Sennadar Forums

straechav wrote: Not all that tricky... well, at least not all that tricky in MY opinion. The website is sennadar.com which should tell you something. It's a page concentrated primarily on firestaff stories. Subjugation at the moment isn't quite (heh) as big, and the others barely qualify themselves as existing.

As for the words: "Professional but neutral" - I'd say, please god no! Professional and neutral always ends up looking like corporate website. This is a community website, hosting fictive fantasy stories. Professional as a term describing graphics is always matter of opinion. But neutral is decidedly horrid word to use in conjuction with art.

Oh, I didn't mean the whole thing should be neutral.  Rather the opposite: I was thinking it might be cool if the Sennadar books had a different look than the Pyrosian books and from the Subjugation books, etc. (And if the others don't have much written for them yet, think of it as an incentive for Fel to write more!) The name "sennadar.com" may be more historical than based on current intent.  That way if multiple people wanted to try their hands at design, they could each take a section -- a true community project -- or if not at least you'd be able to try out different styles.  My thought was then that you'd want some sort of "global" navigation that spanned the different looks, offering core navigation choices.  But it's just an idea, the choice is up to Fel and whoever he chooses to do the design.

I think we should allow more people the chance to volunteer before we start assigning each other tasks...not everyone reads this every day, so it may take a while for everyone interested to reply.

matt

I think there were a few chapters that had 12pt rather than 10pt font, but I can't remember where.  Personally I wouldn't mind if the webpage offered something bigger than 10pt for the HTML files, because it gives me a headache reading small print on the computer after several chapters.  

I agree it would be nice to have an official FAQ/Timeline on the site, and maps are always good.  I like the idea of the god listing too, because sometimes it can get hard to remember all the Elder Gods, and whatnot.

If you've got Windows XP and a mouse with a scroll wheel, Ctrl and roll the mouse.  That makes the fonts larger or smaller.

Thanks, that helps a lot.

I didn't know that either! Thanks!

Glad to help.  And for pranksters out there, certain video cards have a 180 degree flip mode.  Play around with Ctrl Alt and Shift combonations plus the up and down arrows.  If you've got the right vid card, it'll flip your monitor input upside down. LOL

shadowhawk wrote:No Java, please. It takes bandwidth, loads and starts slowly and Java VM takes up memory and CPU cycles. If you have to have an animation, use animated GIF, MNG or Flash.

And Flash, AniGif and MNG are completely free in terms of memory and CPU cycles Speaking of which... MNG? New one on me.  

lochar wrote:Play around with Ctrl Alt and Shift combonations plus the up and down arrows.  If you've got the right vid card, it'll flip your monitor input upside down. LOL

good god. I'm glad it doesn't do that with my ATI video card drivers. Those key combos are my Teamspeak key-combos (Up = TS vol up, Down = TS vol down, Left = Mic Mute, Right = TS Mute)...

Just what I need, Planetside flipping upside down right in the middle of a pitched battle while i'm trying to hear my teammates shouting to get that tower hack *now*.

greymist wrote:it would even be tempting to put the books in a database and put a small search function in allowing peeps to find something in a specified chapter/book/all the books, then again that also goes along with the meta data idea which was thrown around awhile back.

That's what I've been wanting to do / have done for ages - I think I had a chat to you about it before.

Basicly have all sorts of meta info embedded in HTML/online versions so you can get more info on a object/character/location/magic/etc.  

I suppose it would be *sort of* like a Sennadar WikiPedia

As far as I know, MNG is an animated PNG, with the same sort of standards. Unfortunately, browser support has been spotty, which means GIF or Flash is really the only way to go if you want everyone to see it.

spec8472 wrote: good god. I'm glad it doesn't do that with my ATI video card drivers. Those key combos are my Teamspeak key-combos (Up = TS vol up, Down = TS vol down, Left = Mic Mute, Right = TS Mute)...  

Oh, but that'd be so much fun, wouldn't it?  It'd give you a new level challenge?

Doesn't really matter.  I've only seen it on Dell computers that have built on video cards.

