About the website:
Fishing Portal exists to simplify the life of a Gaia Fisher. It is meant to work as a homepage or basepoint from which all links and information are easily accessible. Fishing Portal tracks bucket times, scores, fish caught and other stats for every fisher listed on the boards. It trackes name changes, trophies won and provides convenient calculations based on all the information it gathers.

Fishing Portal is made up of three parts: the website frontend which is done entirely in PHP, HTML and Javascript - this displays and brings everything together, the Advanced Fishing Stats Generator - a script that updates a database with fishing information every minute, and the modules - seperate scripts that run most of the websites functionality (such as the links section, the shoutbox, and the stats viewers).

Fishing Portal was originally written in December of 2005, and started off fairly simple: just a replacement for the Gaia Fishing Stats page, and a history of score changes for each user. After developing this, I let it sit for a month. I knew I could do a lot more with the statistics I had been gathering, so I did. In early 2006 I spent a week developing Fishing Portal into the site that was first seen by someone other than me. It was almost maintenance free: The stats were gathered automatically, new boards switched over every month automatically, and the links on the website could be updated by any user. Portal stayed in this state for about 7 months, having an average of 3 active users. After 7 months, Gaia changed the format of the Fishing Stats page, and the parser stopped working. It is for this reason that I have 3 months where no stats were recorded; although the update to the parser was simple I wasn't paying much attention to the site (and neither was anyone else). After fixing the parser in October 2006, the site again ran but continued unupdated.

Unfortunatly, the old site was extremely inefficient. As an example, one website I host for my Everquest guild has about 130 active members + guests and generates an average of 60,000 queries per day. Fishing Portal, with roughly 3 (no more than 5) users generated an average of 800,000 queries per day. Although I learned a lot from coding the original Fishing Portal, and certainly made use of it while fishing, I was never truly happy with it; I never opened it to the public.

In July 2007, Portal was finally rewritten. In a few weeks, the site was transformed into its current state. It uses Smarty for a template system, prototype and scriptaculous for a javascript base, my own database abstractor, sessions system, modules system, javascript tabs system, etc. With 3 users the site generates less than 4,000 queries a day; certainly still heavier than something like PHPBB, but Portal has a lot more data to gather. The site functions in both "High" (javascript intensive) and "Low" (little or no javascript) modes from one codebase and one template. My hope again is to create a low maintenance site; all stats are automatic, but I also provide administration tools that can help increase the accuracy of the data.

About the developer:
My alias is Acorns (or Elendilon in most roleplaying situations). I am a software engineer employed in a normal coding job. I'm way to easily addicted to things like fishing, and tend to take a typical geek approach to life: Lazyness through extreme projects. I decided I needed a stats generator one day after getting tired of hitting refresh and typing values into notepad. Fishing Portal was a logical next step after the stats generator was started. You can contact me on Gaia as AcornsN64.