Starwolf’s Fansite Developer Diaries

Yes we have no updates to the site for a few days. Remember last week’s hard drive crash? And the shiny new hard drive that I ordered? Well, It arrived, and we started the install on the weekend. Here it is, Wednesday night, and I’m still working on the damned computer, reinstalling software etc. Lets just say that this weekend the installation of the new terabyte hard drive and the upgrade to Vista Ultimate did NOT go as smoothly as one might have hoped, and took a lot longer than planned. Its working now, but I am STILL doing my installs and updates etc etc etc etc etc. And I still have a long way to go.

Not to those who are interested in getting into computers: there are many other hobbies out there which are 1) cheaper, 2) less time consuming, and 3) better for your blood pressure.  I strongly encourage you to consider any of these alternatives.

yes, even on a Friday nite, I code.

So tonight, I updated the ad module on the home page. It now rotates the ads. Next I probably should go through, cut the weight of all the images on this site. Which is becoming a SERIOUS BANDWIDTH HOG.  It does seem to be getting a wee bit of traffic now. Yowza.

Hey, I’m playing Catch-up on Content!  Check out the new article on the CDProjekt RED / Witcher Cult coverup…. and check out all the familiar pages for lots of new advertising!!! Our ad-sales people in Vizima have been busy!

 On another note, I just had my hosting company move the site to a new server and upgrade my bandwidth allotment. So the site will be able to have more shiny goodness, without constantly getting notificiations about my chewing up bandwidth.

OK. you may have noticed that the site hasn’t had any updates recently.  This is courtesy my lovely computer, which decided to have a nice little hard drive crash this past weekend. Oh Joy. Anyway, I thankfully have a computer guy on retainer, so he came over and saved the day, got the thing up, the salvageable bits backed up, and I am up and running (with a few glitches) while I wait for my brand new hard drive to get here. If you are in the Cleveland area, I heartily recommend Paul from http://vardarissoft.com/ for all your computer needs. You may also recognize Paul as the same PaulV from the modding team over at REDFlame Interactive . Anyway, watch for a nice new expose about the Community Specialists over at CDProjekt RED, up on this site.

OK. So, I was planning to work on the site tonight, but instead we went out to dinner with some friends. for the record, El Jalapeno, in Lakewood, Ohio, has fantastic food and great prices.

Anyway, both couples have bands in the family. Joe has an all original band, Pitt, Jocko and Rita have also their own band, plus they know other bands….. So… I mention, by the way, I have this fansite, and I am seriously looking for all original music inspired by the game, The Witcher. And I will hook you up with what this game is about, my fansite, the official site, the free game demo, etc etc.

Joe practically climbs across the table. His band practice is tomorrow night. What kind of music do you want? Tell me about this game. Here’s some ideas I’m having right now… here’s the kind of music my band is doing…..

Rita is like, right now our drummer can’t play due to an injury, but we are interested, our guitarist can also play drums, and by the way, we also know these guys in another band that might be interested….

And my husband has also promised a song…..
Long story short…. watch in the upcoming weeks, for EXCLUSIVE free all original music inspired by The Witcher.

Started chipping away at the broken layout issue when you resize IE6. Known issue, just hadn’t gotten around to it because I was too busy working on content.

OK, so you wont see what I’m doing yet, its all under the hood, just moving around some code, rewriting some code…. the problem is when I rebuilt the site in a hurry, I just hacked my existing Holy Grail fluid layout (web CSS coders will know what I mean). So naturally, it mucked it up in IE6. Over the next week or so, I’ll be finishing the cleanup and applying it to the existing pages. Most people wont see a lot of difference in the appearance while I do this.

For those who’s livelihood involves testing your websites in multiple browsers, I heartily recommend Browserpool, available at www.browserpool.com . It is a resource in which you can live test your site against a wide variety of web browsers. (Prepare to cry).  Free registration for the free trial version. They also have a paid version. The free trial version is slower, and they have a limit on the number of free users at any one time. Awesome, wonderful product.

Yes folks, there are now classified ads on the site! Just the start of the page and a couple ads for now, just to get it up there. More coming. I had a slew of ideas while we were driving to Cedar Point yesterday. (Naturally, when I’m going to be the ENTIRE DAY away from my computer)! It’s underway, with one new banner ad, and I updated the nav to include it.

Cleanup continues, implementing Eriash’s recommendations for improving the site’s visuals. So today I am updating the images on the homepage, moving steadily towards an even more Tabloidy look and feel. I’ve also updated the images for the flash module, but so far not seeing them in the site.

Tonight was just about cleaning up the top navigation on the site, just some fixes to the CSS and the image to get it looking better. Note for the future when I have some time to work on it: redo the sprites for the buttons.

Just a little today, got a start on making new banners and updating the “link to us” page. Checking out the features on a different hosting server (same company), might have to move the site over (there’s some sweet site tools on it). Hints of upcoming EXTREMELY SWEET goodies for TWWW, courtesy of a conversation today with the mysterious Anarchos….