Hey everyone, sorry new poster on the block. A friend of mine introduced me to Sennadar and I've been happily converting the books to my Palm device for reading them on the road. She alerted me about this particular thread because she knows I like Sennadar and I'm a sucker for helping out a what I call a good cause

My reply concerns 4...
I'm a webdeveloper, job and hobby, pretty good at it ::), that is at implementation. Throw me a graphx design, what you want on the site and I can usually come up with a good interraction design, and a fluid website running on today's standards ;D, W3C's that is with some minor adjustments to make it all work on Microsoft's produce as well.
I could do hosting, if needed, can't garantee 100% uptime though, I think I get to round and about 90% though but it would add the benefit of a Java-server (My preffered option for the server-side). But if you want to stick to the current hosting, do advice us of the possibilties of the accound before people wander of any further into the ranges of PHP or whatever other server-side language (Knowing what's possible might be crucial in finding the right man for picking up the webmaster's batton)

Oh, on the list of skills are: (x)html, CSS, ASP (JScript and VBScript), JSP (also Servlets, taglibs). Wouldn't mind webmastering a site in full html, without a server-side application. I forgot (how could I?!?) to mention JavaScript.

Oh, and I have a suggestion on hosting the chapters. Use a few mirrors, the new webmaster could set this up

for a small look at my skills: http://www.windgazer.nl (in the middle of a redesign, implemented on the frontpage only), http://www.heemstede.nl/ (It's a dutch site, no longer serviced by me, but still my implementation) or check out my profile at http://www.experts-exchange.com/M_348554.html

Welcome to the newest convert, Windgazer.  Here's to a healthy addiction. *grin*

I've converted 10 chapters of Axe at http://vysnu.com/temp/sennadar-reformat/ to XHTML and styled it. Conversion was the hard part since it requires some hand-edit to get Word HTML to behave nice.

Styling is inspired by Microsoft Reader which is how I prefer to read my ebooks, but that is a non-issue because CSS allows you to make it look any way you want.

The hard part, as I said, is the conversion. Given enough time, I can convert all of em, though if someone can volunteer, that will be excellent. Just PM me, and I'll be glad to tell u how to do it =)

Note that this is a barebones story page... a common header and footer (which contains a jump to menu to all the chapters and "next chapter" "previous chapter" links) is the next logical step. That would be imo be enuf for a good start, a PHP database which can take in stories could be overkill. PHP can of course be used to require_once all the common elements in the page, and for generating those header/footer links automatically =)

Oh, and I'll be glad to contribute to whatever effort is in place for the website. I would also like to be the "webmaster", but I wouldn't have enough time to keep it up-to-date. If someone else volunteers to perform regular updates, I can do enough to get it off  the ground and more

Oh, and feedback on the layout would be mucho appreciated... I'll probably use this for my stories as well =)

I've worked on it and come up with some simple PHP to make managing these files easy, the script autogenerates the next chapter and previous chapter links depending on the number of files in the directory, so all you need to do to add a new chapter is to upload a new file =) The scripts are also *very* customisable so you can do anything you need to do with it. If you don't like the drab [but readable ] look, changing it via CSS is also uber easy.

The scripts are pretty mature as it is, but three more things remain to be done.
1) A jump to link listing all the chapters.
2) The home page should list all the chapters
3) A downloadable package of all the chapters... or, a range of chapters... this can be done dynamically as well.

1 and 2 are pretty simple, 3 could be a little complicated, but it would make a nice feature. Since I'm working on it now, other feature requests would be welcome.

I'd also ask if someone could do the quite easy (but repetitive) job of cleaning up the word HTML. Right now only 10 chapters of Axe are up. Just PM or email me =)

The url is the same... http://vysnu.com/temp/sennadar-reformat/ and for interested ppl, the sources are available at http://vysnu.com/temp/sennadar-reformat/src.zip

Use as you please =)

Looks great to me.  8)

I thought the solid black bars down the side were a bit distracting (I'm using Firefox), and wondered if you could make that a lighter color.  I'd also like the story text to take up a bit more of the screen, so those bars won't be as obvious.

I like the Prev/Next chapter links, and I think you did a good job with the cleanup.