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[Flintlock]

Hmm, I'm wondering if it might be better to leave the related article link out altogether, or (if possible, and not too much work) have it as a manual field that the author can set. Otherwise, we will probably end up with the related articles not really being related at all. If we decide to keep it in there, I think it might be worth skipping the "medium" and "small" articles, but if the article is on the list below, it's not a big deal to repeat it at the top.

 

[Fangu]

Update:

What's left of the updated version of the site, to launch a semi-variant, based on TwentyTwelve in accordance to Flint's new design:

MAJORS

• Edit the single post pages to look somewhat similar to the current ones (it now looks like http://fhtagn.thelifestream.net/non...iew-final-fantasy-unlimited-episodes-5-and-6/, needs basic edit of font sizes and colours - done in an hour with Flint on the line)
• Check Shademp's articles (thanks to his HTML they're looking a lot better than I expected)
• Forum threads (output latest for each FF category)
• Copy one of the latest Weekly Roundups from the current server to fhtagn to see how it looks

MINORS (not critical, should be fixed sooner or later)

• Design of comment fields on posts
• Add or remove stuff (user names, etc) in the forum thread pulls
• Custom Archives page (http://fhtagn.thelifestream.net/category/final-fantasy-vii/ etc)

I WOULD ENCOURAGE ANYONE TO LOOK AT http://fhtagn.thelifestream.net; compare it to the current site to look for major differences.

 

[Lex]

^Your link to fhtagn is broken

I actually think that looks awesome, I like it all so far.

 

[Carlie]

It has fhtagn in its name of course it's broken.

 

[Fangu]

^Your link to fhtagn is broken

I actually think that looks awesome, I like it all so far.

Oops, fixed!

Thanks for feedback

Suggestion: Since some of the categories can be a bit long ("10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS" is a perfectly decent category title imo), I suggest we break the "category and title only" article list so that instead of

10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS Cait Sith Character Profile p. 60-63

it's

10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS
Cait Sith Character Profile p. 60-63

etc.


Oh, and the two "boxes" at the bottom present on today's site is to be removed, of course

 

[Flintlock]

Suggestion: Since some of the categories can be a bit long ("10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS" is a perfectly decent category title imo), I suggest we break the "category and title only" article list so that instead of

10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS Cait Sith Character Profile p. 60-63

it's

10TH ANNIVERSARY ULTIMANIA TRANSLATIONS
Cait Sith Character Profile p. 60-63

etc.

Sure, it can't hurt to see how that looks I'd probably add some extra space above each category name so that the line-pairs are distinct from one another.

I don't know when I'm going to have time to be "on the line", by the way. Some weeknight early next week might work, but I'm going to England after that, so it could be a while.

 

[Lex]

I'd like to start a discussion about our "Highlights" links. I think the list needs a bit of a re-jig. I was going to replace the "LTD is over" article with Tres's "Dilly Dally Shilly Shally", but I see that's already been done, so thanks to whoever did that

Anyway, I'm not so sure the ACC commentary should be there. Also, what do you guys think about removing "Case of Tifa Audiobook" and just replacing it with a link to all the audiobooks and calling it "The Lifestream Audiobooks"?

Also "History of Deepground Revealed" - that's quite cool, but I don't know if it should be there either. I'd like to add Shademp's Toshiba DVD analysis and "Versions guide" in place of the ACC commentary and History of Deepground - that way we avoid having too many links under that section and keep it kind of fresh.

This section is obviously going to be a bit more dynamic than the others because of its nature so we should probably revisit this every now and again to make sure it doesn't become too static.

 

[Shademp]

I'd like to start a discussion about our "Highlights" links. I think the list needs a bit of a re-jig. I was going to replace the "LTD is over" article with Tres's "Dilly Dally Shilly Shally", but I see that's already been done, so thanks to whoever did that

You're quite welcome.

Anyway, I'm not so sure the ACC commentary should be there.

Depends. We want to highlight fan works, but if there is a "better" commentary out there than the ACC one, I suggest linking to that one instead.

Also, what do you guys think about removing "Case of Tifa Audiobook" and just replacing it with a link to all the audiobooks and calling it "The Lifestream Audiobooks"?

If we replace it, that means we'll have a link to the Lifestream Audiobooks on two spots on the frontpage.

