RAVENNA STUFF TO DO

- Make those Ravenna complimentary plaques already.

- Write that Ostrogoth Intro already.

- Write those articles already - could it be that I'm intimidated at writing really serious stuff about Ravenna and Theodoric?

- Open the "BALNEA GOTHORUM" - forbidden dream that nobody knows about - and with good reason!

- Get Iunia and Her Majesty to finish their accounts so I can link them somewhere as historical fiction.

- Improve bibliography with an organized list at the top of the thread.



- GENERAL STUFF TO DO

- Fix 'hoods and residences thread, add list and make complimentary Germania Resident plaque.

- Post "Wish List" article to be updated regularly. (it's ready, what does it take to post it, lazy butt?)

- Start making family plaques (some are ready too) and post in an article.

- Check out that ambassador stuff. I might be interested, if I had time and/or remembered to read what it is about. [NOT FOR SCRIBES - follow-up to check if there are Germanics interested in it]



YULE STUFF TO DO (December)

- Create shop thread in Winchester (why do I keep writing Manchester?), furnish it and start making book plaques. [DONE and DOING]

- ... and...?



GF STUFF TO DO (October)

... before the end of this weekend, because next weekend I'll be flying South (sigh). [but I survived the flight!]

- Made thread; now fill it up and decorate. [DONE - thanks to Bree]

- Decide with the others where stuff happens - try to be online tonight and/or use e-mail (weird Byzantium invention, can't say I really trust it yet). [DONE, I guess]

- Finish poem translation. [DONE - yay!]

- Blackmail Val (easy) into reading poem aloud - then ask Eirikr what the hell to do with it. [HALF DONE. Val read it. Not up yet. I can do without pestering poor Eirikr... I think.]

- Write general Wild Hunt article. [DONE. Also lots of more stuff which I however need to re-read.]

- One of us (Val or myself): write the black horse thing for Celtia. [DONE]

- Mausoleum article: touch base with KT, stay on the picturesque because he'll stay on the architectonic. Stick Mausoleum things temporarily in the relevant Ravenna thread. [NOT DONE because I'm overwhelmed with KT's genius and don't know very well how to showcase it to the fullest.]

- Are more plaques needed by any chance? [Are they?]

- It would be nice to finish the complimentary plaques for Ravenna citizens in time for GF. [Yes, it would.]

Stuffity-stuff...

Maybe it's just dumb me, but I've discovered this trick only these days, when I've had to leave scrolls to all and sundry, mostly desperate requests for help. If I need to leave a scroll to Thidrek Amaligg, say, and I don't have my Favourites because I'm at work, and I don't remember which of my personae made him a friend, and I don't want to waste time looking him up in the "Members" or "Germanics" link up in the AW masthead, there's a really easy way to write his address directly:

www.ancientworlds.net/member/Amaligg/Thidrek

The first part is probably already written in the browser's address slot. Then you just have to remember to write in "member", singular. Then the family and the name, all separated by slashes, and there you are.

Hey, don't laugh, it's a conquest, you don't know how many searches I used to make, even to find my other selves!

Updated: CHAT and HOODS. I often say "Wouldn't it be good if..." and even though most things are pretty useless or impossible, writing them down I purge them from my system. If the ideas are valid, so much for the better.

1. VERY IMPORTANT! Update the Available Features page that appears for subscribers! It does NOT say how many journal entries are available, and the number of available posts is wrong, at least for citizens (4, not 2).

2. DAILY INDEX:
- A self-refreshing main messages board.
- More posts featured on the Daily Index, 20 or 30 instead of 10: it would be easier to scroll it.
- I have a problem with the fact that under the title of each post appear links that sometimes are not very useful and take up space. For example, under a post in a group we see the thread and subthread, but not the name of the group, and it's easy to skip it if maybe it's a thread that is not much used. But I understand that this is an automatic process and it would be tricky to change it.

