The Fiction Archive Is Ready!

[dawn_felagund]

As many of you know, over the past few weeks a group of (very patient) beta-testers and I have been putting the finishing touches on and testing the story archive on our homepage. Today, I have good news to report: The last of the work is finished, and the archive is ready to be used by the public! I'd like to invite all of you to join us over there, to share your Silmarillion stories and check out those posted by other SWG members.

If you'd like to join the archive, please review our Conduct Guidelines and Terms of Service. Not much has changed here from the similar guidelines that have always belonged to the Yahoo! group and LiveJournal community, but please be sure to read through them carefully anyway. There is a link at the bottom that will take you to a registration form.

From there, you're free to begin uploading stories and posting reviews. Thirteen beta-testers have posted over seventy stories, so those of you looking for something to read should find plenty of that too!

Here's a direct link to the archive!

As usual, if you have any questions or problems, feel free to contact me at the usual places: moderator@silmarillionwritersguild.org or DawnFelagund@comcast.net. Enjoy the archive!

Comments

[alassante.livejournal.com]

Congrats on all your hard work =)

[dawn_felagund]

Thank you! I'm relieved to be finished with it ... though since then, one thousand new ideas have taken the place of worrying about the archive! :)

[sirielle.livejournal.com]

Yay, I'm registered :D

I still don't like the colors, don't shoot! Not important.

[dawn_felagund]

I'm a pacifist, don't worry. I'm anti-gun. ;)

But I didn't know that you didn't like the colors, though you may have been away when I put the first screencaps on-list for feedback. :^/ Anyway, I'd like to eventually allow users to change colors on the archive itself; that won't help you on the main site, but it's something. Any suggestions for what you'd like to see?

[sirielle.livejournal.com]

I've been on the list then and asked about a graphic layout- different background banners etc. I don't like this particular blue with yellow, so there's probably nothing you could do.
I got 404once today,though don't remeber which link it was. And tell me where I should add art galleries in Yellow Pages?
I sent you two e-mails from haathor@gazeta.pl - just in case your spam ate them.I remeber I couldn't write to you from one of my e-mails.

[dawn_felagund]

I do recall a conversation about adding some more fantasy elements to the design. Do you mean to add more graphics? My chief concern with graphics is bandwidth and the file size of graphics. I've tried to keep the site intentionally lean on this: The only graphic (aside from some screencaps in the FAQ) is the logo in the corner. I finance this site on my own, and I dread running up some of the bills that places like HASA have; I simply could not afford to continue to run the site. So I've cut wherever I could to conserve bandwidth, knowing that the software to run the archive takes up quite a bit of space itself. :^/

Also ... I'm terrible at graphics design. I am not kidding when I say that I am third grade. Actually, I'm probably kindergarten. It took me a half-hour to figure out how to make the logo. I'd asked on-list in the past for help with graphics work and didn't receive many offers of help; the one I did receive never followed through with the project. So I'm afraid that I'm between the proverbial rock and hard place in terms of design: even if I could get lean graphics, I'm not able to make them myself and simply don't have time to learn, at the moment. (Photoshop Classroom in a Book is collecting dust on my shelf; one day, I will take it down and do the lessons! But there are so many other things to learn ...)

With regards to the Yellow Pages, I've taken them down for now, until I can get someone who is willing to work specifically on this. One day, I'd like to focus my efforts toward the Reference section, so maybe then, I could handle the Yellow Pages too. But right now, I have too much going on. But if you'd like to email me the links, I'll save them in my SWG folder so when we do get the Yellow Pages up and running, I will be sure to add them.

Or maybe someday I'll know enough PHP/MySQL to allow members to upload their own. But I'm more apt to hold out hope for a volunteer to do the Yellow Pages than to wait for that. ;)

[sirielle.livejournal.com]

I understand the need to make the site as light as possible and in a long term I think it's better this way than to have a heavy fancy layout.
In fact I was thinking of a colour scheme like HASA has got or Elendilion http://czytaj.elendili.pl/ These two are not heavy I think (apart the picture in Elendilion's logo), but I am not sure what is image and what is code on HASA, I thought it was mostly code.
I was going to help with graphics but when you said you want to stay out from them I didn't rise that question anymore. I'm sorry, I thought you simply don't need any graphics.

Now I wouldn't touch anything, SWG works and is clear to read. With time, when all will be done and you'll have a while you can think of something - you said of custom themes, I might do some graphic elements to them. That should not be a problem, the only problem is to have an idea and know how to code it later. Efficiently saved elements should have 1-5 kb and load fast.

Don't worry about the YP,if they are not working, we'll start worrying of it when they will be up and running.

[I'm PHP/MySQL noob, can't help with it.]

[dawn_felagund]

I certainly have the option to "skin" the archive so that users can choose different appearances. I was hoping to one day do this if only because it's a good way for me to practice doing CSS designs and layouts without having to start from scratch with a dozen different sites. :^D I was thinking to do different "themes" based on characters, events, and places. Maybe not all of these; this is just a rough idea. So choosing "Ossiriand" would be brown and green; "Tirion" would be white and gold, et cetera. I'd certainly consider different graphics for this, especially different logos and possibly header bars. I wouldn't want a red and black layout with the current orange and blue logo. That would look like ... yuck!

I really appreciate the offer of help with graphics. There are some things that I am pretty good at (HTML, CSS) and other things that I am hopelessly lost (PHP and graphics). I'm learning, but it's a lot to absorb, and I only started a year and a half ago, so while I sometimes think, "Wow, I've come really far!" then I look up and realize, "Oh, crap, and still so far to go" before becoming a truly competent designer.

Like the encoding issue; I knew to save the pages UTF-8 but never thought to declare the encoding in the < head > of the page. XD

But these things come with time. In the meanwhile, I'm open to ideas for new skins for the archive. This is something fun that I'd like to mess with in between the more serious things that I do for SWG. Believe it or not, writing CSS stylesheets is very relaxing for me! I'm a sick, sick woman. :^D

[sirielle.livejournal.com]

"Efficiently saved elements should have 1-5 kb and load fast."

But we may as well go without them, messing only with colors alone. Later,when a time forthat will come.