Jump to content

  • Guest Access

    You are currently viewing the forums as a guest.  Please consider making a free account to gain full access to the forums, files, gallery and to create your own personal blog.

Blogs

Shoot The Core

ADDING FILES AND IMAGES TO THE SITE

Still trying to get the word out about the site.  My friend Mark sent out a tweet and Facebook post to his subscribers yesterday.. but still, with so few members on the site, it's pretty much impossible to get a conversation going. So, for the last two days I've been focusing on adding files and images to the site.  Pretty much any shmup related image I can find... the games are harder to add since most of the old files I'm trying are now incompatible with Windows 10... but I have added quite a few good ones.. I'm also trying to get development files online as well as ancillary files.  But images are rather easy and plentiful to add.  And my experience from my previous site is that if they are tagged properly "cave, treasure, touhou, gradius.. etc" then each file will result in a possible search hit when people are using those terms on Google.  Maybe that will help the site get found.  these things take time. So if you see a lot of images going up, you know why. 
Gandalf42

Gandalf42

0
Shoot The Core

Working on sorting and adding files.

So getting this site online is a bit overwhelming.  Should I focus on developing the forums, getting the word out about the site, focus on content?  Too many irons in the fire for a staff of one.  So, I've decided to work on the one aspect that I've been dreading the most- files. Even though Shmuptacular came down years ago, I had a complete backup of the files.. Between the doujin freeware and commercial software, I'd say I have around eighty gigs or so of files.  I have an almost complete archive of the files from the Shoot the Core database ran by Postman from back in the day.  The real issue is testing all of the software against Windows 10 and weeding out what works and what doesn't.  I also need to do screenshots of the games, and try and muddle through the Japanese documentation (with the help of Google Translate) and try and add what information I can to the description.  This is even more challenging since almost all of the related sites to these games are offline.  So in most cases this site will be the only online source for these old shmups.  But on a brighter note, this will get most of these games publicly available again. As a call to arms: If anyone comes across this forum and can get the word about it on related sites it would be appreciated.  I'd like to see the forums get a bit of activity. Well, I've got some work to do.  -Gandalf42
Gandalf42

Gandalf42

0
Shoot The Core

Goals for the site.

So I started Shmuptacular around thirteen years ago.. granted it's been on hiatus for a number of years.. but the goals have always been the same.  Originally, I launched the site because there just wasn't a ton of STG related content (games, reading material, art, etc) that was easily available to fans and I wanted to tie together what was out there.  Over the last five years or so, everything has really changed.  STG games are much more common then they were before and accessibility (due to online shops) has helped the genre flourish. I'd always planned on bringing the site back and now seemed as good a time as any.  One of my main goals with this relaunch is to bring a lot of the disparate parts of the genre together under one roof.  To that end, I've started adding doujin freeware games into the files section, the forums encompass all topics from playing and collecting to development.  I've also started to aggregate video content from some of the big channels in the STG scene.  I've added a few of blackoak and rancor's excellent interview translations to the articles section.  The gallery section has a selection of shmup artwork (professional and fan created).   All of the content is also being appropriately tagged- so using the tag system on this site will allow you to pull all content related to a specific tag by just clicking on it. There are still some kinks to work out with the uploads to the site being buggy.. but hopefully we'll get those worked out in time.  I've also been trying to reach blackoak about his stance on me mirroring his translations but I haven't heard back from him yet.  My reason for including them is really about preservation.. having the translations on multiple sites will help make sure they survive if a few sources go down..  That being said, all of his excellent translations are available from his site Shmuplations and most of the ones I'm mirroring are from his posts on Shmups Forum. That's about all for now.  If you like the site be sure to share it with your friends! Take care,
-Gandalf42
Gandalf42

Gandalf42

0
×