| Welcome to HaloCharts.com! | Dear Guest, welcome to HaloCharts.com! If you aren't being tracked already, simply enter your name in the box below and stats will begin to collect for your gamertag. You will have your very own player page and be on many of the site's leaderboards. Feel free to register an account and get access to even more features!
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| Halo Talk
About HaloCharts |
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| | How HaloCharts Began:
HaloCharts.com came online on November 7th, 2007 and was created by me, Firestream. I had been following all of the hype leading up to the launch of Halo 3, but had never been much of a Halo player... but still a gamer. A friend of mine and co-admin here, StaticFlatline, sent me a message a week after Halo 3 came out expressing how badly I needed to get the game. Previous to Halo 3, I had only played just a handful of games of Halo: CE and Halo 2 which included a couple crazy evenings watching StaticFlatline and his roommates rip each other up on Halo 2. I went out and got the game. Here's a link to the first game of Halo 3 I ever played. It wasn't pretty, but at least I didn't go negative!
Immediately following my first few games online, I saw Bungie's incredible website and the wealth of stats they were providing. I started looking for leaderboards and came across Halo3.junk.ws. I've got to give them the most credit for inspiration to start HaloCharts. They were doing some really amazing stuff with their stats and leaderboards. I wanted to learn how they did what they did and see if I could extend the ideas they had. I spent the next few weeks working on code to grab stats from Bungie's site, collect them in my own database and see what I could do with the data. The earlier version of HaloCharts had a handful of leaderboards and stats and didn't really show more than Bungie and H3J did. People started trickling to the site, somewhere around 10-15 new players being tracked each day.
It took about 6 months of solid work on the site to see it grow substantially. I worked nearly every day on the site (and still do), looking at what I could add to the site, what I could do better, etc. Leaderboard after leaderboard popped up and more and more stats surfaced. By January 2008, about 35-50 new people found the site each day. I did my best to promote it, but its hard to start a site from the ground up, especially with competition. In May, 2008, I finished the first ever (that I know of) player comparison system. I posted about it on Bungie's forum and immediately got a ton of replies and a big jump in tracked players. A few weeks later, Bungie posted about the player comparison generator on their front page. That was the first BIG day for HaloCharts, and over 7000 people found the site.
I never imagined HaloCharts growing to the site that it is today. Right now, over 1000 new tags are being tracked each day and the site is getting anywhere from 5000-7000 unique visitors daily. It looks like there's a lot of growth coming soon with the release of ODST this fall and Halo: Reach next year sometime. I also never imagined how strong the community here would become. I've met some of the coolest people and best players through this site. The community here is full of talented, creative people and I owe a lot of the ideas for features here to them. I have a great group of staff that help me a ton daily, as I can't do it all on my own.
The Technical Stuff:
I can't tell you how many different servers the site has been on since it started. At least 6, if I'm remembering correctly. It started out with bluehost.com until it reached the point where a dedicated server was necessary. It just recently moved over to the best server yet:
- Dual Quad Xeon 2.27ghz Hyper-Threaded
- 12gb DDR3 1333mhz RAM
- 64gb Solid State Disk (primary)
- 750gb SATA II Disk (secondary)
The site's running pretty well now with a lot of room to grow. I planning for double or triple the visitors over the next year. The site itself is written in PHP and uses Apache and MySQL. There's quite a bit of code behind the scenes, of course, I've been working on the site for nearly two years now.
I've actually got a secondary development server now. Its got pretty nice specs of its own:
- Dual Quad Xeon 1.8ghz
- 4gb DDR2 RAM
- 2x 250gb SATA II Disks (500gb total)
About Me:
I'll keep this part brief. Right now, I'm the only developer on the site. I also did most of the art and layout, but I've had a lot of help with header graphics, nav graphics, award & medal graphics and sig templates. I actually prefer to stick to the coding side of things. I started programming at about 6 years old doing QBasic on a 286 with a 40meg hard drive and 2megs of RAM. I've been dabbling with websites since 1996 where my first site was with AngelFire. Man, it was bad...
I've been running fairly large communities for a long time. One of my earlier jobs required me to run two very large online communities that still exist today. Around 2002 I started a community called Firestream.net, focused on Christian Rock & Metal, that just recently bit the dust (RIP). It grew to be very large, but nothing compared to HaloCharts. I ended up having to pass on the day to day at FS to another guy due to time constraints.
I consider myself able to pick up and learn pretty much whatever is needed to do the job. I've learned a ton about code & query optimization from seeing this place grow. I've got about 10 years experience in PHP, MySQL and Apache. I'm also very comfortable with the .NET framework including C# and VB.net. I really don't want to list my entire resume here so I'll just leave it at that. I do work full-time though, and don't make my living from this site (although I'd love it if that was possible).
What's in store for HaloCharts?
I fully expect to have a lot of new stats and features for Halo 3: ODST. Then, after that, I'll be looking into what HaloCharts can do in relation to Halo: Reach, whenever we find out more information on that game. Sounds like the Halo franchise is here to stay, and my plan for HaloCharts is to continue to do whatever is possible to extend the experience of those games and provide a high range of stats, charts and leaderboards.
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1616 Views - Last Updated on Jul 29, 2009 - 10:52:27 AM by firestream - This is a Public Page |
HaloCharts.com was created under Microsoft's "Game Content Usage Rules" using assets from Halo 3, ? Microsoft Corporation.
Halo 3 is a registered trademark of Bungie, LLC. This website is in no way affiliated with Bungie, LLC.
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