Winter break starts for me December 3rd, and there's lots I'm looking forward to working on. Here's a preview:

Character Groups
I want to more generalize the usefulness of groups to be more like lists. Maybe a list of your favorite characters wearing kimono's, or a list of characters in your Harem. Anything that comes to mind, you can make an easily accessible and easily manageable group/list with those characters. I'll make it easier to create, manage, and make public/private these lists.

Identify This
Currently we have a working beta, now we need a polished completed version. First up is a 2ch like theme, that's simple and easy to understand. Followed by putting more power in the hands of the author to moderate and manage their thread, as well as more power to moderators to update posts and replies with useful links.

DB Accuracy
I've long wanted to encourage feedback on how characters are indexed. The way to do this, I think, is be allowing all members to create "index cards" for characters in the database, which they can manage and fill out how they see the character. Moderators can then overlap the results of these cards with the database data, and make decisions about what to change.



More ideas to come!

Wow, it's already August. This is the last free month I'll have before I am back at University.

Priorities have shifted somewhat. This month will see another thousand characters added to the DB. We'll be at 15,000 before September. I'll be doing more programming work this month, focusing on auditing all the PHP code in use. I may have time to roll out a new feature or two, and I do plan on improving the usability of the site, and further modernizing the layout and theme.

Further database work will be done, and here is a snapshot of where we are at as of today:

We reached 14,000 characters this morning, thanks to an infusion of over 200 anime characters this weekend. We're keeping in line with an average of a thousand a month. You can help a great deal by taking screen shots of missing characters while you watch anime.

I expect 15,000 to be reached before the end of August.

Well, it's the middle of July, so here's an update on what I'm working on.

Improving the presentation of various key features. Character profiles and game profiles have been improved. I'll next be updating the presentation of group and subgroup pages, as well as user comments. From there, I'll tackle the standard format we use for charts.

Adding more characters. Everyone's calling for this, so I will continue to focus my efforts on adding new characters. If you know a character is missing, ADD THEM! My time is dedicated on adding the characters you don't know are missing.

I expect we'll reach 14,000 characters before the end of the month, and should likely see 15,000 sometime next month.

Today we have reached 13,000 characters, and with your help it wont be long before we reach 100,000!

Please, when you're watching anime, try to take a screen shot of any characters that are not in the DB.

What have I been doing lately?

This month, I've been going over all the games and anime, starting at 1, and working to 1800+, adding profiles for all the characters, adding Japanese and Voice Actor names where missed, and noting any pages that have errors such as duplicates, or incorrect names.

As well, this week I have started adding all the characters and anime listed on wikipedia in categories much like these: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Anime_of_2007

We enter the month of June with over 12,000 characters from more than 1,600 sources. Regret and pchan have contributed over a dozen characters. The bulk of the anime and game entries have their Japanese titles and images.

I've updated the text search to be a little more useful. It still needs much improvement. A true advanced search remains under development. And a complete mobile site (suited for PSP's, Cell Phones, and PDA's) is in the works.

We've launched a Sponsorship Program this month. Please take a look if interested. For $10, you get a button posted above the Main Menu for 24 hours on the day of your choice, as well as your name added to the Sponsors page.

With summer break drawing near, I'm hopeful we'll see more members than ever joining! Get a friend to sign up, and soon we'll reach 1,000 members.

Finally, I am looking for help with coordinated data entry sessions. See the forums for more info.

Sun Mar 9 01:43:25 CST 2008

Changes today includes updating all php scripts to use a SOCKET to connect to MySQL, instead of a TCP connection. This has resulted in a great speed increase for MySQL queries. Hopefully you notice lower latency when selecting search criteria and seeing the Matches updated.

As well, character profiles now mention if the character is from an anime, game, or unknown. Look for the "He/she is from" line.

As usual, more Japanese names have been entered, more product images and product details. And 12 new characters.

Everyday, I'm doing a little work on the database. Here's a log of what happened today.

Dev Log for Fri Mar 7 19:39:33 CST 2008

-Added Japanese Name for Various Characters
-Started work on UserCP.php
-Added info and images for various anime and games
-Gathered more characters for database
-Added more characters

A lot of new features and improvements to tell you about today.

First up, DVD's!
Anime Characters Database has partnered with AnimeNation to bring you Anime DVD's. Over the next few months, we'll be adding the characters from every DVD they sell to the database.

Next up, Videos
We're gradually adding OP and Promo video content for all the series and games in the database.

We also took a lot of time today updating web pages, and cleaning the presentation of various pages. The removal links on the Favorite Characters page, Publisher pages and more.

Finally, we'll be adding 500 characters tonight, and will have 10,000 by the end of the weekend. We're focusing heavily on anime from here out. Expect more videos, more dvds, and more anime every week!