A 2 Year Recap

Happyfolding.com has now been up for about two years. How have things changed since then?

Of course, more content was added. And (thankfully) visitor numbers have increased. To give you an impression, here's what Google Analytics depicts the trend of my visitor numbers: I think I got my highest visit count on 18 August 2009, which must have been when I published diagrams to my first own design, a simple eagle. As far as I can see the highest page views count was on 30 March 2009, right after I uploaded the pictures I took at the BOS Convention Spring 2009.
I was really surprised in the beginning (2007) at how quickly I got many hits. As to be expected, most of them come from YouTube. In any case, I'm really happy as to how numbers have been growing, and hope to maintain the visitor numbers in the future.

But let's look at the structure of the site. Given that I did a video in October 2007, when I launched the site, I still have some idea of how things were back then. So here we go.

The first thing to notice is that the top navigation had other names:

News, Instructions, Techniques, Reviews, Gallery, Conventions, Vlog, Links, Contact

Hm, looks a bit different now.

Instructions

The instructions page is pretty much the same as before, but techniques were merged into that page. After all, those are instructions, too. You can filter by model type "basic techniques" to get just those.

Other videos

Reviews and Vlogs moved to Other videos, mostly because I haven't done many reviews. To be exact, generously counting I did two: one on the BOS Autumn Convention 2007, and one on Eric Gjerde's book "Origami Tessellations".

Gallery

The gallery is also very similar to before. The convention photos moved to the gallery, and a filter was added for that. The pictures (and videos) now have some extra data, such as stating more clearly who folded the model and who the designer is, or what aspect ratio a sheet of paper needs to have if you want to fold it.

Links and Contact

The links page and contact really didn't change, really! Ok, I added my postal address, I probably added a link here or there, but that's about it. No structural changes.

So that's the old stuff and where it went. But what did I add in those two years?

Diagrams

Yes, there's a couple of pdf diagrams available on this site now. Granted, they're not many (and most of them are by Charles Esseltine), but in the future this section might expand. If I design more models, I do plan to post diagrams to those creations there. And some other designers have given me diagrams to publish, which hopefully makes their work more accessible and well known.

Dictionary

Earlier this year I decided to add some captions to one of my videos. In the process I realised I didn't know the correct German expressions for origami procedures. Searching the web, I found some translations of origami vocabulary scattered here and there, but nothing really comprehensive. So I programmed a dictionary module for Drupal, and started adding translations for some languages. Since then I've received help from many others - thank you so much - which means that the dictionary now offers origami terms in 12 languages (Chinese, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish). And I'd be happy to expand it further. For each of those terms I created a page that describes that term, although I have to admit that many of those pages are lacking lots of information. It's an ongoing project.

Media

Only recently I decided to document any mention of happyfolding.com in the media. It's not been much yet, but it's nice to remember those times. And, truth be told, I don't try to get media attention. If people come up to me, I'm happy. But other than that I've just been watching how things develop.

Donations

After a while I added the option of donating to this project. And people do once in a while. It doesn't cover all my project costs, but it definitely helps. Plus, it gives me a smile on my face when people are willing to contribute. I also received some paper donations, which usually totally makes my day, and it's a bit more personal. I was also given two books ("Origami Tessellations" by Eric Gjerde and "Ornamental Origami" by Meenakshi Mukerji), which left me speechless at first. I did find my voice later to express a great thank you. I have received some letters, which I love reading, and I've tried to answer all of them. Thanks for all your contributions, whatever the form is!
By the way, hidden away on the donations page is a link to a page that lists all the origami books I own - or at least most of them: http://www.happyfold...

Side Navigation

And then there's the RSS feeds I added, which hopefully help some of you keep track of the changes to my page. I removed all my origami videos from Metacafe when they changed their terms and conditions, but I did add a link to my YouTube channel - just in case someone stumbles upon this page first, rather than coming from YouTube here.

But what do you think? Has happyfolding.com improved? Are there shortcomings that you'd like to see change? Or do you just love me and my page the way we are? :)

-- Sara