3. GRAMS.
- Having the number of daily grams near a person's name on the companel could give an inkling whether that person is chatting already or has exhausted his/her grams.
- PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE... A bigger gram window so that ALL incoming grams can be seen and noe get lost; and maybe a "ping" for grams, like Yahoo messages.
- The number of expended grams at the top of the gram window and not at the bottom; and a ping or a popup when one is down to the last gram+1... though this might be tricky.
- Impossibility to send grams from the Gram Log. Anyway having the button there and the text in the messages page about the option to send a gram from the person's house is misleading: this cannot be implemented because it would get around the "no gram" options selected by the receiver.

4. A "Cancel" button for journals and posts that is WELL AWAY from the "Submit" button and offers some option like "Are you sure?"

***5. WORLDS AND 'HOODS. It is not easy to see at a glance which discussions in the 'hoods are active. I wanted to respond to a post lately and could not find it anymore if not scrolling pages and pages of the Daily Index
Also, once one opens a 'hood discussion through the DI, it is hard to understand where one is at a glance, also because it has been pointed out to me that the links on top of the page (example: "Ancient Worlds > Germania > Middangeard > General Historical Discussions > The Peoples of Middangeard") can be seen only if one has Java installed.
A list of all recent posts on each world's or each 'hood's main page would be useful. Recently, Amlaidh Niafer prepared a great Guide to Celtia's Neighbourhoods" which is extremely useful. Every world should have one, and if such a thing is too large to appear on a world's main page, at least the link to it should be prominently featured, not just as "News" but as a permanent link. Maybe in place of the "featured hoods", which I never really understood - are they updated hoods, or simply beautiful hoods? It has been suggested that only one featured group would be enough, thus leaving room for links that could help hood navigation.

6. ARTICLES:
- Recent articles featured on the main message board as a quick list.
- The ability to see together all articles from a certain World. There *is* a "Library of..." box, but it's not clickable. It seems Jot might implement it in the future.

7. Some way of knowing (another "ping" or pop-up window) when I get a message at my homesite while I'm logged in, or when someone enters my chat while I'm not there.

***8. CHAT
- The option of deleting chat archives.
- An "ignore" function in chat. Or, an extreme self control that should allow chatters to NOT REPLY ABSOLUTELY to the provocations of EVIDENT TROLLS. I'm talking hypothetically here, of course... But let's suppose that someone comes into chats and kills them repeatedly with unbecoming behaviour. Now, if this person is just a misguided, clueless entity, it would be right and even desirable to try and explain to him/her how to behave, or react humorously to his/her provocations. But when, still hypothetically, there is the strong suspicion that the person is a REGULAR who is DELIBERATELY trolling the chats, in the absence of an "ignore" button, it is strongly advisable that chatters act like he/she does not exist. But all of this is purely academic, of course...

9. An editing function to insert links automatically in a post. Those who use Blogger know what I mean: you paste the link into a box and it is copied automatically into the post with "a href" etc.

10. Another name for the companel, the one that appears in the Windows lower bar when the window is minimized. If it were named "Companel-Ancient Worlds" instead of "Ancient Worlds Companel" it would be easy not to click on it by mistake while switching between windows.

11. Showing the date of a persona's joining AW or a group. It might be useful when welcoming people. I realize this is a finesse.

12. There's some bug with the Journals - you can check which members read it, but sometimes it's updated to more than 1 month ago! I guess it's a temporary bug.

13. The links "Edit stylesheet" and "Edit backgrounds" at the bottom of the home page lead both to the same page.

...MORE...

how to use old slots

When you have to put only links in a post, and no other HTML formatting, you can leave the setting to "PLAIN". So you don't have to add all the "br" and such.

Nov 29th? Anyway I'd better get out the article as soon as possible. Which article? A not entirely idle question. I was planning a piece on the sources of the Thidrekssaga, but that's BIG.

