2013-12-09 11:51:30

I have been asked why I haven't updated the site in so long. The short answer is: For now I've lost the "sales spark". The longer answer: A combination of lowered interest, spending less time on GAF, and letting my attention wander elsewhere.

When I first started doing the database/charting stuff that eventually became Garaph, it was around the time of DS/PSP launch. There was a really interesting competition going on for a while there, followed by the insane record-breaking performance of DS, followed by the insane record-breaking performance of Wii in its earlier years. Lately there hasn't been anything nearly so interesting. Both from the perspective of sales and as a Nintendo fanboy I find 3DS and Wii U far less interesting than DS and Wii were. Without that interest, doing the necessary weekly updates to keep things up to date became more of a chore. The real biggie was when Famitsu yet again changed the layout of their page, meaning I'd have to modify much of my software that parsed the page to make updating a simpler task. I just didn't feel like getting to it right away, and haven't yet.

GAF is someplace I spent a looooot of time. After some net connection troubles kept me away cold turkey for a week or so, though, I decided to try to continue staying away more since I'd already gone through the hard part, and see what else I filled the time with. Largely this ended up being watching a lot more TV and playing more games, but that probably beats more talking about TV and talking about games. Now I visit occasionally, but I don't have the strong connection. Garaph was basically an outcome of being part of the GAF Sales-Age community, so the lessening of that connection lessened my reasoning for keeping Garaph up to date.

Something not many people seem to realize is that part of the site does stay up to date--the Media Create hardware. That is properly set up to grab the data straight from the site every week, so as long as that's continued on a pretty regular schedule and without a change in format or new systems being added, it hasn't taken work on my part. However, since the weekly sales page defaults to the last Famitsu data, you don't notice the data is there unless you go make a graph that would use it.

My attention has also wandered to new and unexpected interests. By way of the Rhythm Heaven series I ended up getting really into Tsunku's music, and finding another small niche I could fill with a database site. It's extremely different in topic and content from Garaph, but is also very obviously Garaph's sibling in terms of page design. DohBell, my database of Hello! Project music.

All the above said, I figure this will catch my interest again someday. I still try to save copies of the weekly results, so they'll be there to parse whenever I get to it. The first time I built up data I had years of old data to find and deal with--the next time I resume I should have an easier time.