Caching
Basic Apache caching was implemented to speed up the site and save some bandwidth in a futile attempt to keep costs under control. So all the images you see whilst browsing writeups.org will now be stored in your browser’s cache for a month instead of being downloaded every time.

The benefits are not colossal – we have very few recurring images and these are very light and usually processed as background elements. The 2012 layout was intended to be lean, so it avoids images. For instance the gradient title bars, the ones that fade from green to white on the right, are not images on the site but are calculated by your browser. Our images are usually specific to an entry, with few opportunities for reuse.

Still, that means fewer server requests for what few recurrent embedded files we use (such as the “back to the page’s top” green arrow in the lower right forner of the screen and the .css files), and a dramatic speed boost if you revisit a page you’ve visited in the last 30 days – since your browser already has the images and knows that it can display them without having to check anything with the site.

It can result in some weirdness if you visit an entry and, within 30 days, I change the images *and then* you visit the entry again. Out of 5,050+ pages the odds of that are tiny unless you spend lots and lots of time on writeups.org (in which case you should consider donating). If it happens, just flush your browser’s cache.

We also do on-the-fly gziping, which is an asset when reading our longest entries.

Erroneous URLs
The 404 page has been redone and better-integrated now that the number of non-working links to writeups.org has been divided by 15 — solving the root problem was the priority.

We’re still discussing which image to use though, because Peter really wants super-zombies.

Adverts safety
A new Q&A has been added to the first chapter of our FAQ about adverts safety, and there’s now a mention of such in the sidebar of this page. Basically, the ads here are either Google ads or Amazon links, which I think is safe.

I’m going to gradually encourage Adblock users to whitelist us, but this very low priority and I have no intention to be an arse about it.

Social media sharing buttons
These buttons have been modified to have a lower priority when loading the page, which should eliminate rare cases where they were making the page hang up as there was a problem on their end.

I am talking about the tiny buttons in the articles, on top of the right-hand images columns — Facebook, Twitter, Google+, e-mail, and the green ShareThis button which lists about every link-sharing service known to man. I’ve always been ambivalent about having those, but using a loadLate=true should make the footprint a bit more acceptable.

Anyway :

• As noted in the previous message, the texts for Crossbones and Foolkiller have been streamlined as they received their DCA stats.
• DARK HORSE HEROES. These entries from these 1993-1995 series are very very old – IIRC it was the first universe where I decided to do a meticulous coverage, and had a large box of comics shipped from Denver to Paris. Since the illustrations, texts and stats are so old, there is ample room for improvement.
  • Gamble‘s texts have received minor polish since his DCA stats are being prepped in the Atomic Think Tank thread.
  • The first entry for the Gault SWAT team has its illustrations rescanned and the text polished.
  • Our entry for X was fully rewritten, the illustrations were redone, the stats were calibrated by Roger and me, the biography was simplified. It was a good series, we think.
  • The four repetitive Pit Bulls entries have been collapsed into a single, better entry for the entire team with new illustrations and texts – and much more context. They’re a military SWAT team with a distinctive twist.
  • Big improvements for the Seekers from the Reaver Swarm. Although I doubt anybody cares about these guys, they make handy generic alien scouts that can be reused anywhere.
• With our Vin article having been recently updated I’ve been chatting a bit with the folks at Crafty Games, who publish the Mistborn RPG. If the world and the metals magic of these popular novels interest you, you should have a look at the RPG — it has a lot of information plus original material by Sanderson.
• More chatting with folks. Our Links page now includes two more selected blogs, based on the fact that 1940s characters and Black super-heroes tend to be well-received and draw more comments among our community. Steve’s big blog o’ fun has lots of good content about Golden Age comic books, and Black Superhero Fan will provide you with news about Black super-heroes in comics, cartoons, etc.
• MASS EFFECT. It’s him ! Conrad Verner ! The great galactic hero now has the small entry we all deserve.
• DCH RULES. First round of changes to the formulation of the Blunting Power in the New Powers File – since as Eric pointed out it wasn’t technically accurate, which is a bother for a rules document.

5,054 entries, since collapsing the Pit Bulls into a single entry killed three lines in the database.

These are from our Atomic Think Tank thread, which still has a consequent backlog of stats that need to be published on WORG.

In this pack :

• Sergeant Gorilla
• Camorouge
• Shatterfist
• Tiger-Girl (Gold Key) (illustrations rescanned)
• Sentry (DCA stats by Pawsplay)
• Mayme (DCA stats by Pawsplay)
• Crossbones (DCA stats by Pawsplay) (texts revised for style)
• Foolkiller III (DCA stats by Pawsplay) (texts revised for style)
• Icicle (Dr. Makent)
• Layla (L.E.G.I.O.N.)

