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Welcome & Announcements
By: Zian Choy
Infrastructure
Last month you probably noticed that due to the forums chaos, the discussion links at the bottom of the cover and each article pointed to the contact page instead. I’m happy to announce that the links are back.
This month marks the beginning of a major overhaul of Terrouge’s infrastructure. You may have noticed the early improvements such as the working contact form, improved bug tracking, staff-only wiki, and the chat room upgrade. In addition, we are working to make daily backups of the entire website so that the forums will never be down for more than 24 hours again. We are also looking for alternative hosting so that we may provide timely information if Terrouge suffers any future site outages. Feel free to suggest a hosting provider for this purpose.
Web Hosting
Our most important foundation is web hosting. With it, we have a site. Without it, we have an unorganized collection of writers. Unfortunately, our current financial backer wants us to perform a complex site move that would cause significant downtime. We want to avoid that so we’re asking for your help to raise the funds necessary to make Terrouge self-sufficient. Our current hosting expires on August 12, 2008.
We have set up a complete PayPal donation area. You can make a huge difference with only $5. If even just 6 people donate that much, you can rest assured that Terrouge will continue to provide you with articles from around the fiction world, discussion forums, and possibly a future community corner for writers and artists.
With your help, our ideas could become realities. If you’d like to help us reach these dreams, please donate a few dollars.
Think Gigantic
Scolly has proposed making an area for budding writers to give and receive constructive feedback along with a simple voting mechanism like the one in Questors Bold. Each reviewer would have a reputation, much like eBay, so that malevolent commenters would find themselves ignored. In addition, we’re considering doing some sort of contests that may be built on top of that infrastructure.
In addition, Emily has proposed offering a similar set of contests and activities for artists.
We’re also looking into reviving the games section and giving the entire website a facelift.
Daily Chat
Some of you may be familiar with the unofficial daily evening chats at the Redwall FanFiction board. I will be experimenting with a similar concept for Terrouge. I will be on the chat every day from 4 PM to 5 PM Pacific Standard Time. I look forward to talking to all of you.
General Note About Openings
If you’d like to learn about how to do any of the things listed below or in our staff web page, then feel free to contact us. We don’t expect you to join Terrouge with a perfect combination of skills.
Art Director Opening
Smith College expects to consume Emily (Nyctalo) this coming school year, resulting in frantic panicking by the Terrouge management. Currently, the art director coordinates artists, handles art-related projects, such as the aforementioned contests, provides a great cover for Firebird each month, and occasionally comments on the artistic aspects of the website’s design. If any of those aspects sound appealing to you, we’d like to know.
Website Developer Openings
As you can tell from our list of 48 open bugs (as of July 30, 2008), we sorely need website developers. If you have any of the following sets of skills, we would love to talk to you about joining the Terrouge staff:
- Bugzilla administration (Perl and MySQL)
- phpBB back-end administration (PHP and MySQL)
- General documentation (PHP, CSS, XHTML, and HTML)
Articles
Literary Recommendations: Les Misérables By Victor Hugo
Grant returns to Firebird with a review of one of the greatest books.
Roz Gibson's Genesis Project
Highwing discusses Roz Gibson’s interpretation of progressive rock with comics.
The Elements of Romance
Sara considers the use of romance in old classics, modern teen novels, and the general stereotypes involved.
Robin Hood
Will’s pranks finally catch up with him as Robin and Gisbourne face off in a test of strategic skills.
Another Relaxing Article
The ranter returns.