Well it's mushroom huntin time again so I think sometime this week I'm gonna grab the old ak-47 and see if I can't bag me a mushroom or two. Last year I found a few but like a dummy I put them in a bowl of salt water and put them in the fridge, but didn't take them out for a few months lol. I like finding them more than I like cooking them. When I was little my grandma used to take me mushroom huntin and I used to believe that you had to be really quiet and sneak up on them otherwise they would pop back into the ground before you could get them. Looking back I think it may have been a way of my grandma keeping me quiet. I tested this theory last year and in fact the mushrooms did not pop back under ground when I made noise. Any other mushroom hunters out there? If so let me know where you're from and how many pounds you find.
So... As most of you know OohYa has been down since Monday, almost an entire week! Our server upgrade seems to have gone horribly wrong, but at least we have the site back up. We are still on the old server and have just been told today that now it will take another week before they get us upgraded. I have no idea why it is taking so long other than our hosting company is simply incompetent. Most of the trouble stemmed from a check from one of our advertisers being 12 days late, the money from the check was what was to be used for the server upgrade. Our original hosting expired last week but our hosting company said they understood the dilema and that the site would remain up as I didn't want to renew the old plan for another 6 months. Of course the site did not remain up, and then when I paid for the upgrade nobody at the hosting company seemed to know how to get the site back up and on the new plan. After days of calling and emailing several different tech support people, being excalated to several different levels of support, and about pulling my hair out they finally got the site live again. But when I logged in to the server of course I discovered that we were still on the original server! When I called them back to ask them about this is when they told me very casually like it was no big deal, that it will take about 7 days to finish the upgrade lol! 7 more days of waiting when I was originally assured that it was a very simple process that could be done very quickly and without any issues. What a joke! I have several other websites with this same hosting company, many of them over 5 years old. I think that I will be looking into moving all of them to a different company soon.
Well, OohYa has come a long way since we launched in September.
The site has a whole new look, we've added more features such as videos, groups, and the new profile commenting system, and are now over 12,000 registered members.
So what is in store for the near future for OohYa?
For starters we should be moving to a new upgraded server sometime this week, this should improve the sites performance quite a bit.
As soon as we get settled on the new server we'll be updating chat to a new version. The new version should address webcam stability issues and eliminate many of the webcam issues we've been having. A few bugs should be fixed in the new version as well.
Hopefully in the near future we will work out the bugs in the profile search as well. This is actually one of my biggest priorities and may have a fix for it within the next couple of weeks. The 2 main bugs in it as many of you know is the fact that if you get more than 1 page of results the next page shows 0 results, and the fact that if you click a profile from the search results and click "back" you get a page not found error. These errors irritate me to no end and can't wait till they are fixed.
I've also made some changes to the site to hopefully regain some of our lost positions in the search engines. There must have been something with the site redesign that the search engines didn't like as we dropped quite a bit in the search results shortly after. One key thing that I've added is the link exchange section that allows other webmasters to exchange links with us. If you own a website and would like to exchange links with OohYa click on the "Link To OohYa" button in the main menu on the left hand side of the site and link away. You can also embed the OohYa Chat client in you website, myspace, or friendster profiles as well, you can get more information on how to embed chat on the front page of OohYa. Even a simple link from your Myspace, Friendster, Facebook, or Yahoo profile is appreciated.
Another thing I've done to try and get a little search engine juice is submitted OohYa to the dmoz directory. However, dmoz is ran by arrogant self righteous punks that don't seem to like OohYa enough to list it in their directory so they can burn in hell. They seem to like sites like chat-avenue and usachatnow better than us and I can see why, who wouldn't choose a site with a barely functional text chat with no profiles or any other features over OohYa? Yes I'm a little bitter.
So what is on my wish list for the longer term future?
I would really like to get the ability for users to create their own public or private rooms again, however we can't even fill just one of the current rooms yet so this one isn't too big of a priority yet.
I would like to redesign the chat room list into a category branch down structure to make it easier to browse. Again, not such a big deal yet but when we add the US state rooms back in and get the user created rooms back it will be a huge deal.
I would like to add a little more customization to the profiles to let users change things like backgrounds, colors, and to maybe add some widgets.
I also plan on eventually integrating flash based games into the chat applet such as pool, chess, card games, ect. that members can play with each other.
Anyway, that's pretty much where we are, where we're going, and where I hope to go. Let me know what you guys think and if you have any other suggestions.