The illustrations were also enlarged wherever applicable, so all in all that was a pretty long grind.

Given the extensive prices personalisation I can’t be sure that the prices you see as are good as the ones they’re pitching to me, though. The following old-school nerdy TV series tend to be $10-$15ish when I view them.

Quick selection :

The note looks stupid, but better to look stupid that not let folks find what they’re looking for.

A propos of nothing, I will not have access to my PC with the fully kitted-out copy of Photoshop during August – so August will probably be chiefly writing and rewriting work rather than images work.

Anyway :

• HELLIONS. A few things about the original Hellions :
  • Benched our current articles against Chris’ old notes. As a result, added notes about felines and magic to Catseye‘s entry, fixed some coding glitches in Roulette‘s entry, added notes about magic and mutants to Tarot‘s entry, buffed Thunderbird a bit and better explained his stats growth, added a psi-screen built into everyone’s uniform.
  • As a test, redid two images for Roulette (Stavros) for which I only have terrible sources, and made them less bad. Getting reprints of the books would yield much better results for much less work, but buying the books I need would take literally centuries of income from donations and adverts at the current rate.
  • Jetstream was rewritten and improved, and got better illustrations.
• INCREDIBLE HULK. From the vintage (1977) TV series, we have Dell Frye’s Creature, a Hulk-like two-faced brute — as written up by Doug.
• The entry for Graviton received a little bit of game stats clarification from Gareth.
• Slayrr from DeviantArt provided us with a second banner for Gareth’s Vin entry (from the Mistborn fantasy novels). FWIW, note that the fan art by Evan Monteiro in this entry is actually two links (one if you click his name, one of you click his art).
• DARK HORSE HEROES. The entry about the gangs of Steel Harbor had its illustrations redone and the text and stats improved.
• Adam rewrote and improved his entry for John Hancock, from the Will Smith film Hancock. Some discussion is still ongoing so there might be further stats tweak.
• Robert wrote up Metalmouth, a very minor character from a Daria episode way back then. The stats have been WORG-normalised.
• Most – not all – of the illustrations for our very old Wetworks entries have been rescanned, as these pictures were generally terrible. The entries themselves are still the “OK, here are my notes” format we were doing 12+ years ago, though.
• Doug has a big article about the mythological Hercules/Herakles so you can compare and contrast with other versions. Also featuring Steve Reeves’ beard.
• The texts for Freddy Kaplan (from the Largo Winch comics) were reviewed for style.
• MASS EFFECT :
  • Kasumi Gōtō‘s entry has been expanded to cover her Mass Effect 3 appearances, and further received various stealth improvements.
  • Fifth entry for Staff Commander Shepard, covering the gap between ME2 and ME3 plus early ME3 events. Just one entry left for her, I reckon.
  • Our entry for Thane Krios, the classiest assassin in the galaxy is now in, covering both ME2 and ME3.
  • Both the fifth Shepard entry and the entry for Thane will receive more dynamic screenshots later on, but right now I can’t tell when I’ll be able to shoot these. I’ll tell you when those are online.
• Peter modernised the technical description of Dr. Strange‘s Orb of Agamotto.
• DCH RULES. The New Rules File – Drawbacks document now has the current version of the Ammunition Load optional rules, though we are discussing a possible variant.
• The drop rates for Angry Fuschia Spider-Bears in the Canyon of Hullulating Doom zone have been fixed.

So that’s 5,056 entries right there.

We do three donation drives per year – February, June, October.

This acknowledges that most people don’t have a lot of cash on hand for hobbies at any given time – hence multiple yearly passes. It also acknowledges than more than 3 times a year would be inappropriate.

All the money is used to a/ pay for our hosting costs, b/ allow the webmaster to recoup years of accrued hosting costs and c/ allow the webmaster to recoup development costs (people hired to churn out code we can’t do ourselves).

Common donation levels are $10 to $20. Less is fine (especially in this economy) ; more means that we’ll eventually be able to make the site even better.

Please support writeups.org so we can keep the site running !

You can use the “Donate Now” button on the site, or go straight to http://writeups.org/donate.php which has further explanations.

SITUATION FOR JUNE : Our hosting costs are about to rise as the hosting service changed its rates. Their switch to a cloud-type billing may not have a large impact – it’s too early to say – but they now bill bandwidth usage above 100Mb/month and the site spits out significantly more than that. And will continue doing so as illustrations get larger and better, and traffic slowly recovers from the Feb./March unexplained drop.

On one hand I’m happy that these very sucessful movies and spin-off products (such as video games) are pushing beloved material into public consciousness. They don’t change much about comic books as a medium (the impact on sales seems timid, though sales and more importantly profit *are* growing), but they allow a far greater number of people to enjoy the characters and universes and clear up some of the remaining scorn about being interested in this stuff.

