January was an amazing month for the website! Let’s talk about why.
Updates
Genre Form Update
Last update I talked about how I was working on this, but also expressed concerns that it wouldn’t make an end of January, beginning of February, release. Well, turns out I’m better than I thought!
The feature actually launched mid-end of January, which was sooner than expected. I haven’t gotten any angry emails, so I’m pretty sure I haven’t broken anything. I’m super happy with how it turned out, and I think it was good for the website as a whole.
Admin Content Check Tool
With the advancements with the form, keeping content correct and up to date is more important now than ever. I wanted a way to easily go through sets of anime, and update them; so, I created a tool for myself. This tool works with data sets of 50 anime shows, and will validate their content based off MyAnimeList. I can see what is right, what is wrong, and easily update it all from this page.
The page will also show if the trailer for an anime page is bad. Trailers get taken down all of the time for a variety of reasons, so this is a plus. This alone will allow me to keep more on top of the trailers.
The only downside to this, is I didn’t implement any link changing for the watch links. The links is where it gets complicated. Sites like Crunchyroll sometimes keep the page up, but they don’t actually have it (this is most apparent with all the shows they lost with the split from Funimation). Other sites, of the less legal variety, don’t really care to have a web bot checking out their content, so sometimes they outright block it.
Anyway, it’s still a cool tool. I plan on making a routine of monthly content checks. I’ll use this tool to verify the content over the first few days of each month (since the tool itself takes a few minutes to run, plus there is me verifying the update is needed, etc.)
Analytics
January 2019 was the most recorded traffic ever in RandomAnime.org’s history! YAY!
There were a total of 23,234 unique visitors to the site, 19,808 of those were new users. What’s nice is we also saw a slight increase in session duration, averaging 4:20. What’s really cool is the bounce rate, which was down to 22.6%.
I can’t express how happy this makes me. It’s pretty awesome. Fun fact, this is the third straight month that the website has had a record user count. Of course, I doubt that February will make it four straight…but you never know!
February Plans
Adding Anime
This month I want to focus solely on content. The website itself and its functionality are in a great place, so I think it’s justified to focus on some content. It’s getting about that time where I add in this season’s anime, so there is that, but I also want to add some others. I have a list that’s slowly been growing from suggestions.
A realistic goal would probably be 1250 anime, which would be 50 anime added this month. I would love to make it to 1300 though. That doesn’t sound that hard but, man, it’s getting difficult to find anime! I never thought I’d have that problem.
RAD By Date
I’m tossing around the idea of changing how the random anime of the day works, but this is just a loose idea at this point. Right now, the anime of the day is updated every night at midnight central time. This is fine, but it also means the anime of the day will update at random times throughout the world.
My thought process would be to have a specific date tied to the anime of the day. Instead of having a automatic script that runs at a specific time, the anime would be stored with a predetermined date. That way, the anime of the day that loads is based off of the date of the person requesting it.
It’s an idea. Not a very hashed out one yet. We’ll see.
Moving Forward
Keep moving forward. We’ll see how February pans out. There are a lot of plans coming together this month and the following, so it’s going to get crazy.
Thanks for reading and, if you are a user of the site, thanks for using the site!