WolfSpoor Updates

Now that WW's new forums and new store are up, Wolfspoor's been redesigned:

http://www.wolf-spoor.org

I was up until 4AM this morning re-coding the Avatar page. o_0

Same avatars as before, sorted a little differently. Links to old pages (whitewolf.php and startrek.php) will link to the new page, but links to individual sections, like the Promethean avatar section, fr'ex, won't work anymore.

Since the official WW chats are down, I imaging more people will be heading to unofficial chats, or starting up their own. The Digichat menu option at the top currently links to a page full of ideas for anyone who wants to use a Digichat, with examples. If I get access to a Digichat environment to play around with, I'll try implementing some ideas and opening the code up for everyone else to use.

As threatened promised, icons for the World of Darkness.



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Demon: The Fallen has been completely upgraded to 120x120, and I've added the Earthbound as a bonus.

Now, as mentioned, I'm making sure all my Digichat packages are updated. I came up with what (I thought) was a good idea last night... Digichat-specific icons. Now, downloading my packages, you can have a full thematic icon set without any gaps. As usual, Digichat-compatible image files are found zipfile in the Digichat links on each relevant page.

This way, if you've got a Werewolf chat, you have a full set of Werewolf-themed icons available to you. Likewise if you have a multi-venue chat, you can mark yourself and your assistants with a venue-specific symbol so you'll have fewer Demon players asking you to sanction their character when all you deal with are vampires. It's also emminently possible via coding to add different Xes based on what kind of character the player is creating, so STs know at a glance who has what type of character waiting to be sanctioned.

Of course, if there are any gaps that I haven't accounted for, let me know and I'll try to accomodate. New Bremen, for example, had a specific icon for emergency personnel. I have no idea if that sort of thing would be useful to anyone else.

Anyhow, on with the show:



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I've updated a ton of icons since my last update.

New sections:

• World of Warcraft
• Kindred of the Ebony Kingdom

New symbols:

• Scion has the Celestial Bureaucracy. Devas will be added once I get a hold of the symbol.
• Kindred of the East (Heretical Dharmas)
• Mummy: The Resurrection (Wu T'ian, Teomallki)

Upgraded symbols: A lot of my older things were at 80x80, and have been for years. I've been slowly upgrading them to 120x120.

• Werewolf: The Wild West
• Werewolf: The Apocalypse (Stargazers, Auspices, Bastet tribes)
• Wraith: The Oblivion (with new key!)
• Dark Ages: Fae (new bg image)
• Changeling: The Dreaming
• Dark Ages: Inquisitor
• Hunter: The Reckoning
• Demon: The Fallen (three houses)
• Kindred of the East
• Mummy: The Resurrection

Altered symbols:

• Changeling: The Lost courts were done up full-colour by Elfteiroh.
• Changeling: The Lost seemings had been bad shapes, and are now darker for easier viewing.
• Changeling: The Dreaming replaced Arkane's images with the official ones wherever possible.
• Vampire: The Masquerade. Many clans/bloodlines were based on low-quality gifs. I made or acquired new high-quality images to base them off of. Specifically: Assamites, Brujah, Followers of Set, Gangrel, Giovanni, Lasombra, Malkavian, Nosferatu, Ravnos, Toreador, Tremere, Tzimisce, Ventrue, Ghouls, Caitiff, Daughters of Cacophony, Gargoyles, Harbingers of Skulls, Malkavian antitribu, Nagaraja, Nosferatu antitribu, Ravnos antitribu, Salubri, Salubri antitribu, Samedi, Toreador antitribu, Tremere antitribu, Ventrue antitribu, "Prince".

---

Because the official chats will be closing soon, I've added a lot of new Digichat icon packages for people to grab for their own fan-based Digichat chat rooms. Also made sure that the existing packages were updated with the most recent version of all the icons I have. Just look for the download link at the top of each page.

For all your WOD mashup needs.



May need a bit of retooling, but they'll stand for now.

Apparently there are still people who read this community.

Well, as many of you probably know, Wolfspoor was down for a while; I didn't see the point in continuing Wolfspoor as a news site when WW itself is doing a fairly admirable job these days, with the site redesign in 2004. I had a cryptic message indicating that something exciting was around the corner. Regrettably that never happened.

So for now, with a lack of anything else to do, Wolfspoor's mostly going to be a site for forum avatars. Mostly White Wolf avatars, but I'm going to be adding others, as I find things that interest me. There's already a Star Trek section, for example.

