I can hardly believe it has already been three years since our official public debut. Some of you might be aware that ironically our website's birthday coincides with April Fools! To our readers, business partners, and affiliates, from all of us at The-O Network, we thank you for your support. We hope to continue to serve you for years to come.
As part of the birthday celebration week for our website, we got several things lined up in mind including a DOUBLE convention coverage this weekend, one for Sakura-Con in Seattle, Washington and the other WonderCon in San Francisco, California.
As for the website, we have some new exciting ideas we will be implementing:
Video Podcast Coverage
We will be filming at Sakura-Con as part of our new video podcast coverage. We'll show you some exclusive behind the scenes clips of us working at the convention and with various guests and attendees. We had previously tested this at various past events but they were typically unorganized
Live Convention Video Streams
With the filming and 3G streaming capabilities of Apple's iPhone, we had hoped to have everything ready by Sakura-Con but unfortunately it looks it may not be possible; however, keep an eye on our frontpage if we get live streaming working.
Japanese Music Artist and Album Directory
We have been looking to expand our music department, and we have been tinkering with the idea of a music management system for users to preview albums as well as rate and review them for the last week. It will integrate seamlessly with all current user's community accounts.
We will reveal more in the next few weeks!
Update: As we are heading to Sakura-Con and meeting with quite a few guests, we plan to bring back some souvenirs as prizes for next giveaway coming soon! Stay tuned...
With my bags packed and ready to go, this will probably be my last post before boarding a plane and heading off to Japan. Other staff members are also coming along, and we got a packed schedule and a few surprises in store for you all. We'll try to provide some updates while in Japan, but look forward to our full reports when we get back:
Ironically today marks the "official" second anniversary of The-O Network and we would like to invite you to take a look back on our history and progress!
Within the last 2 years of our official debut we have grown significantly as a team and as a network.
That's right, I got an extra Hatsune Miku 1/6 scale prepainted made by Volks which was sold only through their online shop and shipped to Japanese residences. Only two production runs were ever made and here's your chance to pick it up if you missed it.
If you are curious, I got this figure through a deputy service and had it shipped over. I had to pay for commission fees, bank wiring fees, domestic and international shipping fees, absolute nightmare.
Only 2 days left before the auction ends, check it out!
This was taken at the University of California Davis. Our own Network Administrator, Kevin Yen was grabbing a bite to eat when a pair of Stormtroopers entered dancing to a familar tune made famous by blogger Danny Choo. The pair danced around campus all day spreading Halloween cheer even though it was raining for the rest of the day.
Video clip taken by Kevin with his phone inside.
I've been working over the last few weeks making tweeks on improving the site load speed with varied success.
The good news is that we've located the source of the slowdowns on our site, the bad news is that it appears to be a form of PHP injection attack. We'll be working to identify the source code that's causing this for the next few days.
For now, comments, login, and registration have been disabled and other features will be taken down one by one for analysis.
UPDATE: The bulk of the script was removed successfully, security features have been added to prevent future injections. Site features will return shortly in the next few days.
Quick site update, forums was migrated successfully though compatibility issues arose. Forum may have to be scrapped and restarted.
Currently rebuilding the Network Directory and readding stores manually. Should be done by the end of this week.
Random insert, who else thought the first episode of Gundam 00 season 2 was awesome?
Quick update, most of the original URLs have been restored. Videos have been successfully migrated over and is up and running.
We are aware of some serious site loading issues. Problem has been identified and should be resolved in the next couple of days.
Network Directory and Figure Database should be back by next week.
Welcome to The-O Network Online 3.0 Orca Build! We've been working hard over the last months getting this version of the site ready. We are aware of many problems on the site and we will be addressing them in the next couple of weeks. Here's a quick rundown of the more significant bugs we are aware of:
Broken/Missing Pages/Links
We apologize to all our visitors as currently all the old links are broken; however, they are still on the site under a different URL. We will be addressing this issue over the next couple of weeks and hopefully be able to provide a fix.
RSS Feed Change
To all our RSS Feed subscribers, we have changed the URL to our feed. Though it may be inconvienient, we are currently working a newer feed so it may be wise to wait a bit.
Network Directory/Figure Directory/Forums Missing
The new forums should be up shortly in the coming week, as for the Network and Figure Directory, we are currently revising both sections and will provide an update to their progress at a later date.
Odd for me to post this, but apparently the rumors that have been floating online recently about a "MacBook Touch" made by Apple is true. Our inside source (which is pretty much 98% reliable) overheard Apple engineers discussing the topic quite frequently. When the engineers were questioned, they acted dumb pretending not to know about it. Emails were supposedly sent incorrectly out to employees mentioning meetings for engineers regarding the MacBook Touch.
I would love to get one, however, following Apple product trends, I'd stay away from the first generation MacBook Touch like a plague.
Originally an anime and gaming network, we decided to drop gaming from our site during the final planning of t-ono.net. We would once again like to explore that option.
Alice Yan will be dealing with all our coverages regarding music, bands, and whatnot. That of course includes interviews, so please feel free to bug her.Osman Numair has been with us for a few months and has been officially added to our staff after FanimeCon 2008. I would like to introduce a completely new face, Davis Fan, who will be joining us as a correspondent until he is added as a staff member.