Garaph

Garaph

{DAYSSINCEBIRTH(birth=2008-06-23)}{DAYSSINCEBIRTH}

Starting in 2006 I began keeping a database of sales data online from which to create tables and images for fun data consumption, keeping things in the [1] directory, since /gamecharting was the directory I kept such things in offline.  As time went on the scale of it, frequency of use, and even external references grew.  I tried to keep some decent links together in the Game Charting page of this wiki, but generally if you weren't following the NeoGAF Sales-Age threads, you'd probably be pretty lost.

It was getting kind of old just referring to it by phrases like "my database" all the time.  What really convinced me to split the thing off, though, was Firefox 3 and its Awesome Bar.  Seeing how useful it was to type a word and have pages with that word in the title from history become available, I wished I had a consistent word across the title of my game charting pages for accessing recently/frequently viewed pages, in a manner other than searching each time or making temporary bookmarks.  And once a decent and decently short name was decided upon, it was a matter of less than $10 to grab the domain for a year, and make linking to http://garaph.info a much shorter affair than http://joshuajamesslone.name/gamecharting .

Why the Garaph name?  I wanted something short, unique, and preferably without my name in it even though that would help with uniqueness.  However, my data isn't unique.  My particular methods of presentation may be, but any combination of simple words seemed like something other sites could or do go by.  Would something like a GCDB (Game Charting Data Base) really sound at all different to a VGChartz or Japan-Game Charts to the end user?  And for any simple name like that that counted on a short acronym, the acronym was probably itself not unique.  I considered a nonsense word like "Wii", but inventing one is easier said than done.  So I considered the classic Japanese name-compressing trick that turned Pocket Monsters into Pokémon.  I'd previously had success with this in calling my Animal Crossing Design Aid Program Anicro Desapro, so what could I do here?  Game + Charting... Garting?  No, that sounds harsh and sounds like something one does after eating beans.  But Game + Graph = Garaph?  Six letters, so fairly short.  Sounds and looks a lot like graph, enough that it's not an uncommon typo.  Generic enough origin to fit basically anything I could add to the site.  Fairly unique in that the other Google results for the word were either typos or for a Hebrew word.

And it rhymes with giraffe.