Stuff I don't think I've mentioned here is that I've got a fancy new PHP script going, which means you I don't need to create predetermined file sizes. All new images are created at 120x120, but you can resize them to anything you want. Anything bigger will probably look like crap, but smaller sizes (100x100, 50x50, 73x73, whatever) look just fine.

For those of you running DigiChat sites, many sections also have a Digichat link at the top. I've created optimized 24x24 gif files, which look damn good if I say so myself. Immortal Vigilance is using them as shown ( below the cut )

I've also slowly been adding higher-res graphics, updating some of the older 100x100 and even 80x80 images I have up. I've also added new avatars to existing sections (like the Disparates on the Mage: The Sorcerers Crusade page) and new sections entirely (like Ars Magica).

I'm going to see about adding an option to change the background on the fly to lighter, darker, or a patterned background so people can more easily see how a given avatar will look on different backgrounds, with the transparencies.

If there's anything you'd like to see added or updated, let me know.

Got the new and improved avatar page up. In addition to the new icons available, it's possible to view avatars at 120x120 (WW forum-sized), 100x100 (LJ-sized), 80x80, 60x60, 50x50 and 24x24 (Digichat sized).

Note that the 24x24 Digichat size won't actually work for Digichat, which accepts GIFs, not PNGs. But it's a good way of previewing and seeing how distinct an icon can be at that size.

And if you want, you can just edit the URL to display icons in whatever size you want. Want something which is 70x70? No problem...
Change this:
http://ianw.wolf-spoor.org/avatars.php?icontype=General&iconsize=120
to this:
http://ianw.wolf-spoor.org/avatars.php?icontype=General&iconsize=70

And yes, it dynamically renders the images at the requested size, so if you right-click and Save As, you'll get the image at that size. I'm not just stretching or compressing it with HTML, here, this is much fancier. (:

So WolfSpoor is back online.

Unfortunately, if you visit, you may notice that the site sort of... well... doesn't work. At all.

Interestingly enough, Continuing the Continuum, which (by and large) uses the exact same files, is fine, while WolfSpoor proper is not. So I figure the DDoS attack fucked up the site theme that I use for WolfSpoor. So I'm going to have to fiddle with that to make it functional again.

I'm back. I confirmed with my host that it is, in fact, a DDoS attack. He un-suspended my account for two minutes and the server usage immediately spiked.

While it was back up, he was able to check server stats... in the list of top 10 browsers, "? Unknown" was the top of the list with 125568 hits. Same thing with with the top 10 operating systems: "Unknown" has 10k more hits than Windows does.

So yeah, this isn't regular traffic. I'm under an attack from an unknown party for an unknown reason.

It's probably just a random attack, although I find it suspicious that it's so close to the attack on WW's site. I actually updated my software in the days following the attack on WW, so it's unlikely that they're able to get anything. Besides, since I don't sell anything, there's no personally identifiable information such as street addresses or credit card information for them to get. If it's a random attack, then they have no way of knowing that.

This won't last forever. I have no idea how long it will last, but sooner or later the attackers will get tired and stop trying. In the meantime, I'll continue to use this journal for both site updates and occasionally WolfSpoor's regular news items.

I got the following email:

( December 19th Issues )

But wait, there's more:
( Hey Ian )

So either some big webportal reporting on the WW hack has linked to WolfSpoor, or WolfSpoor itself (as a very visible WW fan site) has gotten hit. Suck.

I love doing these. Changeling's tough because of the stained-glass look, but the rest, I'm happy with.

( Changeling, Hunter, Mage )

Been a while since I've updated this thing.

As you may have noticed, the front page was, for a while, screwing up the display of news. Only the top two items were displaying, and the other eight weren't. So I took the opportunity to upgrade PostNuke and kept it as a downgraded theme for a while. I've put the regular theme back up for now, and it seems to work okay. Although the forums are still teh suck.

I'm working out a new theme, with which I'm going to do a sort of relaunch of the site. I'm opening most of the functionality of the site so that anyone can add, modify and delete stuff. The site will be much more user-driven which will hopefully make it closer to how I always envisioned the site would be. We'll get there.

Anyhow. The site will have random rotating banner dealies. ( Check out some previews... )

I'm hoping to have one for each game line, eventually. Contributions are accepted, although they have to be 468x150.

It's been three years since I opened WolfSpoor to the public.

Thanks for being a part of it, everyone!

(Crossposted to wolfspoor_news)

The White Wolf Wiki could use your help.

