Better Times

Things have improved, if only slightly, for our dear www.funfoll.com website. There has been a significant growth in visitors during this month, something which is very beneficial for us. FunFoll is getting popular, and it's about time, since the website soon turns 9 months since launch. We hope that during the next 3 months until we reach 1 year, we can deliver more quality content to our community and word of us will spread. Let's hope for the best.

Blog posts have been pretty rare, true, once a month, once here, once on the sister blog at WordPress. But I'm very busy with lots of projects. Also, I am the only person left in the www.funfoll.com team. I'm doing all the content adding and soon I will also start doing some minor developments at the website.

Here are a few great things directly from www.funfoll.com:

At The Office

Sexy Seat Commercial

The Best Dancer Ever

Pictures Of The Year 2008

FunFoll Up, FunFoll Down

As I said on the sister blog FunFoll @ WordPress I am very busy maintaining www.funfoll.com so I don't have so much time to write here. Still, today I'm very pissed off about something, so here I am. So what happened? Our dedicated server in Germany experienced some problems today. This is because of another software we're running there, CaryCary. The Apache log also increased to a proposterous size (3.5 GB). The CaryCary log was 2.5 GB and the database 4.5 GB. We cleaned everything up and after a few hours, the server was down again. CaryCary experienced an even worse problem and the log file increased to about 6 GB.

All this happened at a moment when we needed it the least. Why? Because www.funfoll.com was in an excellent period, better than anything we experienced in the past 3 or 4 months. We had more than 4000 visits per day. And all this came to a sad end today. Due to our own mistakes (we have to admit this!), the big wave passed us and I think we will be lucky if today we exceed 1000 visits. So, it's back to square zero for now. Or at least a long way down. Right now, again, we have to wait for months in a row for our popularity to recover from this hit. We just wasted good moments because our website was nowhere to be found when people came rushing in. So yeah, I'm pissed!

And guess what I do when I'm pissed! I go www.funfoll.com and...

Sing!

Slow Growth

I'm here to report that www.funfoll.com is growing slower than I would have hoped. Much slower ::- (. While this wasn't unexpected, it certainly isn't a good news. I had hoped that we would be in a much better position at the end of July, but we aren't. Fortunately, it appears that we can keep ourselves above the 1000 users per day barrier rather easily. The average for the last few days is 1500. So, the site has been growing in the past two weeks, but simply not enough.

I have been personally adding content to it and keeping things running smooth. My involvement is greater than before, mostly because due to lack of funds, we can't afford a content manager. So I'm it for now. I will not let www.funfoll.com die, that's for sure. As a matter of fact, several improvements are in plan, such as a personal blog for all users and an easier to use content-adding system, which will be used to make www.funfoll.com a moderated community content website, but also allow me to easier add content to it. Right now the development team for the website consists only of me and Gabi, who is responsible for the programming. We will continue to improve www.funfoll.com and hopefully we will see regular above-2000-visitors-per-day figures in the coming month of August.

And now, here's your reward for reading yet another boring post of mine ::- D, straight from the pits of www.funfoll.com

Wrestling Chair Chaos

Advertising Campaign Paused

As of two weeks ago, we have five Google Advertising campaigns running to advertise www.funfoll.com using their Google AdWords service. However, the results are not spectacular, and I decided to pause them all for a little while. We have to improve a few more things at the website and add more content to it before we resume advertising.

Right now, the website is growing again, after one month of almost total stagnation due to the problems our company had. I am personally taking care of adding new content to the website right now, and soon, I will get some help from some of my friends. But the content of www.funfoll.com will continue to be moderated, in order to make sure of its quality.

And, like tradition dictates, here's something from our database of fun:

Cat vs Cake

Growing Up

We're very happy to announce that due to the advertising campaigns which we have recently launched for www.funfoll.com, our number of visitors has been growing a lot, which is very good, of course. We are now always above 1000 visitors per day, happily exceeding 2000 sometimes. We even rejoined Alexa's top 100K websites list. We are right now, today, ranked as 64604. Overall, for the past 3 months, we're at 139228, which isn't very good but isn't very bad either.

Of course, we hope that this growth will continue, but in order for things to be so, we need to keep working at our website, which isn't so easy right now, as we are very short in terms of resources. But the fight will continue, and we are not the ones to give up easily. We invested a lot of our scarce resources into these Google AdWords campaigns and I hope it wasn't for nothing... I hope www.funfoll.com will become big soon!

