With the new direction of Shur’tugal set in our compasses, not only will our way of thinking change but we have to change how the whole system works!

Right now, we’ve got our news system that posts news, takes comments…that sort of thing. With the changes, we need something more advanced, nicer, better. So over the past while, I’ve been working hard on a new system to run our site.

This new system’s gonna be great. I hope, anyway. People will be registering their accounts to post comments (accounts may take a larger role in other site functions for contests and that sort of thing in the future). If you don’t have an account, you don’t post…pretty simple. We’re doing this for many reasons, not the least of which is spam control. People claiming to be other people just isn’t fun either. This will be better. Trust me.

Along with the changes you’ll notice, such as the comments accounts, there are changes you won’t notice, like less server strain on the server. The way we’re rebuilding the comments should make it faster and help out the server strain.

This new system, along with some other changes to the overall design of the site will continue to be modified to reach our new goal (see below in Mike’s post).

Thanks! See ya! Your friendly neighborhood tech slave, Bob (Robert).

Please note that at this point, nothing is set in stone.  Ideas and goals discussed in this post are subject to change going forward.

A major problem with single purpose fan driven websites is in their name - single purpose.  In order for a website to be entertaining, captivating and successful, it needs to be a continual source of knowledge and updates.  For the past five years, Shur’tugal has fit into the stereotypical fan site mold - endless pages of static content and the occasional news (whenever we get it).  This leads to a boring, stale website that offers little incentive to its visitors to come back more than once every week or two.

So how can this be changed?  Over the next month, Shur’tugal will be shifting in an entirely new direction.  Below, our new design philosophy and structure has been spread out for you guys - our visitors - to pick through, understand, and think about.  At this point, no idea is entirely set in stone.  Feedback as well as constructive criticism from all of our visitors and staff is more than welcome.

Static Content - Problem
Shur’tugal’s amazing team of content staffers has worked tirelessly over the past few months to update Shur’tugal’s old, stale content into relevant, interesting-to-read entries to inform our curious visitors.  Unfortunately, once a content page is updated, it receives little to no attention until the next book is released.  Additionally, few visitors find reason to read a content page more than once or twice, making them less of an ideal focus for the website.

Static Content - Solution
Many Shur’tugal visitors are unaware that we have our own Inheritance Wikipedia, dubbed the Inheritance Encyclopedia or PIE (Project Inheritance Encyclopedia).  We’re going to shift all of our current content over to our Inheritance Wiki which will do a number of things for the site: our Wiki, a great tool for sharing a collective and extensive amount of Inheritance knowledge, will receive the deserved attention; our old content will not go wasted - by porting it over to the Wiki, it will still get the same or more views than before; visitors to Shur’tugal will now be able to help shape and contribute to our informative section, filling gaps we may have left or pushing our content in a better direction.

Inheritance News - Problem
Shur’tugal has always been the leading source for Inheritance news.  We have provided the news on our main page for five years now in the same typical fashion as every fan site has in the past: we post it when we get it and leave it at that.  While we post news whenever we can and provide it as accurate as possible, it sometimes is not enough.  We’re often left with weeks at a time of no news which leaves us with unhappy visitors and little to do behind the scenes.

Inheritance News - Solution
Shur’tugal will continue to be the leading source for Inheritance news and information, however, we will be shifting our focus away from static content entries and monthly news articles more toward a friendly, interactive ‘blog’ website featuring news, columns, commentary and more.  The front page content we will provide is as follows:

• News - we will continue to provide the best Inheritance news on the internet, however, we will be faster at posting it and offer more insight into the news
• Columns - we will be bringing on a wide staff of writers to offer opinions, commentary, speculation and theorycrafting in the form of daily, weekly and monthly columns and editorials, all featured on the front page of Shur’tugal.
  • Our current columns include the following:
    - News: Insight, Opinions and Commentary
    - Book Reviews and Recommendations: more on this below*
    - FAQ Column: visitors submit questions to be answered by our staff
    - Theories: multiple authors will come together to explore and analyze a wide range of popular (and lesser-known) theories to engage visitors
    - Fan Submissions: this column will highlight fan work, including fan art, fan poems and fan fiction
    - Inheritance Forum Happenings: Insight into what’s going on at our official forums, including the latest popular threads
    - Visitor-written Columns and Editorials: Shur’tugal visitors will be offered the unique opportunity of writing their own editorials to be featured on the main page of Shur’tugal

Other New Features

• Shurtycast - Though we’ve said it
  many times now, we mean it this time - Shurtycast will be coming back in a new form.  Our goal is to produce shorter episodes that are more time and work efficient.  Our focus will be on Brisingr and news discussion as well as a bit of our goofing off, reminiscent of how the show was way-back-when.
• Newsletter - We’re bringing on a dedicated team to head our monthly newsletter.  The newsletter will offer recaps on the biggest stories and columns of the month as well as work as a news alert feature for big announcements, such as book title and release date announcements.
• Comments - Our comments system will be undergoing an entire overhaul.  Users will likely be required to register in order to comment, however, registration will be free, fast and easy and require no personal information other than an email address.

