theMMOjo.com website appearance March 2009

All in all it’s really been a whirlwind of development over the last few weeks. Our main goal with the first website version, as we’ve mentioned before, was to get Stage One rolled out. It was always intended that this was to be the inclusion of news feeds from a variety of sources and media regarding approximately 10 or so popular MMORPG game titles such as Age of Conan, EverQuest 2 and World of Warcraft.

It really should be pointed out that whilst we’re currently live this is only one part of the whole concept that we’ve got drafted out. In our minds Stage One is far from complete; we think it’s possible to say that we’ve managed to do what we set out to do so far but certainly have many more ideas and concepts that we wish to implement before we can finally say we’re happy to move onto the next development phase.

One of the largest challenges we have had to face with developing the website so far, is that of the installation of the administration backbone. That’s the stuff that you guys can’t see but makes the day to day running of the site a breeze. Now that a large part of this is in place and the databases behind the scenes are set up it leaves us free to concentrate on the content and tools that we know our future users are going to love. But in the meantime, we’re up and running and ready to continue developing.

So what can people expect next? Well, it’s extremely important to us to allow community interaction so we’ll be working on giving our users the ability to comment on the articles. More user interactivity tools will be brought into play over time but we think that this is a good first step in starting that ongoing process off. We hope to have the initial functionality in place within the next week so that we are able to test it and see what people have to say. I truly think that watching the community grow over time is one of the pleasures of what we are setting out to do.

There’s a certain practicality involved in all of this also though. When a site allows interaction from the user base, problems and concerns inevitably spring up. We have to look to the integrity and security of the system and the users ensuring that there are no loop holes through which people are able to sneak in malicious code; not to mention that we want to maintain a balance between the outspokenness of the MMO community and the age/sensibilities of potential viewers. There’s nothing more annoying than censorship or moderation but the unfortunate fact is that sometimes someone in ‘authority’ needs to step in ocassionally when the train is coming off the tracks. However, these are issues that no doubt deserve a post in their own right as they’re complex and highly subjective at times and I’ll try to address some of it in my next post.

Until that time, don’t forget to let us know what you think of what we’ve done so far and as always we wish you good gaming.

If you’ve sat down recently and tried to buy a domain name you’ll probably be well aware that most domain names are taken. It’s big business nowadays; highly speculative but if you purchase and park a key domain name and someone wanders along and decides they want to buy it then you could be onto a big earner.

The current system is arguably not very well designed, although it certainly does adhere to the Internet’s sense of free enterprise. But, for the individual business owners and for website developers/owners it can be a very protracted and painful experience brainstorming and thinking around the issue of what name could you possibly still purchase that meets the need of your ‘brand’. If you don’t have several thousand dollars set aside to purchase a name that is already taken and parked this is a very real issue.

ICAAN is the organisation that is responsible for the introduction and maintenance of the domain name classification system (amongst other things). So for instance they declare what new top-level domains will be available and when i.e. .com .biz .net and so on. The solution to the current situation seems to be the introduction of more of these¹. But let’s face it folks, everyone wants a .com that is relevant. It’s what internet users are most familiar with when they go to type in a URL.

The position that left us in was basically a week or more of walking around the office throwing out random words and concepts for a domain name. We finally settled on theMMOjo as our name due to a number of factors. Firstly, we felt it was a fun play on words. What is mojo and why would it be relevant? Well:

mo⋅jo²

/ˈmoʊdʒoʊ/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [moh-joh] –noun, plural -jos, -joes.

We would be able to use this word and manipulate it with two ‘M’s to make it stand for Massively Multiplayer Online whilst at the same time convey a meaning that was relevant to our product.  It was a breakthrough moment for us when we checked the Whois directory and realised that our choice of domain name was available. There’s no point having web content after all without a domain name!

The whole process was really quite painful we have to admit. It’s also not ideal that one of the side effects of all the domain name parking on the web means that referrals may end up in the wrong place but that’s just the nature of the beast until the system is cleaned up a bit unfortunately.

We finally got a construction page up, it’s nothing special to look at but it’s definitely better than the existing generic community server front page that we were experimenting with. It’s probably a great deal less confusing also considering even we were baffled by the way in which that platform was feeding things through to the front page. It turns out that custom coding the site was definitely the way to go in this instance.

The exciting stuff is going on behind the scenes and still isn’t ready to to be published yet but what I am able to tell you is that it looks good, it functions great and it’s developing very swiftly.

