SP Happenings #25
Posted Tuesday, November 25, 2003 - 20:55 CET by Sorcerer

Believe it or not, the SP merchandise package I've been waiting for for so long finally arrived last week. I'm quite happy with the overall quality and really only found one thing that bothered me, and I think that was the printer's error, so I'm looking into it (nothing tragic, only a slight misalignment of the prints on one of the items).

Most of the people who applied for the online walkthrough writer positions on SP the last time the call was put out have disappointed me (either by failing to write the walkthroughs, or by disappearing completely), so a few new online walkthrough writer positions are available. Veldrin, the news poster who did general news from time to time, as well as Neverwinter Nights forum news, has disappeared as well, so I'm also looking for substitute news posters. Anyone interested in any of the mentioned positions should check this page to learn what the requirements are.

In light of Microsoft's plan to integrate a pop-up blocker in the next version of Internet Explorer, the ad positions in the new SP design had to be reevaluated. Since currently pop-ups are the only real source of advertising income for SP (and they've been removed from the front page and the forums already, so they bring in little as it is), we had planned to use the same approach in the new design. However, if this proves impossible (or too hard to do) in the future, we will need a viable alternative. This is probably going to be the 300×250 medium rectangle ad, since the size would work with our new design, and be still less annoying than those jumbo banners some sites are using.

Though this long delay in getting the new design up has some bad sides, there have certainly been plenty of good ones as well. Over the course of the last few months, many more changes had been made to the otherwise complete code that will make my life much easier in the future. Changes like the ad one described above affect the code on all pages, so implementing them from the start is much easier than going around replacing parts of the code later.

Incidentally, the next site update will probably occur by the end of next week.