Cumulative Update

I did a lot of work on the site last week. I added descriptions to Winnie the Pooh, Speed, The Rock, Predator, Top Gun, and Turbulence - I also started on The Matrix but it's not quite complete. I got content added to the Cell Stuff pages - Over 20 ringtones and there's already more to come. I'm already starting to see traffic on the new and updated pages... sweet.

Firefly Page

The Firefly page is coming along nicely. I actually uploaded the sounds this evening (I realized that I had forgotten to do that when I posted the page yesterday). I also have about half of the descriptions in.

I'm not sure how I'm going to work that page. I've only done the first three episodes and there are over 200 clips already. And I have three more discs to go. I could break it out by episode but if I keep using the same method I used for the files I already have, it's difficult to identify the episode.

Oh well... enjoy them.

SEO

As I was checking Google to see if the new page names were showing up, I noticed that all that was listed for the title was the name of the movie/show (i.e. "Family Guy"). Looking at higher-ranking pages, I noticed they all spelled out the contents of the page more specifically (i.e. "Family Guy Sounds at The Wav Place").

In an attempt to improve my rankings, I have started adding "Wavs at Bubby's Wav Archive" to the end of all of the page titles so you end up with something like "Famly Guy Wavs at Bubby's Wav Archive." I started doing this about a week ago but realized late this week that I was changing the wrong field in the CMS. Fortunately, I didn't get too far.

IE Problems Fixed

Silverstripe was having some difficulties rendering the background properly in the content area. I tried several approaches to fix it and none worked. This weekend, I removed one line of code from the page.ss file and when I looked, it was rendering properly in IE. To make sure that fixed it, I put the code back in... and IE still rendered the page properly.

The line of code I removed also causes browsers to have a hissy fit if they encounter the & symbol in page text (as in Beavis & Buttnead). Removing the code resolves this problem so I left it out.

I still don't know what fixed it.

In other news, I'm working on sounds from the SciFi series Firefly. They should be up soon.

DH3 Is Up!

The descriptions for Die Hard 3 are up!

Die Hard With A Vengeance

I've added sounds to the Die Hard 3 page. I'll get the descriptions added this weekend.

New Game Sounds

I posted some sounds from StarCraft. Rather than record them, I used the SCSoundUtility to extract them directly from the game. As such, these are high-quality sounds and the files are significantly larger. It was for this reason that I did not include all of the sounds. I included all that are not actually featured in the game as well as a few select sounds that would make good alert sounds.

There is a gap between the title text and the table. I've never understood why that happens but I'm going to try to correct it.

I am working on the Die Hard With a Vengeance sounds and should have them up within a week or two.

Redirects And SEO

The conversion to the CMS (Silverstripe) is complete. I had some difficulty getting the subdomain working in conjunction with the direct URL (or vice-versa) but I got that worked out with some help from the web.

Checking my statistics, I've lost some visitor volume. The old URLs all end in /page.htm. I'm stripping off the .htm and that's getting people where they need to go in most cases. However, some of the page names have changed and, while FrontPage uses underscores between words, Silverstripe uses dashes. Because there is a variable number of words in the longer titles, it's a challenge to get them automatically changed over. I have a custom 404 page that advises people to check the master list or the site map but I can see some people are hitting that and moving on.

It also doesn't help that the search engines haven't spidered the site quite yet and have old information. The old links seem to be disappearing but my ranking with the new site structure seems to have gone to nothing (when you're more than 3 pages in on Google, it might as well be nothing). I have tried to make sure every page has some sort of description and/or keywords to help with optimization. It will pick up again.

I have added graphics to all but a few general pages. All of the actual movies, shows and cartoons have representative pictures at the top.

I'm still trying to work out a problem where the summaries are showing HTML code. I've been told how to fix it but the person that told me made some incorrect assumptions (such as me knowing exactly where to put the statement he gave me) and it hasn't happened yet. Heck, it hasn't even been tested yet.

I also have a problem with backgrounds not rendering right in Internet Explorer. I'm trying to get some help with that, too, but it isn't happening.

I added descriptions to the Winnie The Pooh page and started on Tinytoons. You'll notice that I changed the template on the update page. It now has a more color-compatible palette to the CMS and there is a custom header graphic.

CMS Online

I have the CMS in a usable state and placed it online. You will probably see me tweaking and twiddling it (and maybe even frobbing it) over the next few days/weeks. If you are pining for the old site, it is still online for the moment and can be reached via http://www.unclebubby.com/wavs_old.

If you got to the new site via wavs.unclebubby.com, you noticed the redirect. This is a hopefully non-permanent workaround to an issue with my CMS. Apparently, you can have subdomains within a single installation. Because of this (at least I think this is the reason), pointing a subdomain to it while it's in a subfolder freaks it out and it doesn't work. I'm pretty sure there's a fix but I'm hoping the fix doesn't break any of my other sites.

Please take a look around the site. There are comment boxes on most of the pages and there is an email link at the bottom of every page. PLEASE let me know what you think. Like it? Hate it? Have a feature/change request? Wish the background were a different color? Let me hear from you.

Almost Done

I decided to migrate the site out of FrontPage. With the release of Office 2007, Microsoft decided to drop the FrontPage product in favor of their Expression Web product. Expression Web is a completely different environment from FrontPage. While Expression might be a perfectly wonderful system, I'm just not up to learning a whole new editor.

With that in mind, I went looking for a content Management System. I considered Joomla (we use it at work), Drupal, Mambo, MODx, SilverStripe, PostNuke, and Xoops. Some of the products didn't last 30 seconds. One of them I figured if I have to go running for the manual just to figure out how to log in, forget it. Others I weighed against Joomla and each other. In the end, I settled on SilverStripe.

At first glance, I wasn't sure I wanted to use it. It installs with nothing. No structure, no clues, nothing. I kinda liked the feel of it so I dug a little deeper. There are some online tutorials designed to get you started. What I found out was that SilverStripe can be whatever you want it to be. Although I stuck with the basic structure presented in the tutorials, it is EXTREMELY flexible.

I am almost done with the migration and will be switching the site over soon.