The Ultima Codex February Fundraiser
The Ultima Codex has been a big leap forward in many respects, and is much easier to manage (and far less rickety) than Old Aiera. Traffic to the site has also been steady. Indeed, despite the downturn in comment activity over the last few months, the site has seen higher average levels of traffic than did Old Aiera, meaning that more people are getting their Ultima fix than ever before.
All of which is great. However, it comes at a cost. The site has become significantly more expensive to run; I haven’t done an exact total, but a reasonable estimate would put the total a bit above $600 for the year. That’s a combination of hosting fees, additional fees for a dedicated SQL instance rather than the shared SQL resource that comes with the default hosting package, and resource usage/overage fees for a few months.
This is a high cost to bear, and then probably just a bit more than I can afford. It has been offset in the past, to some degree, by GOG and Amazon sales, but 2012 was rather more costly than these sources were profitable. So it’s in what I hope is humility (mixed with just a hint of embarassment) that I’m declaring February to be a “fundraising” month for the Ultima Codex. I’ve been toying around with this idea for a while now, and I’ve selected February because it’s the shortest month; I don’t want to harp on this for any longer than is necessary.
Here’s the details: Clicking on any of the banners below will take you to service indicated. The PayPal link is a straight-up donation link, whereas the GOG, Amazon, and Origin links will just take you to those sites; I will receive commission for anything you purchase thereat. I’ll be putting up a thin banner at the top of the site which will link to this post, and you can also find these same links in the Ultima Codex’s footer area.
If you want to throw something in the pot to help keep the site up and running, I’d be much obliged, and at the end of February I’ll throw together a “thank you” wall, similar to the “Friends of the Codex” section at the bottom of the fansites page, listing donors…or any causes or websites said donors would rather draw attention to (as long as it’s nothing too terribly controversial). If you donate via PayPal, you’ll have the option to send me a message then and there; if you hit up one of the other links and would like to be recognized, be sure to let me know.
Thanks in advance for hearing me out. I’ll drop this topic now get back to posting interesting things in a bit.
I try to always make my GOG purchases via one of your banners (when I remember, which unfortunately isn’t always.. though I just did then)
I am curious (although I completely understand if you’re not able to answer) how much commission you get from a sale through one of these services. Not for any particular reason, just wondering.
Off the top of my head, I can’t recall (and I’m not sure I’m supposed to discuss it anyway; I’d have to review the contract they made me sign). And they only pay out when I’ve earned above a certain level, as well…which adds a measure of variability to the frequency with which they send me anything.
I seem to recall that commission was higher than Amazon, and Amazon is around the 4% mark. Beyond that, I’d probably have to ask them for a reminder…or find that paperwork.
Ah, but I forget myself. More important than the barely-remembered details: thanks for doing that!
Just donated. BUT I think 600,- a year is rather high and that doesn’t sound like something that could go on for years.
Please look through everything on how to save money on the site.
And I’m sorry to say I can easily see why comments have gone down, IMHO only though. I’ve written it before but for me it sadly isstill true, the site has gone horribly unnavigateable for me. Even finding older articles is something I can’t easily accomplish when the article is no more on the front page. I’ve really been put off writing a comment at times. The effort of finding an articles was too much at times.
Or right now on the ipad, I can’t easily log in, would need to switch to full html version, but copy my writings before and then paste it back…
Or right now i only saw an error but it got posted anyway… ;(
Well, I can at least unapprove the first comment. 🙂 But you are right, I fear…the site needs some improvement in terms of how it is structured…and I need to re-think the mobile layout(s) too. I have a few ideas in mind in both respects; I just need to find time to experiment.
As to cost…the site is certainly expensive to operate, although I’m given to understand that our friends at the Wing Commander CIC incur more than double the costs that I do in a given year.
It’s a function of traffic primarily. There is cheaper hosting available, but none of the available options can support the level of traffic I get on a yearly, or even monthly, basis. You get what you pay for, with hosting, and cheap hosting is really only good for small sites that get low levels of traffic. The Codex would likely get punted off of another host, whereas at least with Mediatemple’s (gs) hosting it is mostly able to thrive. A (gs) package costs $200/year, but it is able to keep up with the site’s demands for the most part.
