Headlines Stardate 20601.01
HEADLINES
Anniversary!
Along with the New Year, this also marks the time we celebrate the birthday of Federation Space. Today is our 6th birthday! I’d like to take this opportunity to say thanks to all of you for making Federation Space the great game it is today. Normally, I would review what has gone on in the year. However, this year, I am just going to discuss the plans for the coming year and then announce the winners of this years player awards.
Within the first 3-6 weeks of 2006, we hope to finish up the Federation back-story. We’ve got some special events planned in relation to that back-story.
We will be having a site wide, in/out of context promotion party. Several people have been holding off on putting their promotions on. At the site wide promo party, everyone will be awarded, in game, whatever pips they are due. All site members may attend regardless of where their character is. It will be assumed this party happens when we could all be together.
The new site constitution will go live at the completion of the Federation Space back-story.
The command structure will change slightly with the addition of group commanders. Group commanders will be Commodore level positions and those CO’s selected to be a group commander will be allowed to progress to Commodore. All other CO’s will remain at Capt or lower dependent on ship class/size.
I have, in the past, talked about a site redesign. In the coming year, we will complete that redesign. Let me discuss some of the elements of that redesign so you understand why it may take so long.
When I first put this site together, I was learning web site design on the fly. That included both HTML and graphics. Anyone with any knowledge of web design can look at the site’s code and tell it’s very amateurish. Well, I’ve come along way since then, but haven’t really applied that knowledge to improving the site. This year, that’s going to change.
Right now, the site is purely HTML. We’re going to move the site to a HTML/CSS approach. We’re going to have a master style sheet that will help us make changes on the site a lot easier. I know many of you have no idea what I’m talking about. That’s fine. I’m talking about stuff you will never really see anyways. However, the site will be more consistent through the use of style sheets.
I am also considering using a Content Management System (CMS) as a front end for the site. Right now, I am leaning towards using a CMS called Mambo to run the content side of the house. (The non-bulletin side of the site). If you want to see what this is all about, their website is: http://www.mamboserver.com/ You can look through their gallery link to see various sites and the customization possible with this approach.
It’s very likely we may switch severs either very soon, or at towards the end of the year when our contract is up. The reasons for this are two-fold. Cost and reliability. Many of you have noticed the server errors that come up. I believe they are the empty 400 and 500 error pages. That is not caused by Discus, our message board, but by the server itself. In talking to the tech support of our host, they admitted to me, over the phone, that they periodically shut down functions if they think they are drawing to many server resources. In other words, if they think the message board is taking too much server resources, then they shut it down. This has happened in the past and it’s is no end of frustrating to me, considering we’ve been loyal, paying customers for some time. In addition, without any warning, they raised the price of their Windows servers by 50%. For those of you that don’t know, everything on the site except the message board is on the .net windows based server, while the message board is on the .com unix bases box. In short, I’ve run out of patience with our hosting service and will be moving ASAP, dependant on what the penalties will be for swapping. (We had just renewed.)
A new version of our message board software is due out at any time. (Version 4 is going to Version 5) The new version will add many features to the board and supposedly will make it run much faster as everything will be database driven where before we had a combination of flat and database driven pages.
Right now, we still have a mix of old and new color schemes. We will fix that, through CSS to make sure all pages are consistent.
We’re probably not too far from starting a new ship, something we didn’t do this last year. Of course, it’s completely dependent on how many new folks we get, but this ship will likely be the only new ship we start this year. No firm decision has been reached on the new ship.
I would like to extend my best wishes to all members for a great new year. The year ahead will bring some positive changes to the site. I look forward to sharing the future with your all.
Happy New Year!