CONTENT -> Fan Works -> The Lifestream Audiobooks
HIGHLIGHTS -> The Lifestream Audiobooks

The only difference is there being one step instead of two. For highlighting reasons, it may still be justified to link it twice. If it were me though I'd ask Pixel first to see if there is any particular audiobook he wants to highlight more than the others. If so, go with a link to that audiobook instead of creating a second link to all the audiobooks.

Also "History of Deepground Revealed" - that's quite cool, but I don't know if it should be there either.

If only for the reason that not all of the info in there can be confirmed any longer, then yes I agree it should not be highlighted.

I'd like to add Shademp's Toshiba DVD analysis and "Versions guide" in place of the ACC commentary and History of Deepground - that way we avoid having too many links under that section and keep it kind of fresh.

My ego naturally approves of the idea, can't deny that. Plus I spent a lot of money on the DVD.


Although I took the time to write this constructive reply about site stuffz now, I should reveal that I'm not going to be especially active on the FFVII content stuff this year. Haven't updated the Version Guide yet, simply because I don't feel the drive. Previously I had also planned to publish Unused Text Debug Room articles this year, but I won't. I'll do my best though to ensure that Part 10 and Part 11 (as they are both almost finished anyway, I just need to check if Kusabi, my translator, is available again) become published this year.

The reason being that I want to let go off the sense of responsibility I have towards the site and instead think about other things in life. The Version Guide took me 2 1/2 months to "complete" and for a portion of the work I felt relatively unhappy. I'm not "leaving" I'm just fading off into a ghost-like presence (even more-so than before).

 

[Pixel]

I've always seen Case of Tifa as a good introduction to the audiobook series, so that would be my choice if you decide to highlight one. I really dont mind what you decide.

 

[Flintlock]

To all front page authors:

Please tag your articles with the primary games they reference. If you want to add any other tags (like "Aerith"), that's up to you, but it's important to have the game in there at the very least. When I reworked the category and tag structure last year, I designed it so that tags would be games. If you look at last week's roundup, you'll see why: the top story is about Lightning Returns, and it contains a link to the Lightning Returns tag page, so anyone interested can find all our articles about it.

Thank you!

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I admit that I forget that a lot.

 

[Fangu]

<Fangu> I have a strange feeling I should work on the TLS front page
<Fangu> I have just very minor stuff to go before it's publishable
<Fangu> except fhtagn is being good old fhtagn*
(...)
<Fangu> but, I can still do some stuff - I need to double check how shademps articles look, plus takes notes on some of the css
<Fangu> so I'll do that meanwhile
(...)
<Fangu> basically the new design is for Twenty Twelve - we are currently on Twenty Eleven
<Fangu> t'was to make chances for plugin crashes fewer
<Fangu> they already released Twenty Thirteen but that's crap, so
<Fangu> anyway, the main job is adapting the CSS to match the Twenty Twelve base CSS, changing some of the functions, changing the design on the FP + making sure the rest of the CSS matches
<Fangu> I think I'm about 80% done, at least - that's not including the avatar draw from the forums, which I needed the SQL command access for
<Fangu> so now that I have that, should be able to do that as well
<Fangu> I'm just typing this here so I can copy pasta it into the thread, lawl

* currently 500'ing like a good old bitch

 

[Fangu]

Right, Yop asked in #tls today if I still need fhtagn. Referencing comment above - and fhtagn is still 500'ing, so.

What I could do is to take some of the basics I've done for the front page and slap it directly in the current site. That should be a bit of PHP only. (Still need fhtagn to not 500 though.)

I don't think I'll ever be finishing the transition to Twenty Twelve, I'll be that honest. But an in between solution with minor improvements on Twenty Eleven, I could do. (The main reason is I just can't be bothered to adapt every single manual CSS quirk on our site to Twenty Twelve. I don't think it's worth it - I'm probably being realistic when I say that it will take a long time for Twenty Eleven to be outdated. And if we ever get to that, vB will probably have died on us already.)

 

[Shademp]

One small feature I miss: Being able to mark and copy singular columns in tables.

See for example this PlayStation buttons table. In the past, one could mark one column or the other alone by holding down Ctrl (or maybe it was Alt). But that feature no longer exists. You are forced to copy the entire table all at once.

I'm not going to pressure Fangu or anyone else to re-implement this feature since it's not super-important. Just wanted to share my observation. =)

 

[Cthulhu]

I'm pretty sure you can preview a template and be able to work on it in production (i.e. on TLS' live server) without issues.

