We wanted to share a very early look at the new version of Shur'tugal! The design is mostly complete - content placement, navigation, sidebars, and content formatting is all still in the very early stages of development. Shur'tugal will also be running on an entirely new news, content management, and comments system. We have more details to share with you if you keep reading, including a big announcement regarding a new website! Continue reading...
Comic-Con itself has come and gone but Shur’tugal’s coverage of the annual pop culture convention is far from over! Many of you are fully aware that Shur’tugal staff spent five days covering nearly every aspect of the convention and brought back much to show for it – pictures, video, reports, interviews, and free stuff!
We are very excited to share the final product of our coverage with you and have put together a schedule of when to expect each type of content over the next week. This schedule includes when you’ll find our interviews with Christopher Paolini in addition to a new episode of Shurtycast. Keep reading for a full schedule! Continue reading...
The Shur'tugal team has made it back to our respective homes safely, and we are beginning to wind down. It was an amazing experience, that we have documented fairly well. But we assume you are all wondering about when we will update the site.... Continue reading...
Comic-Con International 2010 has been a busy and exciting time here at Shur'tugal. It has been so busy that many visitors may not be able to keep up with all of the information streaming out of San Diego. We've put together all of the Twitter updates from the convention to make it easy for everyone to find without having to scroll through tons of updates.
Check after the break for the full time line of events so far! Continue reading...
With us being stuck at Comic-Con for the next few days and busier than ever, it's tough to share the story of "The Inheritance Almanac". However, Shawn Speakman, webmaster for Terry Brooks (and other authors) and blogger on Suvudu.com made a great blog post about The Inheritance Almanac and some of how it came to be. It's a fun read -- we definitely recommend it! Additionally, Suvudu is doing some great exclusive coverage at Comic-Con; check it out! Read more exclusive details about The Inheritance Almanac over at Suvudu!
I've been keeping this project a secret for nearly two years now and I'm truly excited and honored to be able to finally share it with you all!
The book is being published by Random House, the same publisher as the Inheritance cycle, whom I had the incredible privilege of working with during the creation of the book. I'll have much more to say about the project in the coming days, but for now, enjoy the cover! The book is set to release on October 26th, 2010.
For the latest updates on Shurtugal.com's Comic-Con Coverage, follow @itsshurty or @mikemacauley on Twitter.
Also: Author profiles are now available, you can find them through the banners on the left side of this page.
We’re excited to announce that we’re running a huge give-away competition alongside our Comic-Con International coverage in hopes of offering fans access to some amazing gift packages! Each day during our Comic-Con coverage (starting July 22nd and running through the 25th), we will release a “word” on the website. The word will be unique each day and will only be available on that day. Fans will be asked to collect each of the four words and at the end of our Comic-Con coverage, will be offered a form to submit all four words and their email address for a chance at winning one of three awesome prize packs.
More details on the contest are available after the break, including a full list of the prize pack contents. Suffice to say, the contents will be awesome (over eight books from five different authors, all autographed –including at least one book from Christopher Paolini himself – promotional DVDs, t-shirts, signed photos, and more!). Continue reading...
We announced late last week that we will be attending this year's Comic Con International in San Diego alongside Christopher Paolini and a host of Random House's talented young adult authors. While we do have a list in progress of events to cover during Comic Con, we're looking to you guys -- our visitors -- to help us fill in the rest of the space. Continue reading this news post for an early look at where we'll be headed during Comic Con and to contribute your own schedule to our list. Tell us what you want us to cover and we'll try our best!Continue reading...
This post was originally a call to action to support the Harry Potter Alliance, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to healing the world by preventing genocide, illiteracy, and violations of civil rights. Thanks to the tens of thousands of fans around the world who rallied to the HP Alliance's support, they are now the winners of $250,000 to help further their efforts.
However, the HP Alliance wasn't the only brilliant organization or charity competing for the grand prize. Dozens of groups from around the world competed to place in the top five; most notable was the Kristin Brooks Hope Center, an organization which operates the Hopeline, a national free, confidential, and twenty-four-hour hotline for suicide prevention. Please continue reading this news post to learn more about these amazing organizations and what you can do to support them. Continue reading...
We’re thrilled to announce that Shur’tugal will be continuing its tradition of attending and covering the annual San Diego Comic Con international this July! Random House, publisher of the Inheritance cycle here in the United States, has stepped in as a sponsor of our coverage of the event, allowing us to conduct much of the coverage you’ll see here on the website.
