it. Any thoughts?

Traffic

Traffic to the site has been pretty steady recently. Below is a graph which depicts the number of visitors since the site went live. Anyone want to venture a guess on what the 3 spikes in traffic were caused by?

Survey

The number of visitors to the site is slowing starting to grow. To make sure we're meeting the needs of our visitors, I'm thinking about creating a survey. It would be a short survey, 10 questions or less, using a tool like SurveyMonkey. If you have any thoughts on other possible methods for collecting feedback, survey question ideas or anything else, please leave a comment.

Of off the top of my head, here are my proposed survey questions:

How many times a week do you visit BCP?

Do you believe the information on BCP is accurate?

Have you ever edited a page on BCP?


Do you find BCP helpful?


What do you like best about BCP?

If you could change a single thing about BCP what would it be?

Small server upgrade

I successfully eked out 200 more MHz out of my ancient 300MHz processor by overclocking it by soldering two pins together to increase the multiplier from 3x to 5x. I also recompiled the kernel so the sever now has support for SATA drives! Not bad for a $25 server!

It's the yellow one in the photo.

On a related note, I have a few extra of these Cobalt servers if anyone has a use for them.