Welcome one and all to the New Blue Fish Apartment Open Beta!

As you may have seen on the old Blue Fish Apartment that was hosted on FC2, I’ve decided to ditch FC2 Blog in favor of a self-hosted option where I have more control over how my gallery looks like as well as a more modern interface, and servers that wouldn’t go up in flames the moment 10 people would want to visit at the same time. If you want to know more about this decision, it’s on the old site (which I’ve now dubbed the Blue Fish Archives).

So that was then. What about now? I had the site in a limited Closed Beta and made a few adjustments to the look of the site. During that time I was hoping to implement features that would better allow for communication to fans to new posts as well as allow for interaction on the gallery itself. Unfortunately I hadn’t been able to implement them do to my part-time eating into my time here. Due to this (as well as other personal factors), I’ve since quit that job to fully focus on this site and other aspects of my artwork (including opening up Print and Merch Shops). Since things were in closed beta for so long with not much happening, I’ve decided to move things to Open Beta and just implement features as I go along. There’s still artwork that I need to do, and I can’t continue to hold off on uploading to the gallery.

Looking to the future, I’m hoping to get this site to 1.0, at least by Spring, with all operations of the Blue Fish Apartment, Print Shop Baguette, and Merch Shop Poisson up and running, as well as the re-launching of my Patreon page. Completion of everything should coincide with my 15^th Anniversary in late July. For now things are going to look a little crusty in some spots of the site. If you catch an issue, do not hesitate to let me know. I’ll be taking all suggestions and bug notices over on the official Discord Open Beta Channel. Remember, you must have the role “Shady Contractor” (it’s housing themed) to post on the Open Beta Channel.

Here’s the current roadmap for the site itself, in the preferred order that I want to do things.

1. Social Media Auto-Poster (Done)
2. Open a Twitter (or convert current one) for BFA and all other operations (Done)
3. Fix About page to not be so slow, and add on Tools of the Trade section (Done)
4. Fix and better understand Analytics System (Done)
5. Implement un-annoying Email Newsletter system (Done)
6. Implement Comment System (Done)
7. Create a full archive page of news and artwork whenever someone clicks on “Latest News And Artwork” to see beyond the most recent 4. (Done)
   

Keep in mind that this is preferred. If something takes a little longer to implement, then I’ll just skip to the next thing until I’m ready to go back and try again. As of this post, I’ll be dubbing this site as Version 0.10, then adding on as each milestone above is reached, regardless of order. The order of things will be like this:

• Ver. 0.10 – Starting point
• Ver. 0.20 – One milestone reached
• Ver. 0.50 – Half of all milestones reached
  
• Ver. 0.90 – All but one milestone reached
  
• Ver. 1.0 – All milestones reached, site is out of Beta (Now Here)

Other things like the the Shops and the Patreon page are separate from the site. I’ll update everyone on the state of those right here on the Blue Fish Apartment.

Now then, back to work for me. Remember to join the Discord for updates on the site.