And now, something to reward you after reading such a huuuuge quantity of text ::- D.
George Carlin - Soft Language

More Advertising

Two Google AdWords Campaigns are now running. The last one was launched two days ago, for the Games section of our www.funfoll.com and another campaign will be launched next Sunday. And next Sunday. And next Sunday. Each Sunday this month, another AdWords Campaign will be launched. The major ones will be the two we already launched. The next three ones will have a smaller scope and will be meant only to popularize a few games and picture series which have a great potential of becoming popular.

So far, the Pictures and Games advertising Campaigns have brought us a bunch of visitors and we invested $550 in them. That might not be a lot, but it's all we can spare right now, as we have to support great hosting fees each month. We hope that from these funds, www.funfoll.com will grow to welcome at least 1000 visitors each day by the end of the month. If not, the Earth will explode.


And now... a great funny "How to" guide, from www.funfoll.com

How To Be Emo

FunFoll is Launched!!!

We are extremely happy and thrilled to announce everybody that www.funfoll.com is Officially Launched as of today, the 1st of June, 2008!!! Today is the International Children's Day, and our www.funfoll.com is but a child right now, so, I think it's the best date to pick as our official launch.

The Launch started with the activation of our first Google AdWords campaign, which was initiated just a few hours ago. We will also start a popularization campaign with our friends and long time collaborators, trying to bring as many visitors as possible to our young but promising website. We intend to invest more funds in popularizing ourselves in the incoming period. Also, development will continue on the community section of the website, where we wish to allow users to add content directly on our servers.

For now, the future is still full of unknown, but we got a great working website, two dedicated servers to support it and a small but growing family of fans and great people who helped us and will continue to help us as we grow.

Let's hope only great things will happen from now on!!!

Here's something for you and your kids to enjoy!

Cute Pets!

FunFoll Begins!!! TODAY!!!

L(a)unch Tomorrow!

I am thrilled to announce that www.funfoll.com will launch tomorrow at Lunch Time, New York time. I chose this particular time because most of our visitors come from the United States of America, New York City. I think this is a sign of appreciation which the Americans more than deserve.

Something to last you until tomorrow:

Cute Kitty Wake Up

Approaching Launch Date

We are happy to announce that we are quickly approaching the launch date of www.funfoll.com which was set a while ago to the 1st of June. So, after several delays and problems, we are finally en-route to the launch of the website. We have just made a major functionality upgrade in the last few days and with it, we have published a few of the most original things our website offers right now: PublicSpace and GoldRush. More details about these features as the story develops ::- ).

As for the USA dedicated server, we've been having some really serious issues with that. Things are slow but we're getting there. The server should be online by the end of the week if all goes well. Things however, are not looking good for our company in the near term. We are pretty short on cash and promoting a website takes a lot of muscle.

Here's some great stuff from our website...

Muto

Easter Holidays Break

It's time for the Easter Holidays in our country. Because of this, the development and content enrichment of www.funfoll.com will take a short 9 days pause. Of those nine days, 2 already passed. So in a week, the development of the website will continue. We have also bought a dedicated server in the United States of America, since we have a lot of friends there, and we really want to keep them satisfied with our service. This server came at no low cost for our small company, but I hope that this move will improve our image. We now have a strong website, using servers on two continents, in order to provide everybody a responsive website.

The sad part is that we are not so popular as we used to be a few weeks ago. For some reason, the number of people coming to us from Stumble Upon has decreased badly. They were our main source of popularization. It's really a pity since now we had the power to accommodate a much greater number of visitors. But we did become a favourite website for some people. They are not many though. But maybe it's better this way, so that when we get more popular we can have more stuff ready.

After the holiday, we have exactly 4 weeks to finish the development of www.funfoll.com and we intend to work very hard to achieve this. I don't want us to be late any single day after the 1st of June. This website should have seen the light of day in the end of Winter, but here we are, working through the Spring. But FunFoll really looks great now and I'm sure that the 1st of June will find us in an even better shape!

Here's to better days to come:

Team Building

Delay - Launch Date Switched To The 1st Of June

As I already wrote on the sister blog, we are forced to delay the launch of www.funfoll.com to the 1st of June. 2008, of course ::- D. This might be considered bad news by some, but I am not so sad about it. The truth is that this is the third or fourth delay for our website. I think I'm getting used to it. I don't mind either. The fact is that we do this for the good of this project. We do this so that www.funfoll.com will hit the market in a very good shape. We do this so that we deliver a quality product.

And the delay is not caused only by our need to fix bugs and issues that have appeared during the testing phase of the project. We also have a few functionalities to finish, including our Super Secret Weapon. As a matter of fact, the project has grown further than what was originally in store for it. It's becoming much bigger and much better than ever before imagined. We are putting a lot of effort into this and we hope that we will succeed in introducing something new to the whole world. It's hard to do this, but we strive to make it happen.

