yearly review

It's that time of year again when I round up the best of the year in my yearly review. 2007 has been the best year ever for ImAFish with over 250,000 visitors! The year started out strong with our Vista in Virtual PC review and part two of our highly successful Cashback article series.

ImAFish went from strength to strength and in May we stormed the web with an article about tweaking OS X. The story hit the front page of news sites all around the world including Digg.com where we got 1629 diggs. In one day the article received 33,000 hits and by the end of the week over 100,000. Fortunately our hosting survived and I used a whopping 50gigs of bandwidth in one week.

In June we partnered with the newly started Health Harm EMR website with two articles about the health effects of electric magnetic radiation. I covered my two holidays this year, the first to Egypt and the second in the Autumn to Hong Kong (check out some of the awesome photos I took).

Over the year we've had visitors from almost every country in the world.

In November I refocused the advertising efforts on ImAFish experimenting with PayPerPost and TextLinkAds. The result tripled the monthly income of the site. The year has ended with a number of successful posts including my trip to the Good Food show where I met Levi Roots.

Apart from ImAFish everything is going well too, I've had my first full year of working. We have some interesting projects in the coming months and are moving offices in March to the Pump House.

Many thanks to all the people who have contributed to the blog, articles, extra and forum over the past year and lets hope 2008 is as good as this year!

Last year I had two year in review posts, this year I'm going to put everything together into one huge roundup!

The year started with our third short film production, Sheep, produced by Matthew Shannon and myself. It was a huge success and was great fun to work on. January also saw the second most popular article of the year about Google Adsense.

At University our radio show went from strength to strength with interviews with Tim Westwood and our Vice Chancellor. We even made the local press and won numerous awards at the end of year awards in May. This time also saw the release of our biggest article of the year on Quidco.
In June ImAFish turned five years old and we launched some new features to remember the event. June was also the month I finished University and returned to Shrewsbury for good. It seemed amazing how quickly it had all gone but in early July I started work for Information Solutions Limited in Shrewsbury doing IT consultancy and web development.

By July I got my results from my degree and I came out with a first! With the summer came our latest character on ImAFish, Beletor, named after my growing gut it soon gained cult status spreading its new religion around the world.
The summer soon went and in early October I went on holiday to Rhodes. After relaxing for a week it was back to work on the grand launch of ImAFish X, the 10th version of ImAFish bringing a whole new look and feel to the site.
November saw some changes to the forum with registration being closed for the first time in order to help combat spam. The tactic worked and now ImAFish is spam free. Finally came December and our new series of blog posts has started with inventions.

As you can see its been a packed year on ImAFish and I must give a big thanks to everyone who has contributed in any way over the past year. Lets hope this year is as good as last year!

Another year has come and gone and it’s that emotional time again when we look back at the fun and happy times of the year.

The spring saw more of my second term of University and I finally quit Greggs after 4 years! I can't say I miss working there though I do miss the staff; I quit at the right time and doubt I would ever go back. Not because it's a bad place to work but because it's not really a satisfying or rewarding job to do and I can't be creative.

The spring also brought to me my biggest computer revolution ever when I got a Mac Mini, after using OS X for a few months I was totally converted into the Apple lifestyle. I got my first iPod for my 20 th birthday in March, it was only the flash based Shuffle but it is a lot easier and nicer to use than my previous MP3 player.

After Easter I had my second year exams, the University work load had been a lot more intense in my second year and things were getting a lot more interesting, I started to get to know more people and the last 6 weeks or so at University were very fun and entertaining even though it was the exam period.

University finished and we all went home, I went straight on holiday to Spain with Laura and we had a great week getting drunk and sun bathing in Salou. I got some really good photos and started to get more interested in film and photography.

A few weeks later I went on holiday again this time to Portugal with my parents, it was a good holiday and I got loads more good photos.

Filming

The long summer days went quite quickly and I was chilling with Shannon one morning online, we hadn't really planned to do anything but somehow we got onto the idea that it would be cool to make a short film. We considered various ideas for a few minutes before settling on filming the shit areas of Shrewsbury and putting together a short comedy documentary (a docucomedy).

