Hi all,
It’s been a fun ride for us here at Sakura Index, and we’re very much happy to have you all with us into 2016! A lot of stuff has been happening in the background lately, and here’s a quick gist of things:
- Updated hardware back-end: Yep, you read that right. We’re back on a bit of a high-spec backend to help support our growing number of visitors. We’ve been currently inducted to a cloud-based solution, so expect quicker loading and response times when trying to access the site. We’ve moved away from our old server, which was a stand-alone one and has been hosting at most 25 websites all at the same time.
- Writer Activations, Old and New: Giving the site a more robust and secure back-end allows us to cater to more users, and along with it more content. We’ve gotten hold of more people to work on producing awesome stuff for the site, so you’ll see more hands and avatars besides me and Althaea-sama. Interested in publishing with us? You can start now: just send in a copy of your write-up, along with a cover letter to inquiries@sakuraindex.jp, and we’ll take it from there.
- Monetization: As you may know, Sakura Index has been alive since five to six years ago. Initially a passion project, we’ve grown into an awesome community. With that, we built the Media Index Group with our sister site Reimaru Files. Through this we planned a lot of content-sharing and a bit of grown hacking, but it took us a lot to get to where we are today. We’ve tried to support the site’s growth by adding advertisements and accepting paid-posts, but for all we know these are not enough to sustain a site such as this…
To support the growing needs of the site and to fund our new-fangled hardware, we’ll begin making content that can be purchased for a small fee some stores and on-site. Don’t worry, FREE VERSIONS WILL STILL EXIST ALONGSIDE THE PAID ONES. We’ll be trying to build value-added content to convince you to make the purchase. Hopefully, we’ll be able to continue doing what we love for the foreseeable future. Hope you’ll continue supporting us with this! ^^;
- Sakura Index: Updates for 2016: in conjunction with the above, we’ll have an avenue for more original content, such as stories, web novels (we’ve been thinking about it), or even web manga (heh. we all know how bad I am with drawing, so we’ll work with using ComiPo). We’ll be implementing this possibly by third quarter this year.
That’s it for now. Some of these changes will happen either within this month or the next, unless specified.
And again, thanks for staying with us and see you again next time! 🙂
Cheers,
Crosse