New Sister Site - Name TBD

We will be launching a sister website to Shur’tugal, part of our new network of blogs incorporating Shur’tugal and the new website.  The new website will provide the latest and biggest fantasy series news for both books and movies, including popular as well as lesser-known and new stories and series.  The site will also feature a wide range of book and movie reviews including the latest and greatest as well as book recommendations for those looking for new books to read (or avoid).

A weekly column on Shur’tugal will sum up the best book reviews of the week from the new website for Shur’tugal viewers to check out.

We have set up a thread on our forums, InheritanceForums.com, for discussion and feedback regarding our above ideas/changes/goals. We invite everyone to stop by to let us know their thoughts and any feedback, constructive criticism or ideas of your own that you may have to contribute. Remember, nothing is set in stone - you can still help us shape the future of Shur’tugal. http://www.inheritanceforums.com/index.php?showtopic=44009

Just a quick update to let you guys know that we anticipate having the design finished by the end of this coming week… however, that doesn’t mean the layout release will be then. That means that we’ll be ready to start coding and eventually beta-testing the new layout.

Beta testing? Yep! And we’ll be picking a few luckies from the blog to beta test for us! So keep checking back… you never know when we’ll make the offer, and we definitely won’t be making the offer on the main site (or even announcing it there).

OK, so maybe we haven’t been nice enough to you guys. We asked for your help on new layout ideas… then we stopped talking. Admittedly, I like to keep my big projects “hush-hush”. Normally, I wouldn’t tell you guys until the day of release… maybe hype it a bit in advance (trust me, we’ll be hyping this one). But you did us a favor, and now I feel bad.

As much as I’d like to, I can’t show you any of the real layout. This is because it’s still very much a work in progress. Things are changing so often that if I showed you something today, chances are it’d be completely different tomorrow. I will share some cool things about it, though:

- Our headers (some, not all) will be a combination of movie and book images (pictures from the movie, book covers). Don’t whine because you hated the movie and blah blah blah! Trust me, we did too, but it looks good! What’s cooler is that for it to work, our designer (Sam) had to draw the dragon heads (the ones that Palencar drew for the covers) full bodies! They look great.
- We’re going to have a new “logo”-type header text (where the title is on the “banner”). Hopefully we’ll use it in some future shirts.
- The left navigation is mostly done and looks great! That’ll probably be the first thing we share pictures of, so hang tight!

Sorry I can’t share more, but like I said, that’s all we have set in stone right now. However, image-wise, I can show you the “placement layout” I drew up:

(Click to see the big version)

Basically (before you jump to conclusions), this “placement layout” doesn’t show any actual colors, graphics, stylization, etc. It shows where things will be placed (and sizing is accurate down to the pixel) and how things will be organized. I filled it in with loads of text, so you can read all about how the new layout will work. Quite frankly, I think it’s really cool!

Anyway, I can’t stress enough that the “placement layout” IS NOT A REAL LAYOUT! Like I said, all it shows is where things will go, how big they’ll be, and how the new layout will function and be organized!

Keep checking back!

Well, we meant to do this a while ago, but here we are. I finally found the time earlier today to sit down and write the little PHP applet that links into our news system database so that you can send news stories via email to friends or family who you think might enjoy them.

Certainly took us longer than it should have, but it was all a question of having someone take the time to write it. We wanted to make sure it was linked into the news stories database so that its all very easy to send a news story with one click, without you having to type in what the actual subject and URL is again, if we were using a third-party script.

Enjoy it, and if you have any suggestions for it just let us know. We read these comments.

In anticipation for the new layout which doesn’t exist yet, unless I wasn’t told, I started working on the new format for the navigation bars. The new bars will allow you to collapse each section of the bar. Not only this, but it’ll also save your settings automatically to a cookie stored on your computer. I’m tempted to go into a techno-jabber about the fun inner-workings of the script, so I will!

