Back in August I said I was going to stop updating unless things changed, which I described as getting enough free money to run the site as I want. I also complained about going from ~1k uniques/day to ~150 uniques/day, hold that in your mind for a moment…
Then, mid-October I had to move the site from a shared account I had to my VPS (the same that hosts a few HCG downloads) and decided to see if everything was working so I could just “set it and forget it” as I wasn’t going to update the site any more, I ended up noticing that a couple of WordPress plugins weren’t working and fixed them (one that generates site maps for search engines and a SEO plugin, if you know anything about running a site, you know where this is going…); after a few days, I had a pleasant surprise, the number of daily unique visitors was rising again (went to ~600/day). Why?
Long story short, Google was indexing only a few pages from the site, after I fixed the plugins I also noticed that google was only indexing ~50 pages of the site instead of ~500, so I resubmitted the site map, fixed all links on the news pages of the site and Google was back to indexing the site.
Right now, ~1 month after I fixed shit that I should have noticed and fixed long ago (all that stuff was in that sad state for at least 6 months), the site is back to ~1k unique visitors/day.
And this was unexpected (and shameful…how didn’t I notice all the crap that was wrong a few months earlier?), fucking great but unexpected.
So, I will be back to updating the site (might take a bit for the first update) and the good old “Donation” button is coming back again (Sorry, it has to.).
Since the site is cheap to run as it is, I would only need people to donate ~60 US$ per year, I can see that working, plus whatever I get from Fileserve for the downloads (if they do indeed pay).
So, expect the next update in around one week. Also, I removed the Rapidshare mirror (they deleted almost all of the files) and am fixing the Fileshare mirror as it was missing ~250 HCGs due to deletion.