The film was an instant success on ImAFish and even though it only took us a day to film and edit the feedback was great, people loved the sarcastic comedy and cheap filming and it inspired us to think of new and bigger ideas.

Blending

I had toyed on the idea of pimping blenders ever since I saw the rustler adverts and microwave pimping but I had never considered actually producing anything. We pitched our idea to some of our friends and they thought it had potential, Nej said he would love to star in it and Mal said he would provide the camera and film; It would leave me and Shannon free for directing and playing extras. We spend hours pimping blenders with spray paint and household items, most looked pretty pimped out especially with the “IBE?? (in blender entertainment).

Filming took about 3 weeks as everyone's schedules were packed with work but we finally got the whole docucomedy filmed and edited. Editing was a lot easier than Shit Shrewsbury as I had just brought a new iMac G5 to replace the Mac Mini. By this time I was a hardcore Mac user and my PC days were gone, no more viruses or awkward crashes. Fortunately the iMac comes with some simple tools for editing video and producing DVD's so it was fairly simple leaving us to be more creative.

The blending documentary was as good hit but not as successful as I had hoped I think I could have edited some of the middle bits better and possibly a better quality Microphone would have improved the quality of production.

Creamfields

One of my highlights of the summer has to be Creamfields, I saw many of my favourite DJ’s including Paul Van Dyk, Armin Van Buuren and Eddie Halliwell.

The summer ended and for once it was different, I had actually achieved something rather than just lazing about all summer it was a good feeling and I was motivated going back to University.

University

Year three started much differently than the past two years, instead of a slow start we were working straight away on coursework. Being the final year there was much more stress on success and finishing with a degree! Things were different in other ways too I was spending a lot more time on campus rather than at home and was chilling with people I had worked with on my course the previous year but not necessarily chilled with before.

Radio

I had often joked with Benjie about doing a Radio Show on the University station but we never tried it before. This term was different and we got our slot on a Monday night between 6-8, the show quickly became a success with our great tunes and hilarious comedy links. The station reached new highs with on air dating and satirical news content.

Christmas
Finally Christmas has come round and it’s snowing at last (as I type this) and I have my second iPod – this time it can play video too!

It’s going to be a busy year as I graduate in the summer and will have to find a job!

ImAFish 7

I had been getting fed up of ImAFish 7 for a couple of months but wasn’t really sure what direction to take the site in. As ImAFish was more for the articles and my sub site was for personal writings people were getting confused and large areas of the site hadn’t seen content changes in months. I had got lazy when it came to writing articles mainly because of how long a good in-depth article takes to write in order to draw visitors in.

I knew something had to change so I went about merging ImAFish and my sub site together. I wanted to show a more personal side to ImAFish especially how popular blogging had become and how it was acceptable for someone’s blog post to form an article.

ImAFish 8

I came out with an early version of ImAFish 8 at around Easter time but most of it used the same code from prior ImAFish versions, the articles and blog sections lacked basic features that I needed to go forward.

ImAFish 8 had a good start but it seemed unfinished, the backend required loads of coding and I was more interested in producing content rather than writing code. The answer came to me one day when I came across Boastology, a free blogging script that you could install on your site then customize to your needs. It contained everything from RSS feeds to user management and the ability to make custom templates.

I imported all my blog posts into the script but soon realized it would be perfect for the articles too, this proved to be quite a bit more work to import one database to the other but after a lot of effort everything worked well.

I created my own template based on the ImAFish 8 design so that the Blogs looked and felt part of ImAFish and soon we had a small dedicated group blogging away.

Gallery

With ImAFish 7 I had a small gallery script I wrote in PHP that was pretty lame, it was ok for hosting a few pictures but wasn’t very scaleable and lacked many useful features.

For ImAFish 8 I decided to find a gallery script online, after some careful looking I came across LinPHA, a full gallery management system that would resize and syndicate images for me.