This year’s 41st Comic Con International is going to be bigger and better than ever and we plan to make sure that our coverage of the event is the best we’ve ever done. Most importantly, Christopher Paolini will be attending this year’s convention, sitting on a panel, doing a book signing, and joining Shur’tugal for a two part interview (representing June and July’s monthly Q&A series interviews). We will have coverage of all of his events, from the panel to the signings and anything more!
We will also be catching up with Michael Scott, bestselling author of the Immortal Secrets of Nicholas Flamel series, Esther Friesner, author of the Nobody’s series, Lauren Kate, author of the Fallen series, and more coverage yet to be announced! In addition, we are extremely excited to finally lift the veil on the secret project and announcement we’ve been biting our tongues on. This will happen during the convention!
We will have a complete list of our event coverage, including schedules, author information, book information, and more available on the website prior to the beginning of Comic Con. The convention runs from July 22nd to the 25th and Shur’tugal will be in San Diego from the 21st through the 26th to cover every event we can!
Shurtugal.com is now in search of interested fans looking to hone their theorizing and writing skills to write theory editorials and articles for the front page of Shur'tugal! We've set up a page explaining exactly what we're looking for, which is unique and rich theory articles written by our visitors exploring some of your own favorite theories. Members of the website who have their theory articles published will be rewarded for their work with some signed pictures, drawings, and even personalized signed books! So go ahead, check the page out -- we know you have some awesome theories to share and we'd love to hear them!
Additional site updates: We're sure you're curious about the Q&A that's due to be published any day now. The questions were great and we're looking forward to Christopher's answers! However, we cannot post the interview until we've received it. Hang tight, we expect to have it soon... and the minute we have it, we'll share it! Also, check back soon for the first episode of Shurtycast 2.0!
After reading through the piles of feedback left for us regarding possible solutions for our Q&A dilemma, we've reached a conclusion. We also chose some great new questions from the questions submitted and plan to ask them during this Q&A. Join us after the break for a full breakdown of our solution for the Q&As, information on when this Q&A will take place, and a list of questions we plan on asking! Continue reading...
Having now gone through questions for the sixth Q&A with Christopher Paolini in preparation for the actual interview, our staff was presented a challenging dilemma: the amount of askable questions for this Q&A, as well as our previous one, has gone declined. We’re not sure if fans just haven’t been around to ask the right questions or if people are feeling as though they’ve started to run out of questions, however, what we were sure of is that this is a problem. We’re going to present our possible solutions to you after the break (as well as a preview of the questions we pulled from the group that we felt are good enough to ask) and we want your feedback on what you’d like to see us do to solve the problem! Continue reading...
The month of March marks the six year anniversary of Shurtugal.com and boy have we traveled a far way over the past six years. I started Shurtugal.com as a side project of a bored teenager during winter break back in 2003, but it wasn't until 2004 that I purchased the domain and launched what would grow to be the largest Inheritance Cycle website on the internet.
Over the past six years Shur'tugal has evolved into a community of tens of thousands of Inheritance Cycle fans spanning over one hundred countries. I've personally ventured on dozens of trips on behalf of Shur'tugal, representing the Inheritance fans and reporting back here on the website for all to see. I've devoured the words in the box dozens of times, I've worked on and launched over a dozen "top secret" projects, and I've made some amazing friends.
What Shur'tugal has grown to become was never intended or expected. Together with my amazing team of staff, we've made many wise decisions and have seen Shur'tugal through some of the most exciting points in our lives. I've made my fair share of mistakes running the website as well, but I've also used those mistakes to learn, grow, and mature. I've put the creative portion of my mind to work building new features to entertain fans in the past and continue to do so for the future. We have a lot of great plans and surprises in the works for our visitors and friends, and to celebrate our sixth anniversary, we'd like to share these plans with you. Continue reading for a sneak peak at what's to come! Continue reading...
As you've noticed by now, Shurtugal.com and it's sub-sites (Shur'tugal Fan Fiction excluded -- we're still working on bringing this back up) are back online and on a new host. We have a lot of great things in store for the websites in the near future, all of which will be recapped in a six year anniversary post this weekend. In the mean time, we'd like to ask all of our visitors to report any errors they may have found on the website (broken links, broken features, etc.) in the comments of this news post so that we can fix them as soon as possible. On a related note, we'd love to hear any suggestions for ways to improve the website or features to add to the website from you guys, so feel free to share those in the comments as well!
