In that time, it hasn't lost any data at all. It just does its little thing. It quietly updates itself when there's a new firmware update on the site. It emails me if something's going badly wrong in its internals (which has only happened once when it detected that one of the drives was about to go teats' up). The little bugger just sits quietly and runs and doesn't bother me with its little petty problems.
Oh if everything I owned could be so reliable.
One funny side-effect is that it talks to the little Belkin UPS that it's plugged into, and if there's ever a power-event (brownout, blackout, etc), it logs the event. So I now have a complete log of every power-event in my house for the past year.
Oh, and I'm actually buying a print ad. Talking to my game players and just casual acquaintances who like to play games, one common denominator (besides being female and over 30), is an affinity for Games Magazine. Since IMHO Games Magazine is recognized by my potential players, targets my target audience, and is something near and dear to me (I've been subscribed to it since 1977), I figured I'd throw a couple of bucks their way and see if it generates a few hits.
Mind you, it's just a dinky classified, but it'll be running every other month for one year starting in March of '08.
This is the first real "get out of the box" thing that I've done in a while. Most of my awareness-raising I've done for my games has been done via the traditional "free awareness for your website" method. . .
1. Make your site really accessible and make sure it points people to a purchase.
2. Spread a few hits to your site around the blogosphere to raise your google profile.
3. Make some friends with industry sites so hopefully they'll list you and raise your google profile a bit more.
4. And buy some google ads if you have a few bucks for that.
5. Hope that folks find you.
And on top of that I have the added bonus of having had some big hit shelf-titles from the old infancy-of-the-internet days. And folks nostalgic for those titles (even if they no longer own 'em and can't get the name of my company from the "about" box) can find me fairly easily if they remember the names of their favorite games. At least that's the impression I get from my "top searchwords that drove people to your site" section in Google Analytics.
Yes, I'm the number one search hit for "Cheesy Pursuit". Impressive, eh? :)
But that's kind of a dead end for some audiences. While some of my target audience is in-tune with the blogosphere and the web 2.0 and the internet casual game scene, a lot of 'em aren't. So I'm putting my URL in print on paper and in the hands of a few thousand people who dearly love puzzles but don't necessarily play 'em on the Series of Tubes over which you downloaded this very post, possibly with some kind of web 2.0 RSS intertube-downloader portal app.
In short, I'm not trying to get the attention of my my 15 year-old nephew but my 60 year-old aunt. And the way you get my aunt's attention is much different from my nephew.
I guess we'll see how it goes.