After using it for a few months I decided it was using too much disk space and bandwidth so I decided to get a Flickr account and upload all my photos there. It’s still not ideal but when you have 2gb of photos (and growing) Flickr is ideal, you just don’t have much control over advertising and page layout.

Hacked

In October the forum got hacked and defaced, unfortunately it caused a bit of damage with user ranks however luckily no posts of user accounts were damaged. The forum has done well in the past year however has not seen much growth.

Advertising

Finally this Christmas I have been trying to improve the advertising revenue from the website by tweaking various pages. ImAFish has come along way in the past year and is a much better site than it was a year ago.

Now ImAFish has a good base I want to concentrate on content, we have some great media pieces from the past year and hopefully in the next year we can build on these. I have an article mostly written as well hopefully brining more people to ImAFish.

Its been an interesting year to say the least and a lot has changed. The year started off pretty badly at Beanies where the whole night seemed to end up in arguments and unhappy people. I went back to Uni and had another cracking term including some great parties and nights out. The term peaked with my birthday where I got so wasted and got some wicked photos.

This term of Uni also gave birth to Switchweb which is now making a nice profit thanks to some hard work.

Easter came and in the first week of being home I got dumped by Steph for Shannon. It hurt lots at the time and it still annoys me when I think about it now but fortunately it was for the best.

Its a shame cause they did split the "group" for quite a while until the summer when they split up.
In this time Jonnie had setup his own forum to rival ImAFish which took good advantage of this split, it did annoy me at the time however it didn't have any major effect on the popularity of ImAFish.

I still remember the day after they split up and I was in town with Nick and Shannon when Steph walked past crying, I almost felt sorry for her but after what happened it was sickly entertaining.

Fortunately things moved on and by mid-summer everything was back to how things were before (apart from me being single). We had some good nights out over the summer normally in Liquid but occasionally Flares.

By the end of August everyone seemed to be looking forward to going back to Uni (those that go) however things had taken an unusual turn. I had met Laura years ago as one of Stephs old school friends. We had occasionally chatted on-line however our paths had never really crossed until I split up with Steph.

Late Easter we had started going out for drinks together which was nice as I was feeling quite down at the time though I soon went back to Uni. Throughout the summer we had kept in contact, whether it had been on-line, going out for a drink or bumping into each other in town.

At the beginning of September I was in Yates (on a wed night) chatting to Serena, I mentioned that I had gone to the cinema with Laura the previous night and she said it sounded like Laura was interested in me and she would find out if she was.

Later in Liquid Serena told Laura that I liked her, while it wasn't the most tactful approach thankfully for my pride Laura said she liked me too. Later that night we got together and we have been together ever since.

My main worry at the time was going back to Uni in a couple of weeks time however we discussed it and she didn't think it would be a big issue. I have seen her every weekend since, either in Coventry or at home.

The second year of Uni started really slowly, it took quite a while for the course to get going and for the first 3-4 weeks I didn't actually do anything. In a way it made the term lag a bit and its not been as fun this year like it was last year. The work load has also significantly increased and the last 2 weeks of term were very hectic with coursework and tests.

I have made a lot of new friends at Uni this term and have found I have been going out with different people from last year (apart from Ben and Chris) though its all good.

These past couple of months has also seen Jonnie's Forum go, while it was a shame it did seem slightly pointless having two forums for the same purpose. For a while the ImAFish forum saw an increase in traffic though this has slowed down over xmas, I expect it will pick up once xmas is over.

The rest of ImAFish has stagnated over the last year and 2004 was the first year where we saw no new ImAFish version! I do have some pretty big plans for ImAFish 8 over the coming year including making it into a more personal site. I know what I want ImAFish to be like - its just designing and coding it now which is what is going to take the most time.

It seemed to be the year where all the old relationships ended and new ones begun, started with Jonnie and Kelly, then Shannon and Beanie, on to Me and Steph, Nej and Lisa then Tom and Rachel. By the end of the year some are still single but others have new partners. Well done to Alex and Ami for staying together (ironic?).

The year finished with a party Friday night and I was wasted, start as I mean to go on?.... Maybe.