Birthdays
First Birthday
June 25, 2005No formal celebration. The character battles section was launched.
Second Birthday
June 25, 2006
Another year has passed for Toad's Castle, and what a year it's been. The overall content on the site has more than tripled and many new sections have been added. There has scarcely been a week that did not see new guides, comics, reviews, or other additions. A year ago the forum was nothing more than an unused sub-section of my other site. Since July it has slowly grown into a thriving community with discussions on a broad array of topics in addition to video games, from current events to writing, books, and movies. In the fall Toad's Castle interviewed a Nintendo programmer, and we recently interviewed Tommy Tallarico. Visitors to have increased from 100-200 a day to about 1000, and in May we had a total of 482,860 hits. It's been a great year and I've loved every minute of it.
When I started Toad's Castle early one summer morning I never expected the site to last or grow for as long as it has. Indeed, I often start small sites that are quickly abandoned. It seemed Toad's Castle's fate was sealed when I stopped updating several weeks later, leaving the site's hideous yellow layout and nearly place holder quality content to rot in the wasteland of failed projects. But things changed about a year and a month ago when, discouraged with people's lack of enthusiasm for the programming site I had run for two years, I restarted work on Toad's Castle. By July of last year Toad's Castle had become my main website. It is now my longest lasting and most successful internet project.
Over the past few weeks you may have noticed several new sections popping onto the navigation bar in rapid succession. I've been hard at work in my effort to turn Toad's Castle into the #1 Mario fan site on the net, and this is only the beginning. Throughout the summer you can expect updates almost every day, with new sections appearing on a weekly basis. By the end of the summer I predict that Toad's Castle will have grown in size more than it has throughout this entire year.
I'd like to thank all of you for visiting and supporting Toad's Castle. A fan site is nothing without quality fan content, and I am overjoyed to have received such great art, fiction, comics, and more. Reading your comments and feedback on the site has been a wonderful experience. And finally, thanks to all of the great members of the forum who stop by daily and make Toad's Castle more than a cold collection of bits. I hope you'll all stick around, the show has only begun.
-supertoad
Third Birthday
June 25, 2007Another year has come and gone here at Toad's Castle. The last year saw renovations on the castle in the form of a much improved layout, an approximate doubling in traffic, and expansion of the forum community. Although I wasn't able to update as much this year as in the past, our new news system and the consistently active forum kept people coming back. Thanks goes to Gage for doing the news for all those months and the rest of the staff who helped out during the year.
Over the next year I hope to continue growing the forum, get updates on the other sections back to a more frequent pace, and open at least ten more sections before the next birthday.
To celebrate this birthday I decided to put together a list of memorable topics from forum history. The more buried topics have been locked to prevent bumping. Enjoy!
Game and system collections
My conversation with a Nintendo programmer
The Toad's Castle Show
Toad's Castle Interviews Tommy Tallerico
Pictures from the Reggielution
Revolution gets official name: Wii
Toad's Castle Turns Two Years Old!
The Corrupted Wish game
Would you do it?
Debate: Immigration
TC is going back in time!
Does anyone care anymore?
Tunnel in the Dark - This is the End for Me
Debate: Gage vs supertoad
Fourth Birthday
June 25, 2008Yet another year has passed at the Castle. It's hard to believe that it was four full years ago that I sat at my computer at the start of summer and started a small Mario site. Thanks to all of you the site has grown more than I could have expected that day, and I hope with your continued support we can keep expanding this year. We go up and down on our traffic, but we never have fewer than 30 thousand unique visits per month. Last month we had 44,610 unique visits and 1,125,594 total hits. With five days left in June we have already surpassed that.
Toad's Castle always grows best in the summer. So far this summer submissions are starting to come in more steadily, we have restarted Nintendo News, we have launched the Find Snake game, we now have monthly contests, and the forum has seen new members. I would like to take this occasion to announce two new projects for Toad's Castle.
The first is Mario Game Pages. If Toad's Castle is going to grow to be one of the best Mario sites, we have to have an information page for each game. Each one will have a summary and stats about the game and links to the relevant content on the site. To help start this section, the next monthly contest will ask members to submit the best game summary and accurate game stats.
And now, for the major project I've been secretly working on...
A fully automated online trading card game. We've tried several incarnations of forum-based trading card games, but the fact is they just aren't that much fun to play. I am programming this game using PHP and JS so you can login, buy and trade cards, create decks, then play games in real time or over a longer period--whichever you prefer. Unlike on the forum, there will be no tedious manual tracking of stats, decks can be truly shuffled, and elements of chance can be introduced in battles. Players will earn coins to buy new cards by playing games, submitting content to the site, and winning contests. Here is a preview:
[dead links removed]
You can expect the game to be finished in the next week or so, depending on how smoothly the rest of the development process goes.
Here's to the best year that Toad's Castle has ever had, and many more birthdays to come.
Fifth Birthday
June 25, 2009This last year has in many ways been the least successful the site has seen. It started out well last summer with the TCG project, but following the disaster that washed away all those weeks of effort, I lost much of the will to update the main site and didn't really start to recover it until a few months ago. In the darkest hour of TC's history I actually considered changing the site to be something entirely different, but stepped back from that brink. I am still convinced that TC could be a great and popular Mario fan site.
In May I laid out some thoughts and plans for the summer. So far they haven't gone as well as I would've hoped. I got the video section up, but due to technical limitations I wasn't able to make uploading easy, and I haven't received a single submission yet. While I still believe the video section would be great for the site, I realize video creation isn't a skill I've yet developed, and probably isn't for other members either. For now we should play to our strengths. In the next month I am going to dedicate myself to rebuilding the main site experience.
I will be working from the following principles in the new design:
- Make the site more visually appealing.
- Add more flexibility and interactivity to our existing content.
- Fully integrate members' forum accounts into the main site so they could be easily accessed from future web applications.
- Make the submission process for all content as automated as possible.
- Improve flow to and from the forum.
Thanks everyone for coming here and contributing to our community. This forum is the reason I am still dedicated to the endeavor I started five long years ago when I was in many ways a very different person living under different circumstances. Here's to another five years.