On the other hand little indie sites like us, Marvunapp, Cosmicteams, etc. (see our links page in the FAQ) get pushed further down Google result pages as large corporate sites (and movie and game wikis) now have content using the same keywords – and of course beat us hands down in terms of search engine visibility.

Anyway :

• WILD WILD WEST. The classic TV show of yesteryear, that is. Doug wrote up James West as played by Robert Conrad, and you can probably guess what will be the second entry for this arc in a few weeks. Plus, all the folks grumbling about there being notes for the Will Smith version but not for the Robert Conrad version can now be happy.
• INVINCIBLE. Two more minor heroes from the Invincibleverse by Bryan :
  • Science Dog
  • Kaboomerang
• FRENCH GENDARMERIE. Some textual tightening and style improvements for La Louve‘s entry.
• GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY. The first Gamora entry had a brush-up for its text (it wasn’t too bad), and a full overhaul of its illustrations, with rescans and new shots. It looks much better now.
• Doug wrote up Hercules from the Legendary Journey TV series – the one with Kevin Sorbo. Which is even cooler since we hadn’t been able to revisit this universe since Sean’s Xena notes in, mmm, 1997 I believe.
• MISTBORN. Gareth rewrote parts of Vin‘s entry to make this universe’s concepts clearer and more accessible. Note all the fan art in the entry has been authorised yet, so some bits may vanish or be modified – it’s only there for the artists to review.

And so that’s 5051 entries, which is a nice-looking number.

The traffic on the site is stable at 1000+ unique visitors per day ever since the sudden drop of late January and early February, and I still can’t pin down the cause. Since I’ve reacted with various search-engines-friendliness improvements, we are in a in ironic situation where our traffic took a 33% hit (it was nearing 1,600 uniques/day before) despite the site now being much cleaner for search engine purposes. We essentially lost 18 months of growth.

Still, it should grow back in time, and I may get new ideas to investigate possible causes for the drop. In the meanwhile, I can only encourage friends of WORG to link to it and recommend it – by doing so you make it easier for people to find it.

The logic of search engines tend to endlessly reinforce the five biggest sites in a category, so small indie labour-of-love sites like WORG that lack a marketing budget, a corporate umbrella, a known brand, SEO experts, etc. have to make do with readers engagement and a lot of work by the contributors. See the “six easy ways to help WORG survive” pale green boxes here and on search result pages for what *you* can do.

On the other hand the backups now run fine – the last glitch for the mirroring was ironed out, and the master recordings of the images are getting a distant backup on mega.co.nz. If we ever exceed the disc quota for Mega, now there’s always Flickr. So the bad loss of images we experienced some years back will hopefully remain the only such occurence.

On the other other hand, still no resources to fix some strange MySQL glitches that affect a handful of entries.

As always, and as with our small Pinterest board feel free to favourite, tag, repost, whatever the pieces you like — to spread the word. For convenience’s sake I’ve listed our social-media-thingies presence on the Links page of writeups.org. Generally folks on the Internet much prefer images to words, so pushing the illustrations a bit might help the site.

Furthermore, a fix was found for those sites that link to our entries with character encoding mistakes. I mean “found” in the litteral sense, since it was copy-paste coding at its finest using Jim’s solution. I can read his regexes… if you give me 20 minutes per line. More generally hundreds of 404s have been manually declared fixed to Google, and nearly all links you’ll find across the net to writeups.org now work – except for the really borked ones, or the pre-2004 ones.

Anyway. Few wholly new entries this time around, but a lot of entries getting overhauled as I run across them as part of my images embiggening work. Improving the pictures without improving the texts is often too hard to resist.