On a brighter note, www.funfoll.com has entered the top 100.000 Websites on the internet, according to the Alexa web stats company. Yesterday, we were on place 85,892, which is pretty cool considering our age and the fact that we're still in Beta stage. Of course, our target for the following two months is top 5000. We should be in top 5000 about two weeks after our 1st of June launch. I don't think it's going to be easy, but we made it this far, so we will keep fighting! And by the end of 2008, I hope we'll be in the top 1000 ::- D. Am I nuts? Sure I am. Always was, am and always will be. As somebody famous already said, I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it.

Here's something from our fun library at www.funfoll.com:

Cute Animals Compilation

Popularity On The Rise

With great joy we inform you that the popularity of www.funfoll.com is on a constant rise. Things have went quite good for us lately, especially since we joined forces with www.flash-fun.com a few days ago. This brought a large number of new people to our small but growing website. We are also working on ironing out some of the remaining problems we have. There are a few bugs to fix and a few functionalities to implement.

I do have to remind everybody that www.funfoll.com is not yet officially launched. We are just popularizing because of a few partnerships we have established with some websites which now refer us and help spreading the word. But we are still far from the launch.

Because of the fact that we got more work to do at the website than initially planned, it is more and more likely that we will postpone the launch again, with at least a week. This is not yet completely sure, but we are under pressure to make the website work perfectly as fast as possible, as we have an ever increasing number of fans to keep happy about our stuff.

Here's something from our bag of tricks at www.funfoll.com

Funniest laugh ever!

The Rise Of The FunFoll

Even though our young site is still in beta stage, the latest work we've achieved in the S.E.O. area has started to yield results, as http://www.funfoll.com started to receive traffic from various sites all over the internet, mainly Google and Stumble Upon. This is good news for us, because we need to start growing and popularizing as soon as possible. We will continue to improve our website in respect with the S.E.O. paradigms as well as add more fantastic content to it. The 15th of April should catch us in a much better shape.

Next week, we hope that http://www.funfoll.com will be ready to join forces with another medium-sized entertainment website. We will try to host all the users of the other website together with its content, in our effort of creating a larger online community.

For now, we also host a large number of videos on our dedicated server, but we intend to increase this number in the coming weeks. However, this will require quite a lot of bandwidth, so our intention is to acquire an additional server in May or in June, at the latest. But in order to do this, we need the website to be successful enough. And who knows if it will be...

Here's something off our small but growing website ::- )

Star Wars Goofs

Delay And Progress

As you may or may not have read on the sister-blog of FunFoll, located at WordPress, we had big problems with the desired release date of 29th February. We could not achieve that release date because of our participation to CeBit as well as outstanding tasks for some of our clients. FunFoll is an In-House project and sometimes we need to give a higher priority for tasks from our partners and collaborators. CeBit was also important for us so we had to channel our resources for the preparation for the event. Even so, our www.funfoll.com is not in any danger. We have resumed development at the project a few days ago, when we returned from Hanover, Germany.

For now, we are working on the day layout of the website, which features a different color scheme and graphic. We also improved the FunFoll player (which thrilled one of our visitors at CeBit and they also bought it) and we intend to add more features to it in the coming days. Other than this, we're still busy adding content and working at the infrastructure of the website. We still have to add our super secret weapon in the website as well as finish some of the functionalities which are now in Beta.

Here is the oh-so-usual reward for visiting the blog, taken directly from the Fun Bucket of www.funfoll.com

Japanese Taxi Prank

The Dedicated FunFoll

We are thrilled to announce that the Beta version of www.funfoll.com has been successfully moved to a dedicated server, located in Germany. We have acquired the dedicated server about 3 days ago, and we moved the website yesterday. Now www.funfoll.com works much faster than ever before. The website is very responsive and the surfing experience is very pleasant.

If things go well, we intend to buy another dedicated server in March, to cover the North and South American continents, as we desire www.funfoll.com to work as fast as possible regardless of the country in which it is viewed.

Here's something for the loyal readers, the very first www.funfoll.com funny link from this blog.

P.S.: Oh, and yes, the language of the website is currently stuck on Romanian, we got a bug there ::- D. It's going to be fixed on Monday, don't worry.

Devil Cat

Beta Version Online

We are happy to announce that the Beta version of www.funfoll.com has finally hit the stores. This happened two days ago, on Friday, February the 15th. The Alpha and Beta versions were released according to plan, and right now, we are busy working at the final version of the website. We hope that we will be able to launch it as planned. The upcoming week will see us move to dedicated hosting, since this is vital to a well functioning website.

