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The Story of Jappleng Part I

Written by: OG Jappleng

This story is about the harsh reality of the ups and downs of Jappleng and why it is so hard to work on and why I'm too stubborn to hire programmers.

Story Chapter Selection
The Story of Jappleng Part I - You are here
The Story of Jappleng Part II - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part III - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part IV - Go there...
The story of Jappleng Part V - Go there...
The Story of Jappleng Part VI - Go there...

Jappleng Was Famous!
Jappleng was a fun idea back in late 2005 but it's April 2017 now and there's significantly less traffic and activity than there was back then.  When I say significantly less I mean in around 2007 when Jappleng was at its height as a blog / forum, it was reaching thousands of people every day, I think the record was somewhere around 34,000 or so? Jappleng was so big that I would hear people talk about it in public, which was so cool!

The Rise of Jappleng (Golden Age)
It shames me to say this but I wasn't always the to-go guy for this project. Originally I had asked a friend of mine to program. I didn't know if he could or not, but I wanted to work with him because of sentimental reasons.  I was in charge of writing / design and he was in charge with programming. Unfortunately, even though he gave me deadlines, they were never met. We had a comment system and people were psyched about this back in early 2006 and he just kept missing his deadlines. Around October 2006 was when he had missed his biggest deadline and just ran away. That's when I had to take over and a month of sulking later, I was ready.

I wasn't much of a programmer, but I made due. The community was growing bigger at this point and I started to spread the word of Jappleng forums, and people joined in fairly quickly. Soon enough there were thousands of members and tens of thousands of forum posts using the old phpBBv2 forums. People loved Jappleng so much that they would contribute their stories and editorials so that other people could enjoy those topics, it was a great time to enjoy Japanese things! I said before there were tens of thousands of visitors each day and this was true. In fact, Google would report that millions every day would come across Jappleng but not necessarily click on the link, but that many impressions felt really great!

The Fall of Jappleng
Life is what happened. I had fallen in love with one of our members and poured everything I had into trying to make it work. I moved, focused on school, and changed priorities because California was a very expensive place to live at.  I would have made more money off of Jappleng than working part time here and there but no one believed in Jappleng, not even my girlfriend at the time. I was told to stop focusing on this project and focus on the only things that mattered which was school, relationship and money.

Jappleng eventually died but I kept the servers up even though I made pennies, I literally made on average about $1/hr in silicon valley because a particular startup I was working on didn't want to pay me.  Well, that was for the first year and a half at least. I had a server that would cost about $100/mo. and yet I would get paid only $500 from the start-up and my rent was just as much, mind you I lived in a hoarder's home where there was mold and trash everywhere. Welcome to California!

Jappleng rises from the ashes in the next blog post! Don't miss it!