• CHARMED. More handy minor villains from Ethan’s coverage of the show – the three shapeshifter demons.
• The second and last part of our redone Peter Van Zante profile is up – after his career as the Water Wizard (a Ghost Rider villain), his time as Aqueduct (a New Warriors villain). Writeups.org is now one of the best Peter Van Zante reference sites in the world. Yeah, I’m impressed too.
• NEW RULES. The Foe Drawback has had one last-for-now round of polish and is now in the New Rules Files – Drawbacks.
• GREAT TEN. Small upgrade to Ghost Fox Killer‘s entry to add her ghost limousine and explain the Jade Lion and ghost army for all readers.
• VILLAINY INC. More entries had their illustrations rescanned and their texts redone for style/brevity:
  • Cyborgirl
  • Doctor Poison I
  • Giganta (Silver Age)
  • Giganta (Golden Age)
  • Which leads us to…
• The entry for Giganta (Dr. Doris Zeul) was fully rewritten for style (it was pretty bad), all the illustrations were rescanned, the history was extended to reach Flashpoint, and there are a few new illustrations. Since this entry is very popular it should have been done a long while ago but, well, stuff. It is now called Giganta (post-Crisis) to avoid confusion with other versions appearing post-Flashpoint or in the DC Legends continuity.
• I miss Human Defense Corps and it’s been ten years since that series. So the entry for Chaplain Charlie and its texts, stats and illustrations upgraded a bit.
• From time to time an entry pops up in the updates list without content change – usually it’s because I’ve change its name, and usually that’s because I forgot to list the actor for a TV/film character. The entry for the Greatest American Heroine is an example of such – though in this specific case I’m pretty happy of how the main shot now looks. It uses to be clearly low-res.
• The big entry for the Atomic Knights (1960 version) had its pictures processed per modern standards, but also had its texts revisited for style and brevity. Which might be the second such pass for this article, I’m not sure. Anyway, this is a cool entry and it has giant dalmatians.
• Lastly, the entry for the Creeper (1920s Parisian version) has been rewritten, upgraded and had its illustrations rescanned.

Headcount is now at 5,047.

Another image thing – all the banners and the full-size right-hand column images have been processed using a wonderful Photoshop™ plug-in — Noiseware, by Imagenomic (there’s a free trial). It’s a denoiser, which I use to erase and dampen most little artefacts from bad printing, bad ink, paper grain, bad scanning, and some image compression artefacts.

For those images where it has been used – it’s not suitable for *everything* – it makes it look as if the image had been printed using better machines on a better, glossier paper. Solid colours and regular gradients are no longer marred by little glitches and paper grain – you could call it a virtual reprint. Incidentally that makes images lighter (10%-ish), since the noise has been erased, so pages load faster. I’ve also recalibrated, upgraded and automated my Photoshop™ tools.

I don’t expect people to spontaneously notice, since it makes bad images look less bad and good images look like they should. As a random example, here is a side-by-side of a common result using my current tools and settings. The difference won’t make you fall out of your chair, but it does make the site looks slicker, and helps with providing the best pictures you’ll find anywhere for some characters.

But it still means that a lot of images gotta be redone – an image that has been processed with a professional algorithm from the ground up looks cleaner than an image that has been de-noised using my amateur techniques, then processed through Noiseware.

Of course, these tools cost – so heh, feel free to donate to help pay for improvements.

Anyway, there’s a *lot* of stuff this time around. Most of us have been too busy to write lately, but some weeks back Bryan finalised a lot of his articles.

• G.I. JOE. Our Joe entries are a/ very old and b/ adapted from MSHRRPGAS work by Firebomb, so upgrading them is considered a good thing here in Worgistan. Bryan went ahead, and now we have a full profile for that 1980s boyhood idol, Snake Eyes.
• FALLOUT. Continuing with the Fallout 2 companions, we now have :
  • Sulik
  • Cassidy
• Ethan wrote up the version of Grendel that was in the 2007 motion capture/CGI film by Robert Zemeckis.
• Bryan wrote up Andrew Detmer, the rogue telekine in the movie Chronicle.
• UNDERWORLD. Peter recently saw the first (2003) movie, so that’s a good occasion to compare notes about Selene and upgrade this pretty old entry for a bit. All illustrations redone, text rewritten for style/brevity/clarity, started making stats tweaks based on Peter’s analysis.
• VILLAINY INCORPORATED. The following entries had their illustrations rescanned, and their texts rewritten for style and brevity :
  • Our general Villainy, Inc. notes
  • Queen Clea (post-Crisis)
  • Queen Clea (pre-Crisis)
  • Trinity
  • Dr. Poison II
• DRAGONBALL. Been a while, nu. Bryan now presents an extensive writeup of the future version of Vegeta’s son Trunks, from the Androids-dominated timeline.
• NEW RULES. I finally noticed that the old Catfall Bonus for the Jumping Power was somehow missing from the New Bonuses document, so it’s in. It’s probably not final though, as there’s some discussion of Jumping going on.
• INVINCIBLE. Bryan also has an article about Universa, a minor villain.
• MASS EFFECT. Two fan-favourites and two upgrades :
  • Quarian Marine Kal’Reegar now gets a minor entry on writeups.org.
  • Jack (Subject Zero) gets a much larger one, covering Mass Effect 2
  • Plus an update to Joker‘s first entry to integrate the events from the recent Free Comic Book Day story.
  • Plus additional polishing for the first Mandala Shepard entry (mostly rewriting the “illusive generic Shepard’ section)
• INUYASHA. And finally we have Bryan’s second InuYasha article about, well, InuYasha. It’s a very comprehensive article with lots of stuff and pretty kanji.