(Above bar only represents phase 1)

It's February 2021, where are we at? 

I've added a new row telling the newly found pages at SonicGear since the last update, this will make it clear why the finished date moves up even though I keep at the same velocity. SonicGear keeps increasing with it's weekly updates, but also a few new pages have been found! 

The Trello board is slowly clearing the cards at phase 1, there are still 34 Sonic Gear categories left to finish! 

(Above bar only represents phase 1)

The stats: 

(Above bar only represents phase 1)

This time an update on mostly the featureset of the website. Ofcourse lots of pages have been ported too, but not as much as I promised. 

The stats: 

(Above bar only represents phase 1)

It's been a while since I posted, and to be honest barely any progress has been made last summer. 
I did need a break, as porting articles is very repetive work, and took up lots of my freetime. So while I didn't intend to take a break, it kinda just happened, first because of hot weather, then because I just felt like I needed to and then even a surprise vacation. A lot of stuff has simply happened, but that doesn't mean I'm going to quit. 

I've started picking up writing articles again, and since I skipped a ton of weeks it makes no sense to do a weekly velocity anymore, so I'm just gonna go with "Velocity since first article" which was april 13th. And now I'll just call it "Daily Velocity". Hoping this will be the most trustworthy even if I decide to take another break. 

I also figured out 2 pages a day is too much for such a long period of time. But I'm going to aim for 1 page a day instead. And we'll see what happens to the average velocity. 

So here are the stats updated: 

So does that mean I've done nothing at all for Sonic District? Well I did create a small program that tracks merchandise website that sell Sonic stuff. And while it may not work for all websites yet, it works on most of them (but each have to be configured seperately). It currently active as a bot in my Discord channel Sonic Online (Click to get invited). And spams the #bot channel daily with updates of various websites that sell Sonic Merchandise. It'll keep you updated whenever an article is added, deleted or changed in price. It currently works for SegaShop US & SegaShop EU. And some other websites (mostly european or dutch, but you're welcome to ask for support on other websites if you want to!). 

Currently it's mostly made for private use, but anyone who wants to can join in. In the future I could potentially add a price-watch portion to Sonic District, but this is a long-term idea. But if I feel like I need to get a break from working on articles I could be working on this instead. 

(Above bar only represents phase 1)

Last week I ported 16 SonicGear pages

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly! ) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2

** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

Last week I ported 14 SonicGear pages, back to the pace I want it to be, but still need to get my average back to 2 by doing more! 

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly! ) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2

** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

So far I like posting these logs on monday instead of sunday. I post them after SonicGear made an update (and posted this update and/or updated trello for any new pages). 

What else has been done? 

As you can see at the top of the website, we have a new logo! This logo was made by a good friend "Yimoo" and it was quite a journey to come to the final one, so this will be a seperate blog post later! 

Last week I ported 9 SonicGear pages, not the best week, it was too sunny to be on the PC for so long ???? 

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly! 3 new pages have been added or found today) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2
** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

Oops, the phase 1 based on average velocity went to 2021, that's definitely not something I want, so I'll do my best to get that average weekly velocity back to 2 and the phase 1 finished estimation back to somewhere in 2020. 
It's pretty hard to keep up the pace when it's so sunny/warm, no airconditioning so I spend much more time outside in summer when it's too hot inside. This week it's better though so I'll try to increase the pace a little. But if it keeps being hard on me I will considering lowering the pace a little, but this depends on a lot of things (weather and work mostly). 

Last week I ported 16 SonicGear pages, so the average velocity is finally back to 2+. 

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly! 3 new pages have been added or found today) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2
** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

SonicGear keeps adding new pages in a rapid velocity. This time 3 new pages have been found, when a new page is started though, it'll take a while to fill a page, so I don't expect this much to happen weekly. 
Although there are also some "hidden pages" that have been forgotten to put on the home page, I'm hoping we're starting to find all of those by now, it'll be no good if we forget a page. 

This week didn't go enitrely as I expected, it's been a rough week so that's why there are only 2 extra pages ported, even though I planned to do much more. Things don't always go as planned, but I still managed to put the velocity back to 2 a day, so let's keep it like that. This week my aim is simply just 14 pages again, but if I have time (and motivation) to do more, I will. 

A lot of the pages previous week I actually made easier, because a large portion of it was just "clothing". And because it seems like a bit much to just make a new article for every other shirt, I group classic and modern shirts together and group them together in 1 article. So 1 article can take up to 10 shirts. In some cases there are still solo shirts though, because I do them 1 page at a time and sometimes something just gets left over last. 

Even by grouping shirts, there are still a ton of them. 

Also, over 100 finished pages! Well "finished" it will never be, because they potentially update weekly. But every monday (or whenever sonicgear updates, mostly monday), I will update these, so this number should never decrease. 101 pages is 22% of all phase 1 pages and 19% of the entire website! 

Last week I ported 14 SonicGear pages, not enough to put my average weekly velocity back to 2. But I expect to be able to do this next week.

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly!) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2
** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

In the process of doing this for 4 weeks now, I've noted that some pages are missing in Trello. This is because SonicGear doesn't link on them in their menu, and I won't notice until they add a news post about it. Because of this the "Remaining pages" could go up more quickly. I've asked Azure from SonicGear to keep an eye on this, so we can find those missing pages!

