::::[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 18:09, 11 September 2007 (EDT)
::::[[User:ShadowWolf|ShadowWolf]] 18:09, 11 September 2007 (EDT)
=== {{Separator|k|Old News}} ===
=== {{Separator|k|Old News}} ===
Ever looked at the "Blind Pig" universe and decide not to write a story in it because there was some facet that you didn't like? Well, [[User:ShadowWolf|myself]], [[User:Bryan|BD]], [[User:JonBuck|Jon Buck]], [[User:Cubist|Cubist]] and [[User:MichaelBard|Michael Bard]] decided to do something about the sometimes annoying holes in the TBP universe. (Most notably is the consistent violation of the Conservation of Mass/Energy and the broken 'neo-luddite' nature of the world that van Sciver didn't have in place but others have later written into the setting)
Ever looked at the "Blind Pig" universe and decide not to write a story in it because there was some facet that you didn't like? Well, [[User:ShadowWolf|myself]], [[User:Bryan|BD]], [[User:JonBuck|Jon Buck]], [[User:Cubist|Cubist]] and [[User:Michael Bard|Michael Bard]] decided to do something about the sometimes annoying holes in the TBP universe. (Most notably is the consistent violation of the Conservation of Mass/Energy and the broken 'neo-luddite' nature of the world that van Sciver didn't have in place but others have later written into the setting)
Anyway, we set to work on modernizing the setting—bringing the science up to date and fixing the holes. The result is the '[[Pig and Whistle]]' universe—a version of the TBP universe stripped of the morass of the history that universe has and corrected to be more realistic. If the setting interests you, there is a 'quick and dirty' intro to the setting called '[[User:ShadowWolf/Little Things|Little Things]]'. And if, after reading that (in my own opinion) horrid hack of a story, you are still intrigued, then write away!
Anyway, we set to work on modernizing the setting—bringing the science up to date and fixing the holes. The result is the '[[Pig and Whistle]]' universe—a version of the TBP universe stripped of the morass of the history that universe has and corrected to be more realistic. If the setting interests you, there is a 'quick and dirty' intro to the setting called '[[User:ShadowWolf/Little Things|Little Things]]'. And if, after reading that (in my own opinion) horrid hack of a story, you are still intrigued, then write away!
Revision as of 17:12, 11 September 2007
Shifti is growing exponentially. Already this month we've hit almost 200M of bandwidth use and over 500 unique visitors. If this keeps up there may be a problem with the connection serving the site won't be able to keep up. However, there is no need to worry - Shifti is not going to be moving, adding advertising or asking for money to join. Why? Because until it becomes clear that the growth trend is going to continue I see no need to do anything drastic. Even then there is an option that has worked for other sites - donations. So if Shifti keeps up the wild, rampant growth look forward to seeing the Donations page filled out so that a separate server and much higher bandwidth hosting can be paid for to keep the site running.
Ever looked at the "Blind Pig" universe and decide not to write a story in it because there was some facet that you didn't like? Well, myself, BD, Jon Buck, Cubist and Michael Bard decided to do something about the sometimes annoying holes in the TBP universe. (Most notably is the consistent violation of the Conservation of Mass/Energy and the broken 'neo-luddite' nature of the world that van Sciver didn't have in place but others have later written into the setting)
Anyway, we set to work on modernizing the setting—bringing the science up to date and fixing the holes. The result is the 'Pig and Whistle' universe—a version of the TBP universe stripped of the morass of the history that universe has and corrected to be more realistic. If the setting interests you, there is a 'quick and dirty' intro to the setting called 'Little Things'. And if, after reading that (in my own opinion) horrid hack of a story, you are still intrigued, then write away!
{{title}} has been updated—you can now specify a list of "coauthors" instead of (or in addition to) the 'author' parameter. Though using coauthors means that you'll need to add the links yourself, it also allows for doing things like acknowledging the illustrator and such. And there is a brand-new template you can use—{{byline}}. TheByline Template is meant to be used instead of the Title Template on pages in the main namespace. Enjoy!
Had a power failure that took the server oflfine momentarily while I was asleep. Unfortunately this meant that the rather unstable hack I had to implement to bring my setup inline with what the ISP expects had to be re-established. Of course, I have no idea when the problem happened or how long the server was offline, but from some circumstantial evidence it looks like it was around two hours. The only way that I could correct this would be to coloc the server, and I do not have the money to do that. If there are no complaints I'll be setting up a pay-pal account to accept donations to make the co-location possible and actually happen. Of course this means that Shifti will be entirely donation driven, but I'm sure that the community will help us keep it online. Any comments can be made on my talk page or on this pages talk page.
Lots of interesting stuff has been going on behind the scenes here at Shifti. With the recent explosion of stories (we've passed 100) the administrators have begun adding "Transformation Type" categories. While they aren't mandatory – the category could give away a twist in the story – it is going to be one of the main ways for people to find stories on the site. Another bit of news is that I (ShadowWolf) have added the "ShadowWolf's Pack" as an alternate to Bryan's Picks for finding high quality stories. It has three sections — a rated section, where I will rank the stories from 1 to 4 stars; an unrated section, where I have been putting stories that rate more than four stars and a small section where I'm highlighting the first one or two stories from authors new to Shifti who show great promise.
The template {{part}} has been deprecated and is planned to be removed as soon as the admins get around to removing it from use. The reason is that Bryan discovered a subtle feature of the MediaWiki parser that would generate links into sections of a template if the template used the header markup === text ===. Since {{part}} does this, it was creating a subtle breakage of the sections in articles.
In all seriousness we are trying to make Shifti a great place to find stories. To do this we have been developing the policies regarding categorization as we go along, such that, recently, a change was made to institute Category:Stories by author so that stories are sorted by author and changed the original Category:Author so that it is a place to find a list of authors that have contributed stories, so you can find a list of all stories by a given author.
Old News 
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Old News 