The official launch date of www.funfoll.com has remained set to the 29th of February, but as I have said before, this all depends on how our development team can cope with the remaining problems to be fixed and the new functionality to be added.

Our sweet www.funfoll.com also has Google's AdSense running on it. We have just set it up the same day we launched the Beta. We hope we can move it to a dedicated server as soon as possible, as we really need to start popularizing the website, and this can't be done on the current shitty co-located server.

This is my reward for you for reading this post. It's also the last time I'll post a non-FunFoll link here.

Crazy Catz

Finally, A Working Server

Pfew. We finally managed to get www.funfoll.com working on the IX Web Hosting server. They enabled the PDO MySQL driver for us after more than two weeks of waiting. This is a very good thing because we got rid of the iFrame which messed things up for us. We also can stay a bit more on this server before moving to dedicated hosting. This is also because the move to dedicated hosting is going to take a bit of time. So we won't move to dedicated this week. We will do it next week.

The Beta version of the website is on schedule for launch tomorrow, however, we did start to have some doubts about how and when to launch the final version. Our intention was to launch the website on the 29th of February. However, this seems to be harder and harder at the moment. Many unplanned things hampered us in the past weeks and this is having a negative impact on what we thought to be a very relaxed time-line for the release date.

Our company will also travel to CeBit this year, and this further stresses our development team, as we would wish to present some of our software there. Anyway, we will try our best to finish www.funfoll.com in due time for its planned release. However, we will NOT PUBLISH SOMETHING UNFINISHED. I would rather postpone the release of the website rather than publishing a crap job. We will try to create something of near-perfect quality, and when we are happy with what we have, we will also launch it.

And here's the more-than-usual reward for reading one of my posts ::- D. This is an excellent game which will also be featured on www.funfoll.com. Let's hope www.funfoll.com will rule all ::- D.

Great Game with Great Idea

Alpha Version Online!

A few days ago we launched the Alpha Version of www.funfoll.com. This is a big event for us. Unfortunately, I was a bit too busy to post about it here. But alas, better late than never. The website can, of course, be accessed at it's official address, www.funfoll.com but this is not really the host of the website. At this address, there is but a simple file which opens the website in an iFrame. The website is hosted on a server here at our company, Wildcard Technologies. Why are we in this situation?

It's simple. Our host, IX Web Hosting, is the worst host I have ever come across. If you're reading this, remember to stay away from them. They're a crappy co-located host with no respect whatsoever for their clients, which is to be expected, of course, for the price of 12$/month which we pay for hosting our stuff there. Even so, they could have helped us with our problems, but didn't. We had a simple issue, we needed a PDO MySQL driver installed. Actually, not even installed, just enabled. Today marks the 10th day since our initial request for this driver. No answer to this day. I have spent 3 chats with members from their support department and I got the same stupid answers: wait, please wait, we're working on it, etc.. Lies. The reason I am so angry on IX Web Hosting is that they are a bunch of liars. I would have preferred a straight "we won't enable it + reason" answer, rather than waiting an eternity for a non-answer. This is the most unfair thing to do to a client: keep him/her waiting in a line for weeks. IX Web Hosting sucks and I suggest you to stay away from them, go to Blue Host or Lunar Pages or whatever. I know that we're going for dedicated hosting with this website because co-located hosting is bad no matter how you look at it. IX Web Hosting did answer tickets usually around 2 to 8 hours and they have a non stop chat service. They have a good package and reasonable support, unless you need more complex stuff, case in which they will lie to you, they will deceive you, they will make you scream in anger and frustrate you. Stay away!

Ok... so for now, we got www.funfoll.com at a temporary location. But we'll launch the Beta version of the website on the 15th of February, and that will feature dedicated hosting and a great deal of bandwidth and performance. Let's all hope that things will go well.

Let's laugh a bit together before www.funfoll.com is launched!

Great examples of stupidity

Delay

As I have said on the sister-blog, FunFoll @ WordPress, we are running a bit late with development on the website because of some pesky clients. But rest assured, we'll have a beta version online at the beginning of February and the 29th of February will see the launch of www.funfoll.com in it's first complete version. But of course, lots of improvements will come after ::- D.

And now, because we're FunFoll, here's something nice...

Ass on the beach

New Layouts Received

So the Holidays are over. Work now resumes at www.funfoll.com with full speed ::- ). Our designer has just finished the layouts for two more sections of the website. Right here is the content page, which will be used to display the extraordinarily funny stuff we'll have on www.funfoll.com. Really!



More to follow as development continues. For now we have not updated the main website because development is still in early stages for the content section.

As usual, a special link for the fanatics still reading this boring blog ;;- )

The Greatest Prank ever