So I though, let's switch to something easier - a biography of Theodoric the Great. The Ostrogoth Curse struck immediately, because I cannot be content with sticking together a few facts, nooo, I have to psycho-analize the guy. At one point I realized it wasn't an amateur history buff digging out sources about a subject, it was Aelfwine ranting about his love/hate relationship with Theodoric in "Dragon" and making wild assumptions that yes, could have a basis in history (the Arian empire, the identity crisis, the Church plot) but that I'd have to do one heck of research to justify! Which I will do, eventually, hey, I have to if I don't want "Dragon" to be a dime novel, but not before Nov 29th!

So I had another idea. Surprise. Well, the usual esoteric topic which 3 people in the world care about, I guess, so don't hold your breath.

Although my dream is to write a very, very cool article about Ravenna for the 'hood, but I'd want it to be a travelogue of an actual visit there, with pictures taken by me, so it requires... an actual visit to Ravenna. Possibly in spring!

I bookmarked "The Crossroads" on my main page and Valeria upgraded her subscription and joined "Arachne's Web". These are groups that give answers to most of the doubts I jot down here. For example, right now I'm breaking my head on "Wanderings of the Tribes" because I'm reformatting the board titles and boards seem to move at random across the group's main page. But is it really random? Of course not! (I hope!) I seem to have discovered this:

- if someone adds a post, the board shoots to the top of the list; [UPDATE III: or maybe not]
- if the hapless editor changes formatting, the board shoots to the BOTTOM of the list.

It should be possible, therefore, to skilfully pretend to edit the boards until they are in the order I want them. Of course this will all change when droves of people will come flocking to Wanderings! Won't they? *dark Saxon glare*

UPDATE: OK, this theory seems to have crashed on... guess who... The Ostrogoths!!! They won't budge or let themselves be edited, LOL, so typical of them! Why oh why??? Stay tuned!

UPDATE II: Because if you want the title to appear in small caps you have to write it in caps, you Saxon bighead! - Random Ostrogoth

This is not a bug, it's actually quite clear if you're not a dumb Saxon. If you're chatting by gram with more than one person, two of them could gram you at once. In that case, both grams appear in the same little window which at the top has the words "You have 2 messages". If you don't read those words... you just answer to the topmost gram, close the window, lose the other one and wonder if you've said something wrong while the other person thinks the same!

In such cases I keep my Gram Log page open with the grams of the day, and refresh it when in doubt.

I had to write an article for ACTA, and it was a useful experience with a part of AW I still did not know. Being a Patron, I was able to post it in the Articles section. I went there and clicked "Write an Article". Then I threw myself recklessly in it, and the result cleared a lot of doubts in my mind.

So: if you add an article (you can do it with all the bells and whistles - HTML formatting, pictures etc, just like any post or entry) it then appears at your home under "Articles" in the Courtyard, Library and Study sections. Now that we have neighbourhoods, you can also "associate" it to a neighbourhood or a region or a city, and it shows up there too. Once it's there, you can happily link it from boards, groups etc.

I'm enquiring whether it's also possible to associate an article more generally to a specific world, so that there is a real "Library of Germania" that you can browse for Germanic topics. Another little thing I haven't worked out yet is that it seems you can't change the "Historical" label. Though there are other articles out there labelled "General", but I really could not find any tab to click.

There are still some mysteries about articles but I'll clear them slowly as I proceed writing. One thing - being precise is not always good! I named my article "Ragnarök" with the two little dots on the O and it doesn't show up in a search if you don't write it exactly that way. [UPDATE: it's enough to write the first letters to find it.] Alas, practicality is the reason why I write my name with a separate A and E, though it looks so much cooler written as it should be: Ælfwine.

I've just discovered that the link "Edit group list" in the Groups section of my home page is extremely useful. The link "Complete list" leads to the same page. You get at a glance the last 3 new posts of all groups. A lifesaver for absent-minded Saxons. I've read somewhere that you can also change the order of the groups but I can't find the place anymore.

UPDATE: you can find it here. It works.