Just a quick note, the site cache (something that makes the site load quickly) didn’t update two things tuesday - one story, the week in review, and the link in the header to the “Current Events” was still showing September, 2006 instead of October, 2006.

Nothing major, and it was corrected last night, but it does brings up another point: whenever you visit some sites, you might want to hit the reload button or F5 depending on your OS and browser, to make sure you are viewing the latest copy of the site. I’m not saying do it multiple times a day, but if you visited our site, or even say, UO.com on a thursday night, and something is updated on a friday morning, you might not see it, since your browser might still be showing you the previous locally cached version.

Which leads me to another point: I made some tweaks to the site template/theme last night, trying to increase load speeds (or decrease load times if you will). I removed about two-thirds of the graphics “footprint” (the gray stone background tile, etc.), so things should load substantially faster. This would be a good time to hit reload on your browser so that your local copy is updated - you may very well be seeing the site as it looked yesterday morning.

Oh, and the part about the header not updating in the cache - FYI, the “Current Events” (currently October, 2006), is a page that lists what has happened this month, what will happen, and what has happened in past years during the same month.

Thanks,

Smith

Long story short, on my to-do list was to figure out someway to display the Five on Friday information that comes to us from UO.com every week (where the developers answer five questions). It was pretty far down the list, but somebody contacted me out of the blue and asked me about a way to easily search the FoF information. I got to looking at it, and played around with it a bit, and the end result is this: Five on Friday by Topic. Basically I broke every Five on Friday question down by a specific topic (or multiple topics) and posted it on a seperate page with other questions that concerned the same topic, and it’s all listed by date. If you want to see all client-related questions, you’d click on the Client link, if you want to see all 9th Anniversary questions, you’d click on the 9th Anniversary link, etc.

If you’d like to discuss it or make suggestions, a topic was started in the forums. It’s missing about two months worth of questions, but should be completed tomorrow or the day after (I was holding off until I found a format I liked before doing all of it).

We still have other major projects to finish (but they are coming along):
- UO-related books
- UO Developer listing
- Various timelines (publishes, client changes, etc.)
- Gallery (have 300+ screenshots to add, including 100+ of UO2 and Ultima X: Odyssey)
- Guide to UO products on e-Bay (not in-game items)

We are still running in a sort of “stealth” mode - not actively advertising the site or anything, as it needs a lot of work still yet, but I thought for those few who have been invited and for those that are finding us through Yahoo and Google, that we’d fill you in on some of what we’ve done recently. If you’d like to discuss any of these, please use the UOCodex.com forums. It’d be great to hear what you’d like to see more of, how easy you can find the information we have already online, as well as where you’d like to see things go.

A lot of work has been done behind the scenes of UOCodex.com over the past five days or so. One of the biggest things is the UO dev team documentation project - a little project here at UOCodex.com to flesh out all of those Ultima Online developers you see mentioned in the credits.dat file tucked away in your Ultima Online directory, as well as to work on preserving information about cancelled Ultima-related projects (including one that surprised us, and it has nothing to do with UO2/Ultima Worlds Online: Origin, or Ultima X: Odyssey. We’ll talk about that one at a later date).
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We haven’t forgotten about the news - instead, with the long weekend (for us), we’ve been concentrating on a few areas that we are wanting to really work on. We expect it to be a slow news weekend as it is, and this is a good chance to shrink our to-do list.

Some of the things we’ve been working on can be found at the UOCodex.com Updates Page