I can not believe it is now 2025... More and more the passage of time feels like it is catching up with me. Late 2023 and 2024 have been prosperous times for the development of this website and its viewership. Although the site remains basic in its appearance, it has grown to cover many of the toys I set out to document as well as many more that I did not even know existed when I registered the domain for this site in 2021. Indeed, I have been building up rather large stockpiles of toys and spending plenty of money on them as well... A lot of my Plarail collection has been covered, and if I am not always buying more it will be easier to get to the stuff I have not covered yet - there are still some neat sets from the 2000s as well as some newer Thomas sets I would like to get to this year. In 2025 I have decided to focus on playing more with the many toys I already own and find new interesting things to photograph or comment on on this site. Hopefully some of the Plarail trains and accessories will get some nice photographs set up in neat layouts this year, and I also think I will spend some time with N scale model trains this year. I have plenty of toys awaiting repairs as well as plenty of toys waiting in storage for their turn in front of the camera as well...
In addition to planning on covering some toys over time this year, I have started photographing some of my tape collection for eventual cataloging and showcasing. I have been experimenting with using computer vision to automatically crop down photographs of parts of my eight track tape collection already. I hope I can apply similar topics to ingest new VHS or Beta tape scans, compact cassette cases and tapes, floppy disks, and other similar pieces of media. Having the pictures prepared saves the lengthy manual cropping time. I hope to implement other workflow improvements like this over the course of this year. There are also many, many tapes hanging around as well as VCRs and other electronics that I would like to photograph, as well as video games and computer stuff... I think I will try and focus on eight track machines and VCRs this year as well.
I have been toying around with the idea of updating some of the code for the website. I have considered giving the site more proper CSS and an actual "design," but for the most part I like this look... There are a few small CSS improvements I have already implemented in some places that will probably appear site-wide, although they are all things you will probably not notice. The other more major idea involves setting up an implementation of shimmie2 as a backbone for the site and making it easily searchable and then rewriting all of the main content pages to reference the shimmie2 "backend" (really more of a side room) and use PHP to size these pictures automatically, letting me focus on the content instead of manually sizing each set imperfectly... After writing the functions to handle displaying images and the paragraphs of text and assembling a template page I could use an Excel sheet to write pages fairly easily, as I have done with some projects in the past, but I have not decided yet. The number of files and folders and sheer size of the site is starting to strain my visual editor...
The website is getting more views than I ever thought it would in such a relatively short period of time. There are about 1,500 different users visiting in a month right now. I expect that the site will easily surpass 100,000 individual page views this year. More times than not when I open my web analytics there is at least one user live in the last half hour, and every month there are more visitors finding the site from Google searches - 700 in the last 28 days, with the most clicks in a single day so far being 42 on the last day of 2024. Thank you to everyone who has visited, looked around, and fallen inside a hole.