But even so, there have been issues. The Codex tends to generate a lot of SQL queries, unsurprisingly, and it tends to overwhelm the shared SQL instance on the (gs) cluster. So I pay another $20/month for a standalone SQL instance. And that actually helps a fair bit, and gives me more management options.
Of course, in spite of all this, there are periodic spikes in traffic that just chew up my allotment of cluster resources. In essence, I’m entitled to about 10% of the cluster’s processing in a given month; if I go over that, I incur overage fees. There was…a lot of that in 2012.
The overages I could probably mitigate with a few tweaks…better caching, tighter layouts, etc. The rest is largely unavoidable. It’s the cost of being a hub site, by and large, and it’s actually fairly cheap by comparison to some. But it is a lot, even so, and probably untenable in the long term as a standalone proposition.
So thank you…that was very generous of you, and will help a great deal. And I will get to work on finding a better layout…something that works with the iPad too.
Speak of the…I may just have found a comment editing solution.
I think what helps out the CIC, though, is there are multiple staff members sharing the costs. Here, it sounds as if you are on your own cost-wise with some minor help from banner click purchases.
Basically. The wiki guys have helped out a couple of times as well, when the wiki has been the principal source of overages.
But mostly I cover it myself, offsetting it when I can with what GOG and Amazon send my way.
I’ll see what I can do. But I agree with Dominus that the categories at the top and the blog updates below and out of view make it pretty busy looking and tough to navigate. So I spend less time around the site/thinking about it, not intentionally but subconsciously.
You know, there is a theme designer whose work I love, and I’ve been looking at some of his work again lately.
How does this theme look? http://demo.alienwp.com/origin/
Or this? http://demo.alienwp.com/oxygen/
Or this? http://demo.alienwp.com/proxima/
I have to admit…the NAME of that first theme has a certain appeal…
Primarily I think the ways things are categorized and divided needs to be shrunk to something that makes sense. Then I’d go with the theme that best matches the organization. On pure looks I’m attracted to the latter two, but that’s just because of pretty pictures.
In the end, the big issue with any theme I switch to is the forum, which will require a fair bit of custom CSS to fit in to any new layout. I could migrate the rest of the site to a new theme in relatively short order, but I would probably have to turn the forum off for a few days while I adjusted things…it would be unusable for how bad it would look by default.
Hey I like the new layout. The only thing that bothered me was that it took me ages to find the login button… That really should be at the top of the page.
Yeah, I might move it back up there. That menu doesn’t have a lot of width, but I can probably cram one more thing into it.
At any rate: Yes! There’s a new layout. And you should also notice that you can now edit your comments…for a while at least. The plugin doesn’t allow editing on comments older than some set amount, which I will see if I can edit just as soon as I find the configuration pane.
I was surprised and a little overwhelmed at the generosity of some people, so I worked late into the evening crafting a new backdrop, picking a new theme, and writing CSS for a sidebar menu. Hope you all enjoy it!
Hmm actually if you were able to just move that Navigation menu up above all the banners I think that would make a bit more sense – then you wouldn’t have to squeeze anything more into the top bar. On a small screen I have to scroll a long way down before that menu appears so at first I just assumed that it wasn’t there anymore.
Yeah, I’ll move it up then. I still need to do some tweaking anyway…little adjustments here and there.
Okay, Duke, I’ve moved the navigation column up to the top. See if that works for you.
N.B. On screens with less than 768px horizontal resolution, the layout of the site will flip to a single column, and the nav menu gets bumped below the main content in that context. So it might still be sensible to put a login link on the top menu.
Yep that’s much better!
I was wondering, can you get money from other Amazons, or just from Amazon.com? I say this because I’m going to purchase several things from Amazon Japan in the following months (I did a big purchase just yesterday from them, wish I had seen this before doing it….)
I don’t recall. I think so, as long as you can get to the Japanese portal from Amazon.com after clicking on the link here.
But if that seems like too much hoop-jumping, don’t worry about it.
Now that’s actually really readable. Melike! One housekeeping change I think you should make is that U6: Archon is a completed project as of that last update. 🙂
Hmm, testing whether I can still nest my replies.
Edit: ok weird, I tried replying to the thread above and it tossed the reply down here. Or I did something wrong.
Could be that the template doesn’t support the same nesting depth. I’ll investigate.