After a few more weeks (so we've hopefully found most of those missing pages) I'm thinking of adding an additional velocity, which is the SonicGear new pages velocity. If I can track how often (on average) a new page is added we can get a more realistic expectation of the "Phase 1 finished". Because currently it will only go up as SonicGear will add new items every week, and if a page is full they will add a new page. 

11 of the pages done this week were Sonic Clothing pages, they can be done fairly quickly but are also pretty boring (it's just shirts after shirts) so I will likely take another page kind next week too. For clothing I started combining some shirts, but only if they are close to each other on the SonicGear page (because it's a hassle to find/edit pages I've already done) and only if they have something in common. This way pages get a little more info on 1 place which is nice (there's often not much to say about shirts). 

Finesse has announced a werehog skateboard on their instagram page. With Mephiles being their previous one they are definitely going to do the rare characters now making it interesting for Sonic Collectors. Some of the earlier skateboard have also been made into Tech Deck fingerboards, so if they keep their collection growing it'd be interesting to see if these newer ones will get tech decks too. 

Either way, if you want to get your own werehog skateboard (for skateboarding or collecting) be sure to keep an eye on them, because they sell out quickly. They'll likely show images of the full skateboard first and then they could pop up in stores at any time. So far these skateboards have only been available in US webshops, but some of them do ship internationally (in which case you should be prepared for expensive shipping prices). You may also test your luck on Ebay and possibly some local stores in the US. 

Last week I ported 10 SonicGear pages, OH NO! It's less than my promised 14 pages/week. But it's not like I did nothing so I'm still close to an average 2 pages a day, and will try to do a little more in the futue weeks to get it at 2+ again! 

It's been a crazy week with BLM the world, even in europe, seems to turn around. Terrible things are happening and my mind wasn't fully with Sonic District this week. Tssznews is even affected by it and has shut down (some of the articles are now available at sonicdistrict.com/tssz). Still Sonic Merchandise isn't being quiet with the DJ Sonic set and stuff quietly being released/teased (I didn't post everything, but Finesse seems to go and make a Werehog skateboard! Wow!) 

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly!) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2
** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

Last week I ported 15 SonicGear pages, the USA Sonic Figures is finally done! Although I noted that many were sold in Europe aswell, many of the jazwares figures where in these pages and also the Toy Island page. 

The stats: 

* This can increase if SonicGear ads new pages (SonicGear adds new items weekly!) and it can decrease if I move things to phase 2
** This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

Other things that I have done

Some minor styling, but not much. A bug where sometimes the wrong category is displayed has been fixed. 

I moved 2 cards from phase 1 to phase 2: 
"Wanted Gear": Will have to think what to do with this one, do we want this as a seperate tag, category (both?) or maybe a page. Let's wait for everything else to be ported before we decide. 
"Sonic Games": This is a pretty odd page, SonicGear doesn't include many game pages at all, and this one actually links only to a page about Shadow the Hedgehog. So there's not much Sonic games to read at all at Sonic Gear. I think a game section will be interesting but then maybe we should see if we can include some special game packages in this section. If all regular pages are ported I probably have a better idea what to do with this one. 

Well not entirely "week 1". The first articles I've written were on april 13th. But this is the first full week after the official go from SonicGear, which is when I wanted to start porting at least 2 articles a day. 

Last week I ported 17 SonicGear pages, mostly USA Sonic Figures (a lot of Jazwares!). In the USA SonicGear pages there's only 1 more Jazwares page for me to go (which is the transformed figures) and then it continues with ReSaurus and Toy Island Figures. 
I've also ported 2 pages of "Japan Sonic Stickers". Because I was getting tired from only seeing action figures, while it's one of the most interesting parts of SonicGear, I do want to switch sometimes to see different things. Especially due to the first part of the Action Figures being pretty hard. Most of those pages have a lot of figures of different packs. It sometimes required a little photo editting to split up some images. I also had to stay alert as a figure might come back a few pages later, then I don't need to write duplicate articles. 

Some stats: 

* This is not a promise, it will change weekly! 

So what's "phase 1" you might ask? At trello I have moved some pages to "phase 2". This is to split some work in migrating the website. 
Phase 1 consists of all official merchandise, while phase 2 consists of "fan items", "fan events" & "places and "avoiding bootlegs". 

This means that after phase 1 is done, I still have 79 pages more to migrate. But I thought it might be nice to add a goal that's achievable this year. If I can keep up my promised pace of 2 SonicGear pages a day it should be done at December 8th 2020. 

Other things that I have done

So while it's mostly porting over articles, I'm still doing other stuff for this website. This week I've added a random article that will appear in the menu, this is only visible on the desktop website. If you're sure what to look for, maybe you can find something interesting here! Every page change or refresh this article will change randomly. I might change the styling of this component in the future. 

I also changed the menu a bit. The Blog section is now the home page, we can use this for weekly updates to show what we've added. Similar to how SonicGear works at the main section under "Announcements & The Latest Updates". But it can also be used for merchandise-news like the thing about the Tails hoodie that happened recently. While porting over articles I will keep an eye on Sonic Merchandise news and I'll share any interesting story here! 

Then there's the "Latest Additions" menu button. This will show the latest articles that are set to "featured". We can control what will and will not appear here. But for now I will mostly put the articles I recently added and/or updated there so I can quickly see if it looks OK. It's unsure if this menu item will be kept if we're going to use the blog as a latest-update thing too.