More grunt work to make stuff closer to an illustrated encyclopaedia than to a bunch of text some guys on the Internet came up with. Appearances govern credibility, after all.
- NEW ENTRY. As part of MySQL interfaces tests, I’ve added the first new entry in a troll’s age – the group background for the Starjammers. It was awkward to have the Starjammers rewrites point toward a not-yet-published article… Basically it’s a large History section, though there’s a lot of peekchurs too.
- NEW VERSION STUFF.
- We’re now on what should be the final, target server after some time spent on a free.fr subdomain (which was the dev server). The writeups.org domain is now again the ‘native’ domain for the site, and not a funky http redirection.
- This hopefully means that the built-in Google search engine (“Parse” button) will work as intended – at least it makes it possible. We’ll have to wait a bit for Google to crawl the site and see what happens.
- Speaking of Google I kinda broke the ads. Will be back ASAP. It’s hard for me to renounce a revenue stream that brought in, hmmm, nearly two bucks so far. Still the ads are getting useful – when fixing a banner image on Thor, the ads were about discovering Viking mythology, and super-heroes game figures. That’s not bad.
- The “Alpha” button was borked. It is now back as it should, and I can only encourage folks to use it since it’s an interesting way to view the site.
- A few minor irregularities with how the search results were displayed have been smoothed over.
- After some head-scratching we’ve come to the conclusion that a layout trick we use only works on Firefox (and really shouldn’t). It created more padding between the lines of text in some sections – stats and background, mostly. Manu has found a simple way to make it happen on every browsers, but it will necessitate a fair bit of recoding on my part, which will take time.
- REWRITES. Two big ones and two smaller ones:
- Barb Wire. The first Dark Horse Heroes rewrite. More accurate stats, much more info, mo’ better illustrations, incorporates various appearances that were not in the previous version, etc. – a very complete profile of what is likely the Dark Horse Heroes characters with the greatest name recognition. For some reason I’m happy about how that one came out.
- Hellrazor. A handy minor thug from the Marvel Universe, now with an improved entry and cleaner illustrations.
- King Tiger. Another interesting Dark Horse Heroes character, now back with a much more developed and richer writeup. Kung fu ! Guns ! Demons ! Magic items ! Acrobatics ! Drama ! Violence ! Sex ! Treason ! Noodles !
- White Dragon II. An obscure Marvel villain who was a favourite when I was a wee kid. Now thoroughly revised, with improved illos..
- ART. New stuff for the following boys and girls and others:
- Fang (Shi’ar Imperial Guard)
- Apocalypse
- Beast (X-Men, main w/up)
- Beast, but the Fables one
- She-Hulk
- Bishop (X-Men)
- Razorback (Marvel)
- Thanos (yet again)
- Foreigner
- Jean Grey
- Rampage (DC)
- Impossible Man
- Gideon Mace (again)
- Hammerhead (again – and yes I plan on rewriting him)
- Killer Shrike
- Black Cat (modern)
- Angel (Early)
- Super-Skrull
- Frankenstein (Seven Soldiers)
- Chameleon (Marvel)
- Kraven the Hunter
- Longshot
- Fitzroy
- Rick Jones
- Crux (Cerebro’s X-Men)
- Validus (pre-Crisis) (and his missing banner is back up)
- Storm
- Spider-Man (Ultimate version) (again)
- REPAIRED/REPLACED BANNERS. There’s a renewed effort going on to replace a bunch of those. For now, we got:
- Boy Blue
- Rapture
- Salamandra
- Tellus
- Crux (Cerebro’s X-Men)
- Half of Quicksilver (Ultimate)
- Frankenstein (Seven Soldiers)
- Bouncing Boy
- Validus (pre-Crisis) (who also has new art)
- Starhawk
- Beast (Fables)
- Quicksilver (Ultimate version)
- Stature
- Devos the Devastator
- Unicorn I
- Dr. Doom (Ultimate version)
- Snow White
- Glob (Ultramarines)
- Mirror Master
- Black Knight (Dane W.)
- The Brain Globes (stop laughing)
- Midnight Sun
- Yondu
- Thor (Ultimate version)
- Meteorite III
- All the missing Runaways material (Arsenic, Sister Grimm, Talkback and Victor Mancha)