The World of Joel

If I had a week of vacation that I could take, I might just take it now so I could stay back and watch the full coverage of this years US Open. For one laying on the couch eating some chips and kicking back a few cokes would be ideal, but just after watching a few matches yesterday (Nadal and Blake) I have once again been instantly sucked in to watching this year’s US Open. Did anyone hear that they brought in Don King to help promote this year’s tournament? The Grapple in the Big Apple is what he is calling it. The battle between Federer and Nadal. The two have to get to the finals first, I am a bit surprised they are playing that up so early in the tournament.

In some respect it does make sense given the amazing Wimbledon match of only a few months ago between the two players, but common Blake has a chance. Well maybe not he barley made it through his first round match last night against Donald Young. I am sure many of you could care less about the tennis circuit but I am a big fan, and I love watching the four grand slam tournaments especially the last two of Wimbledon and the US Open.

This should be a great US Open and let’s just hope Nadal trips on his capris and makes a quick exit, because I don’t know about you but I can’t stand the guy. We shall see, it will be a fun two weeks of tennis!

So its been a few weeks since the relaunching of Darkstation.com! I am actually not sure what to call this. It never was really taken down, updating was becoming more and more sparse but the site still remained up and updated. The new design and backend for the site has really allowed me personally to do more with the site then I had been able to in the past, and our traffic is already showing signs of improvement.

I have three main simple goals with this site:

1. Stay updated with great content, don’t just post content to have content

2. Offer viewers plenty of chances to win prizes, because let’s face it who doesn’t want to win free stuff.

3. Increase our readership by 200% by the end of the calender year of 2008.

#3 is by far the most challenging out of the list but I also find it to be the one that really drives me each and every day to update, and keep the site running like a fine oiled machine. We shall see what happens with the site in the coming weeks and months, and I have a feeling we will be able to see what is working and what’s not for the site and continue to improve upon it. Let me know what you all think!

I have never had to server Jury Duty. I registered to vote the day I turned 18 but one way or another I have been able to get out of Jury Duty each time I am called, until a few days ago. They had requested me to come in this past Tuesday at 7:45am and so there I was bright and early in a very large crowded room with a ton of other people who were even more upset to be there. About a half hour after sitting down in the waiting room the head lady started reading off names and court rooms. I was assigned to the old court room accross the street from the new court room and was required to wait for a deputy to take us accross the street. What was worse about this was that they let about 100 people go for the day right after calling my group court room.

I was later glad I didn’t get let go because I was able to sit in the court room, see what a real court actually looks and feels like and was later let off due to the fact that my work currently doesn’t pay me for jury duty, and $15 a day isn’t going to get me very far. I actually wish my work did pay for it as I would have loved to sit on the Jury, but alas it was an experience nonetheless. Jury duty for me anyways no where near as bad as I thought it was going to be. A half of a day and I was done for another year, and hopefully it will be a few more years until I get called back in again.

WELCOME TO THE NEW DARKSTATION.COM!!

Beginning in January of 2008 I began work along side Josh Salder from Josh Sadler Designs laying the ground work for the new Darkstation.com! Now a little bit of the backstory first. I began writing at Darkstation in September of 2002, and have been one of the bigger contributers in terms of content for the site. In the recent year, year and a half the sites owner has started his own business and has had little time to work and improve the Darkstation.com website. So I approached him at the end of 2007 into the beginning of 2008 on me taking over operations of the site. Like any webmaster who loves there project its hard to see at first, but we both came to the realization that the site needed to keep moving forward and not stay stagnant to long, so we began working.

When I say work, I mean 5-7 days a week, an hour or two a day getting the content transferred over to the new content management system (CMS) going through a ton of mock up designs, and then implementing this over the months. The project was one of the most developed projects I have ever been a part of, and to see it all come together as it has, is amazing. Now that the site has launched, and the anticipation is over, its now time to get to work. My hope is not only to bring the site back to a point where it used to be in terms of # of visitors, but I would like to far surpass those numbers and become one of the more distinguished fan based gaming websites on the interwebs today.

Please let me know what you think of the site, what you think of the design, content, load times, etc. I hope you all enjoy and you can expect a ton of updates on the progression of the site.

Welcome back everyone, I know it has been a while since my daily posts while traveling through Europe, but I needed to take sometime, get rested up, and really geared to get back to as close to daily updates as I can on this hear blog. What have you missed since coming back from Europe? Well Jenn and I are already on the search for a wedding location which so far has yielded some nice finds but as of right now no final decisions have been made. When planning the engagement, and planning to get married I don’t think I ever sat back and thought about the actual wedding. But that time has come and gone, it is the daily talk of the house, and it really is quite exciting. Outside of that, not anything else really new here, except for the announcement of my latest and by far biggest project I have worked on.

As many of you know, last year I went on a spending spree buying a ton of different TV site blog domains, developing the sites, and then I sold them earlier this year. That worked out really nicely. The problem with those sites were that they were not bringing in the type of revenue I would have liked, and secondly I couldn’t specialize in one area, I spread myself far to thin and didn’t do as great of a job as I could have. So I decided this year to go a different direction, instead of doing multiple projects I would work on one big project. What is that project? As of earlier this year I have been in talks with the owner of Darkstation.com, where I have been writing video game reviews, previews, interviews, news, etc for about 6 years and we have decided that I would take over the site and take it to the next level. So coming this month, yes this month, I will be launching the new version of Darkstation.com.

Taking over Darkstation is something that I have wanted to do for years, it has slowly been loosing steam and it was desperatley needing a new look, and some new blood. So Rizal (the owner) and I discussed a partnership of such where I would take over operations he would remain part of the site, but a smaller role. What does this mean for the site? Well it has gotten a complete make over, with the help of my good friend Josh Sadler who designed the site, and using CustomCMS we have created a site that I believe is far more appealing then the current product out right now. The new version will be coming out this month, there are only a few tasks that need to be done before launch. The design is about 100% done and the implementation in the CMS is about 99% done, where we are still working hard to finish is in content where we still have a bit of work to do. My estimated ETA would be next weekend. My original goal was 08-08-08 so I figure we are going to be extremely close to hitting that target date. Whatever the case I am very excited to show all of you the new version, get your feedback, and continue to expand Darkstation beyond what it already is today a great video game website and resource.