Here's a list of today's top 20 most-needed articles, in terms of how many other articles link to them. Have something to contribute, even if it's just a single sentence? Please do so. Any content is better than no content.

1. Vampire: The Requiem Rulebook (51 links)
2. Adventure! Core Rules (42 links)
3. Aberrant Core Rules (hardcover) (38 links)
4. Teragen (29 links)
5. Aberrant: Teragen (28 links)
6. Michael Daemon Donighal (23 links)
7. World of Darkness: Storytelling System Rulebook (18 links)
8. Aberrant: Project Utopia (15 links)
9. Garou (13 links)
10. Whitley Styles (11 links)
11. Fair Folk (11 links)
12. 1900c (10 links)
13. Quantum (10 links)
14. Proxy (10 links)
15. Epoch 4 (AOS) (9 links)
16. Jake Stefokowski (9 links)
17. Triton Foundation (9 links)
18. Inspired (9 links)
19. 2103 (TU) (9 links)
20. Psi Order (9 links)

Some of you may have noticed that there's been a distinct lack of news updates over the last month or so. This is due to various reasons, chief of which is that I don't have much time for updates any more. A lot of my attention is on filling out the White Wolf Wiki.

I was hoping that users would submit news regardless, and all I'd have to do is approve them. Actually, I was hoping this would be the case when I started the site nearly three years back. But this hasn't happened.

Don't worry, I'm not going anywhere. I'm just going to put things more in your hands. I'm not going to rely on you for stories, and you're not going to have to rely on me for them either.

I've opened up administration permissions. Now all registered users have suitable permission to add their own news items on the front page. I don't have to do a thing. Likewise, you also have access to edit a story once it's up.

( Read more... )

Please don't abuse these new tools, or they'll be removed. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have about anything.

The WSO library is back up.

From my POV, however, I'm going to have to dig into all the files and edit them. The developer has added the publication date and product code fields that I used to the module, but hasn't fully implemented them. So I need manually add the fields back in so I can edit them accordingly. Dark Tales and Disturbing Legends was moved up unexpectedly by a couple of weeks, so it's coming out Monday. I can't update to reflect that until I've edited all the appropriate files.

So it's functional, just not fully functional. (:

This morning I uploaded the most recent files for the books module, which powers our library. Unfortunately, it looks like the upgrade function is busted, so the library's temporarily unavailable.

I've sent an email off to the developer, so hopefully I'll be able to fix it soon.

Ironically, just yesterday someone noticed the Mage info I had posted in there, so there's a huge thread going on on RPGnet about it. So in the meantime, I direct people to mageawakening. I'll repost the entry in there.

Hey, all. Long time no post.

I've got the "new releases" block I'm sure you're all by now familiar with. It displays the last batch of releases as well as the next releases due out.

I've added a block called "upcoming releases" which is pretty much the same as new releases, but modified. It goes through the books database and displays ALL the products which I have that haven't been released yet, sorted by date. Obviously, the further ahead the date, the less accurate it will be. But I do make the effort to update it periodically to remain as accurate as possible.

The only problem is... it's big. I put it at the bottom of the right-hand blocks so it doesn't get in the way of anything else.

I'm looking at finding out a way to customize the blocks so that certain blocks (like upcoming releases) will only appear at certain times... like if you're looking through the books module. But it doesn't look like the Xanthia templating engine's capable of doing that quite yet.

So I leave it up to you... should I leave it there, or take it down? Is it useful enough that it's worth keeping around, or should I just keep it in my back pocket until I'm able to limit when it's displayed?

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

A question for you priveledged few who pay attention to this community...

What sort of additions would you like to see on WolfSpoor? I'm talking in terms of functionality rather than something else.

Fr'ex, I've been vaguely thinking of a classifieds or auction module, for people who want to buy or sell their own stuff.

Or a personals module, both for gamers looking for others to play games with and for gamers to hook up for relationship purposes.

Maybe some sort of gallery module, for people who want to display their own art.

Thoughts?

Our calendar of events is back up and running. For a few months now, it has existed in a state of semi-functionality... you could check up on all the items already added, but you couldn't see the details, and I couldn't add anything new. Well, I could, some of the time, but editing and deleting stuff was out of the question.

And the calendar block screwed up and the rest of the page wouldn't load, rendering the entire website useless if the block was active.

Well, I got the latest version (technically a test version, but I don't care at this point). Everything's running smoothly once more. If there are any items you'd like me to add, feel free to let me know.