Today I was checking on the web stats for Virtual Console Mondays and realized that Google had finally given it some PageRank.  Currently it only has a PageRank of 3, but it is a good start and I figure that since I don’t have a whole lot of websites linking to me I have done pretty good.

Also the website has been slowly crawling up on the first page listing for a set of keywords that I really want a high listing on.  The other first page listings that I have obtained for the site are holding their place right around the first five listings, so I’m quite happy about that as well.  To tell the truth I haven’t really done a whole lot of work to get these high listings the main thing I did was use my head and tried to write good relevant content and it seems to work pretty well on its own.

Over the past week I’ve been working on some slight tweaks to enhance the user experience.  The first bit was to distinguish comments made by myself from other users comments, so that my replies are visually identifiable.  Secondly I removed several of the “top sites” only leaving what I thought are the better ones.  Also the remaining “top sites” were added to the bottom of pages that do not include the side bar, this is so that the true number of visitors will be recorded better.  I also added a background to each individual post that changes depending on which console the game is for.  Lastly I ran the CSS file through a optimizer, which reduced the file from 14kb to 9kb.

Hopefully these additions to the site will only increase the experience and will not affect load times or readability for users.

Today I decided to up the resolution for the video demos over at Virtual Console Mondays, they will now be 640×480 with a variable bitrate.  This change in resolution didn’t affect the file size too much so I think it will be a welcome change in quality.  The main reason for doing this is that when viewed on Google’s video site the picture would stretch which would result in a more pixelated video.  I am also working on updating the old video demos to this new resolution/bitrate but it will take some time to encode them all and get them uploaded.

I started this blog so that I can keep track of any progress or changes being made with any of my projects, mainly my site Virtual Console Mondays. I’ll also do the odd update about any graphic design that I do in the future as well as other projects that I may start and hopefully finish.