Stage One of our rollout is going to be the provision of gaming news for all interested parties. Whilst it would be impossible for us to attempt to support every single known MMO out there currently, we’re building a system that will automate a large amount of the ‘grunt’ work involved with that kind of continuous research. Initially, we’re looking at supporting approximately 10 to 15 games. This should help us to project and account for just how much work there will be on an ongoing and daily basis as we introduce and modify new features and projects at MMOjo.

We’ll be giving our users the usual search functionalities and organising everything in a very neat and compact way so that you can always get the pieces of information that you want as quickly as you want them. The current speed at which the system is feeding back (totally untechnical I know!) is extremely fast and I’m told by my partner there are still some additional things that can be done to make this even faster and more efficient. From a none technial point of view it looks good and works very well so far. I’ll be giving it the once over in the next few days to see if there’s something that we’ve missed out, or something additional that we can look to provide now or in the future in terms of its functionality.

The next step in this part of the project will be to provide our viewers with the ability to comment on articles, although the jury is still out as to how we’re going to fully implement that piece of technology. I like threaded comments personally but I think that Scott has a few tricks up his sleeve that I look forward to seeing.

Moving forwards onto Stage Two our users can expect to see a new section of the website being born. It’s a bit more bulky and a great deal of development work; so for now all we will say is that it will originate from a universal listing of MMO games available currently. Background information on all aspects of the games will be introduced and that will lead to a few more neat features. We’ll let you know more when it becomes a bit more relevant as we’re still arm wrestling over a few concepts, thoughts and ideas.

The moment that we go live with the news section I will update this blog post haste so that you all know and can even (we hope) start to become users yourselves. Have fun in the meantime and don’t forget to get your game on!

I suppose the best place to kick this all off is to expain who and what we are. I mean if you were to just browse by this page we’re sure the average reader would be extremely confused and probably rather amused considering that we’ve had zero time to do some of the niceties like make it look well… good.

So for those of you who can suspend disbelief for a few moments and enjoy watching a new blog being born, welcome to theMMOjo.com’s official wordpress blog. We hope that you stay with us on this journey as we build and conceptualise our website; if only to smile as we no doubt make some very rooky mistakes along our way.

What is theMMOjo? It’s a concept that my partner and I came up with some time ago one drunken evening. We’d like to think of it as more of a question of what is it not?

Both Scott and myself are avid consumers of PC games known as MMORPGS (Massively Multi Online Role-Playing Games). Now some of you are probably familiar with these and others won’t be, if you’re in the category that doesn’t know anything about them then feel free to step over to my lens at squidoo to learn some more. I have become totally addicted to that site in the last few days and am constantly updating my pages there. Hopefully in it’s pages you will find an answer to your question and if you don’t just contact me and I’ll try to give you some help finding the information you need.

Moving on though, so what was this concept we came up with? Well, quite frankly we got fed up of having to visit a gazillion web sites all over the place to get an answer to a question or to find out some key information on that upcoming game release we had been waiting two years to hear about. During our exhaustive journeys for answers we were welcomed by corporate sites that were self promoting; fansites that varied in quality and often hadn’t been updated in months; and some semi-professional sites that were all good at doing some aspect of what we wanted to see but never a whole package one-shop stop concept. I mean let’s not even mention the number of viruses we had to get and the male performance pills/creams/objects(?!) we saw along the way.

So we thought big. I mean really big!

What if we could pool all the information and resources together? What if we could depolarize all the gaming communities and have them come to one spot? That was a key aspect for us, the gaming community is a fickle thing, trends and tastes change but how do we help to inform the gaming developers of the real wants and needs of such a diverse crowd of people? Instead of creating flawed products that somehow miss the spot why not look to a gaming community that has a finger in many proverbial pies? As for the players themselves, why should you have to bookmark a million pages just to try to keep up with your favorite title and products? Confused about something or are you just dying to know the latest information so you can decide what to do? Then that’s what we’re aiming to be – a place that any MMO gamer can call home.

I did warn you it was big! Our greatest challenges in the days and weeks ahead is how to start implementing it on a smaller scale and to grow organically yet methodically from that point until we provide what we’re aiming to. We will endeavor to stop by and update everyone on our progress and development as often as we can. Join us on our journey and see how we do; who knows you may even have a thought or two for us and believe me we’re very interested in feedback from everyone.

That’s the beauty of the internet in a sense, we can all help to inform and create change.