GamerSigs.net Development Blog

I thought I’d pass this little gem along to those of you who might need another guitar for Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero III, Guitar Hero : World Tour, or Rock Band 2. I have one of these and they work fine on all the games mentioned… and for $10… you just can’t beat the price!

Guitar Hero Wired X-plorer Guitar for Xbox 360 - $9.99 each (while supplies last)

Or optionally, if you have a PS2 still you can get Guitar Hero III for the PS2– really cheap!

Guitar Hero 3 Bundle for PS2 - $29.99 after SAVE20 code (expires 12/31/08)

I recently found some online games that work in a web browser. No, they aren’t 360 games but at least they aren’t 100% chessy. (They are only about 50% cheesy, yet fun enough to pass some time.)

As I find them I’ll post them in this blog under the category Web Games so they can be found easily. Here is the first one from Microsoft– wonder why they look similar to a Mii??? (oops, I mean Avatar!)

I’m working on two things right now for the site as a by product of no longer having to worry about space used on the drive. They are:

1. “A voting mechanism”, no not for gamersigs– but that’s a good idea too!
2. Video Game reviews.

The second is the one is what I’m unveiling tonight. It’s called One-Hour reviews and the basic premise is explained in the first post in the blog, but to elaborate on what you can expect from the reviews is:

• Brutal honesty in what the bloggers think about the game (yes, there’s more than one. If you’d like to blog about games you purchase send me a freind request and I’ll get you an account setup)
• Humor
• A mini walk through of the hour I played the game, including achievment points earned!
• The writer’s thoughts on if you should buy the game or not.

First up is Star Wars: The Force Unleased.

Well, hopefully you didn’t notice the day before yesterday but we now have a new hosting provider… and I can tell you they are much better than our old provider, MyDomains. ME! Since I’m a Web Administrator by trade– there really is no reason to host the site elsewhere. Especially since the number of clicks that adsense receives doesn’t seem to pay the bills. Have you considered clicking on one our sponsors?

We’re now on Two dedicated web and SQL Servers, rather than the slower shared servers. Astonishingly I noticed they were running close to 200 databases on the SQL Server the site was previously located on… no wonder it was so slow!

The pages seem to come up much faster now and I’m quite pleased with the outcome, and if I don’t like the performance I’ll always be able to get someone smart enough to understand what I need done to help me out. The other positive thing is this gives me the ability to schedule jobs and tasks to run periodically, which should help make things a little better.

Well, I recently traded in a BUNCH of records I had in my basement from my prior EBay days and got nearly $180 in credit at Vintage Stock, then traded in a few NES games along with an extra Gamecube… the result being I had more than enough trade credit for a Nintendo Wii!

So, now I’ve added a Nintendo Wii to the game system collection… The wife and kids love it. It’s OK and fun enough I guess, but I haven’t seen anything on there that amazes me beyond the 360. I haven’t played twilight princess yet… but got side tracked after I popped it in and loaded a game save.

With the addition of a Nintendo Wii at the homestead, look for some widening of the signatures scope beyond just xbox360 signatures in the coming weeks, especially since my personal roofing project is now complete.

In the mean time, check out the Dark Knight fan art signature created late last week. If you like one of the signatures there, go on over and create a Xbox360 signature.

Everyone, if your Xbox Live account is about to expire (or if you want to just add to your time) I found a pretty decent deal for 13 Months of Xbox Live! for $43.99 with FREE SHIPPING! over @buy.com, plus they have some decent deals on new releases. (a couple of bucks off generally without the waiting in line)

Yes, the 4th of July is here and there hasn’t been much done on the site lately because I’ve been putting a roof on a house– and doing roof structural repairs on top of it. (Since MEMORIAL DAY)

I’ve managed to get some gaming in and watch the traffic on the site. I’ve had time to think about some other features I want to add to the site. Go on over to the forums and check out my feature brainstorm post there. Go ahead and post your ideas there and we’ll see what we can do. (You’ll need to register, but We will NOT share your information or use it to spam you or send you marketing/sales e-mails)

Quite a few people have found the site! Some of you are even using our signatures in the forums!!! Thank you for that, it’s a key part of making the site grow. Just a reminder, if you use the signature on a forum (or anywhere else– because we’ll see where you use it) please do place a link back to us and to 360voice letting people know who makes the signature for you (and who makes the data available for us to do so). I’ve seen some people doing it and some people not. I’m hesitant to place a watermark on the signature, but might have to since the signatures are a key part of the marketing for the site. (Basically, word of mouth)

Doing so will drive traffic to the site, get our name out there, and through traffic generate ad revenue (yes, I know… it sucks but someone has to pay to keep the lights on.)

Ok. Not a lot has been done in the last week or so because I’ve been in the hot sun (and wet rain) on a leaky roof doing repairs (No, replacement) of the shingles each weekend. However, I think we’ve come far enough to call it good because all I’ve worked on for some time is new features.

So this morning I said “we’re live”.  You can feel safe using the gamer sigs in forums. The only thing we request is that you leave the link back to us (and 360voice) intact in some manner when you use the signature. You can feel free to reword the BBEcode or rework it, so long as there is a link to both us and 360voice.

The other thing I’ve done is to add in the statistics bar (that is on every page) the LAST signature displayed’s gamer tag with a link to their 360voice blog and to display the same link and their gamersignature on the front page. The goals of this are:

• Highlight the signatures on the site in a dynamic psuedo-random fashion.
• Highlight the user displaying the signature out in the world.
• Drive traffic to their blog to raise their ranking in the 360voice Top 20 gamertags

Here are a few items to know about how it works:

• The last signature displayed is driven by using the displaysig.aspx?gamertag link provided when you create a signature, so it only works when you use the dynamic page to display the signature. (Which BTW is also how the signature gets updated each day, so there’s no value in using the image link by itself)
• Since it changes EACH time a user’s sig is displayed it is very fluid.
• The best way to ensure your name stays on the front page is to use the signature in forums and other high traffic sites.
• Post more meaningful posts in forums, so that people read them more– thereby displaying your signature.
• Post in lost of different places so that traffic in each location will trigger the display of your signature.
• be involved in the community where you use the signature so that there is ample opportunity for your signature to be displayed.

Good luck and enjoy the signatures!

Well, not much got done this weekend due to work needing to be done around the house. (Same thing plus some for this weekend and Monday) But I have made considerable progress the last few days.

First, the signatures now autoupdate if they are used via the link provided (….displaysig.aspx?gamertag) if they have not been refreshed in 24 hours… so basically you use it and post it on a web page and when it is displayed 24 hours after the creation it gets re-created by the display process! Automagically!

Last, today I finally got text additions working (and using a transparent background for the text, instead of the default black background that was showing a black rectangle behind the text.

I did a little work on the signature datatype as well, to add a few pieces of data and since text is now working I finally started working on the Gamertag datatype to temporarily hold data from the 360voice.com feed of youre xbox live gameplay while the signature is getting created (or refreshed. Did I mention they do it automagically now?).

Ok. I’ve been working on linking the gamer signature creation form with a database, but the server side drop down and posting in asp.net is giving me fits! As a diversion from my current woes, I’ve played a bit with the css for the site and the site layout since I never liked it in the first place… so it’s been mildly changed so it takes up more of the browser.

I also added:

• The first three postings returned by the blog RSS feed to the main page.
• Achievement Search (which searches our friends at 360voice and achieve360points.com (in addition to us),which displays a series of links for your search term for each site.)
• Misc. behind the scenes stuff.