Each time you click closed or open each section of the navigation, it changes a style in each section that hides or shows it. Also, each time that parameter is changed, it saves the data for each navigation section (whether it’s open or closed) to a cookie (file on your computer that saves small bits of data from websites). Then, each time you open the site, the cookie is read (the cookie looks like this: navigationcookie=10101) and the navigation bars are kept open or closed whether or not the cookie data shows a 1 or a 0. It’s that simple! Now I bet everyone is going to go out and try to make their own user-changable navigation bar!

I’m pretty sure it works in all browsers. If you want to try out the new bar, click here. The test there is rough, but displays all the functionality that the final product will have…except working links…I didn’t feel like typing them out.

Both Mike and I are very happy with the outcome of the new translation add-on to our news system, which I finished coding earlier today. Shurtugal did used to offer translations for the entire site, but it was through an automated service which returned very spotty results, which is why we stopped using it. This new system will rely on human translators and a custom-built system, which while more time-consuming should be very effective.

The system has been completed and tested, and when it is released you’ll be able to choose from multiple languages just underneath the site theme selection in the layout box. At the moment, we’re hoping to release with English, Spanish, French, Russian, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Danish, though the list may grow or change before the feature is released. As the system is currently designed, your language preference will be saved for one year from the last time you update it, and used wherever a translation is available.

Right now we’re happy with what we have, but in the near future I’ll be making more code edits and additions to the language system being put in place to allow for more parts of the site to be translated as time goes by. Look for the news translations to be rolling out as soon as our translators (Job Openings ) are in place and working! Click the image to enlarge it for an example.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are still having trouble with the CSS and other site images, please clear all cookies from shurtugal.com and refresh the page. This should solve your problem.

As we’re sure you’ve all noticed, we continue to have server problems this morning. However, this would appear to be the ‘getting worse before it gets better’ phase. We have moved or are in the process of moving everything to our new server, but some parts have come across incorrectly or incompletely, which causes the problems you are seeing.

Subdomains (such as fanfiction.shurtugal.com, media.shurtugal.com, topsites.shurtugal.com, etc) are not yet working correctly, which will cause several errors, including a 404 on most media files that Shurtugal uses, as all of these are hosted on the media server.

The main site is incorrectly loading the CSS Style file as well as the top banner. This is because both of these files are dependent on what theme you are using, which is saved in a cookie. However, this cookie is not being correctly parsed on the index.php page, which we believe was caused by a change in our PHP installation. However, we are unable to resolve this problem because FTP access has still not come back up to any part of the server. (If I sound like I can speak civilly about this, then I’ve fooled you)

We are working on all these problems, and hope to have them all resolved soon so that the site can return to its normal state, and we can get back to working on new and more exciting things for you, and once they are resolved Shurtugal and its network sites should be running faster than ever.

For those of you who care or who have noticed, we’ve been experiencing some major server issues ever since the four day period of down time we had about a month ago. During the down time, we moved the site to another server - technically just replaced the hardware in our old server.

Since then, we’ve been plagued with problems. Comment-goers will notice that the comment system on the main site’s news has been down since then, partly due to the fact that Tim left for China a day or two after the server was back on time, and partly because we’ve been blaming the problem on the wrong thing. Inheritance Forums posters will have noticed the “IPS Driver Error” you get every ten minutes or so, post times going wacko, and a number of other problems. I think our current server is a lemon.

This is all being resolved because I’ve ordered a new, better server! For those tech nerds out there who ask, here are our current server stats, and our new server stats:

Current (P.O.S.) Server:
Dual Athlon 246, 2 GB RAM, SATA 250GB HDD + 36GB SCSI Drive

New, Better Server:
Dual Athlon 250, 2 GB RAM, SATA II 350GB + 36GB SCSI Drive

The additional 36 GB SCSI drive houses our MySQL databases, which run our scripts (IF, this blog, etc).

Anyway, I’m told that the new server will be online in the next 12 hours or so… after that, we just have to move everything over. And since IF is the site with the most problems, we’ll be moving that over first. Also, Tim gets home from China in a little over 24 hours, so the site news comments should be online and fully functional by Saturday or so!

Original post title, I know.

This is our Shur’tugal Development Blog! No, I won’t be the only poster here. Basically, any Shur’tugal employee working on a project or what-not will (hopefully) post here. It’s a great way for you guys to see into the “behind-the-scenes” of Shur’tugal, and an even better way for you guys to give us your thoughts and ideas on what we’re currently working on, and maybe even some ideas for what you’d like to see in the future.

Nothing more to say now other than that we’d prefer you register if you plan on posting comments, because if the spam bots start hitting us hard, we’ll have to enable spam prevention, requiring everyone who wants to comment to have an account.