Website News

UltimaCodex.com and UOJournal.com Changes, and Happy 20th Birthday to Ultima Underworld

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If you haven’t seen the Ultima Codex, then you should see it. It officially launched today.

And a big Happy Birthday to Ultima Underworld – see the Ultima Underworld page at UltimaCodex.com.

What Does That Have to do with UOJournal.com?
Have you noticed I’ve not been posting much lately? I’ve been a little busy. I’m not quite ready to talk about parts of it, but parts of it will be available in the next few weeks.

Serious/community/news stuff is moving to UltimaCodex.com. Soapboxy/Rant/Humor stuff is staying here at UOJournal.com. I’m working out how to move stuff over without any penalties within Google, but there you have it.

So UOJournal.com will continue on, it’ll just be on a diet. Some of the new stuff that will be UO-related on UltimaCodex.com actually relates to what I wanted to do on UO Journal, and other (cool) people in the UO community who are working on this have some interesting things to add as well on the UltimaCodex.com side of things.

Changes to UOJournal.com

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Since I’m flying solo for the most part these days, I’m going to be changing a few things about UOJournal.com, and the focus is just going to be on the news and commentaries. You’ll see some links in the menus disappear or redirect you to UOGuide.com or other websites. This is something I should have done several months ago.

It’s not going to slow down or change my posting on UOJournal.com, it just means that a few things I had planned on doing on this website, I will probably be contributing them to UOGuide.com as it seems a more logical place to write them.

Of course, if you’d like to contribute – articles on UO, commentaries, upcoming events, etc., by all means Contact Me and I’ll see that they are posted.

Basically, UOJournal.com is going to strictly revolve around news, events, and commentary. Yes, I know, that’s what it’s basically been for some time now, but this is basically a formal declaration. I’m also going to be more active within the community, but a lot more about that later.

Deckard

Site Update – February 27, 2011 Plus Some Answers

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Status of the UOJournal.com
It’s actually pretty good….except for three months worth of stories that are offline, as you can see from the notice at the top of the site. We actually went “live” a lot faster than I expected, otherwise I wouldn’t be discussing missing stories. More on that in a minute. The reason being that we like to have either images/screenshots accompanying our articles, or small icons indicating what the story is about. When we moved over, the actual content of those stories came over just fine. The links with the images didn’t because the addresses were hard-coded. The result would be a lot of stories with broken images. I thought it didn’t look very good, so I took them offline yesterday, and will make them available either as I upload the icons to UOJournal.com, move the images over to our public Flickr account (see below), or if images don’t contribute much, I may just remove them. Things will seem odd for the next few days. I apologize, but I just did not like seeing stories and articles with broken image links. There were also stories that related to what became UOJournal.com, and I need to change the references in those as well to reflect the new domain name.

This is a very long read, as it answers some questions asked of me this morning, and much of it will probably bore most of you, so unless you are interested in the behind-the-scenes part of UOJournal, you may want to pass on it.

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The “Official” Launch of the Ultima Online Journal

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Update (Feb 26): Quite a few stories are offline, namely stories that have screenshots that we took, or other images that were hosted on the test server – we need to move those over and are working on it this weekend.

Today marks the official launch of the Ultima Online Journal.

Yesterday, the domain was officially registered, and our hosting provider set things up. This morning, we migrated the database of four months worth of posts and stories over from the private test site (our own Test Center!) As far as we know, there are no problems – we apologize in advance though for anything that may seem odd, especially with the RSS feeds. When we set things up, the RSS feeds were in reverse! That was due to the migration resetting some dates/article numbers, and you should not have seen it, but if you notice anything weird, please contact us. Those dates have been properly fixed and should display properly in an RSS reader. I believe we only have the last 10 stories set for RSS anyways, so any problematic past articles will quickly be out of that buffer.

Unofficially, as mentioned on the About page, UOJournal has existed since November of 2010. It ran on a test center of sorts, while we added stories, worked out formats, and generally decided what we were going to do. One thing I’m personally happy about – what we talked about in November and into December as far as what the site would cover has survived up through today. I take that as an indication that we had a good idea. We did remove some things, either because they were duplicated by other sites, or just really didn’t fit, but the core of what we laid out last year survived.

For those who had been invited to comment/critique what is now UOJournal.com before it went live at UOJournal.com this morning, you may notice some stories that are missing – that is due to stories containing videos and screenshots that we ourselves took. Those will be added back into UOJournal.com once we finish uploading the related media to our public YouTube and flickr accounts. Other stories that reference third party videos and screenshots are still intact and available.

What Can You Do?
Spread UOJournal.com around, contact us with UO news and commentary. Just because we have officially launched UOJournal.com today does not mean many players are going to automatically visit it – it will take some time to find its way through the computers of Google and the other search engines. If you have thoughts on the website, positive or negative, please let us know, we love any and all criticism.