As for copying tables / columns directly, you may need to use another application; I doubt WP's editor is advanced enough. Could Excel export to HTML tables?

 

[Shademp]

Being able to copy the entire tables (walls and everything) is not desired from my end, even though it would be a cool. Maybe Excel can export to HTML tables, I dunno.


Being able to mark and copy the content within the tables is what I'm interested in. This way, say for example if somebody on this forum wants to discuss the content presented in a table, they can easily mark and copy column A and then the same with column B. As it stands, the columns will be mixed in a copy-paste and look weird. For example if I copy-paste this first table from Unused Text Part 7.

{Aeris} AERITH Aerith
&#8220;He loved women, a real lady&#8217;s man. &#12300;&#22899;&#12398;&#23376;&#12364;&#22823;&#22909;&#12365;&#12394;&#12516;&#12484;&#12384;&#12387;&#12383;&#12363;&#12425;&#12397;&#12290; He was the type who loved women.
He probably found someone else&#8230;&#8221; &#12288;&#12393;&#12371;&#12363;&#12391;&#30693;&#12426;&#21512;&#12387;&#12383;&#23376;&#12392; He probably went off with someone
&#12288;&#20210;&#33391;&#12367;&#12394;&#12387;&#12385;&#12419;&#12387;&#12383;&#12398;&#12424;&#12289;&#12365;&#12387;&#12392;&#12301; he met somewhere.


But like I said before, it's not a pressing issue.

 

[Lex]

Kudos to Tres for the article. It made me laugh

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

I'm a week late on the follow-up article with stuff from the 25th Memorial Ultimania Vol. 2, but I'll have that up tonight. There will also be one more small 25th MU article to come, hopefully (again) within a week.

And that will resolve all my Ultimania commitments.

 

[Lex]

Kudos to Shademp for his article on the magazine scans <3

Tres can I just mention (should have done so before) that your 2:1 image looks unprofessional and you should use something else if an image is going to look as stretched as that if at all possible - it's a problem because this isn't the first time. If it's an issue of finding an image or editing it then I'm happy to do something for you in future, just let me know. No point changing it this time since it'll be gone after another few articles, but just for future reference. Also the title of your article, while inventive and cool, doesn't give any inkling as to the contents and contains no keywords, which is a big problem for hits if people are searching for FF or FFVII stuff through google/ google news.

Don't mean to be a dick but I think we have to watch these things. Also I love you <3

 

[Shademp]

Didn't remember until now to link to the magazines in our FFVII Content Page. Silly me.

EDIT: On the topic of frontpage images, I did the weird choice of cropping away the bottom of "FINAL FANTASY VII" away in my image because that part had the Dengeki watermark. So I cropped that instead of the top in order to get an image where width = height times 2.

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

Kudos to Shademp for his article on the magazine scans <3

Tres can I just mention (should have done so before) that your 2:1 image looks unprofessional and you should use something else if an image is going to look as stretched as that if at all possible - it's a problem because this isn't the first time. If it's an issue of finding an image or editing it then I'm happy to do something for you in future, just let me know. No point changing it this time since it'll be gone after another few articles, but just for future reference. Also the title of your article, while inventive and cool, doesn't give any inkling as to the contents and contains no keywords, which is a big problem for hits if people are searching for FF or FFVII stuff through google/ google news.

Don't mean to be a dick but I think we have to watch these things. Also I love you <3

With the picture, I honestly forgot that you're good at these things.

After tinkering and adjusting for about an hour, I was just ready to post the thing.

With the title, I thought Google/Google News would scan the whole article and derive an excerpt? If not, oops.

Also, I love you too. <3

 

[Lex]

Google does scan the whole thing in a web search, but not in a news search for whatever reason. I know it's difficult but we should try to include buzzwords or key search phrases like "Final Fantasy" or "FFVII" in our titles but we also need to keep them short (two lines) so it's a bit of a pain.

Also, google shows the excerpt from wordpress articles so we should include as detailed and concise a summary as possible, limited to 3 lines. Tweet sized if you will

It just gets us more hits. Something else we should consider is promoting the site through N4G which Carlie has been mentioning to me for quite some time - it's a gaming news aggregate and it kind of super promotes the first original news source/ article for hits.

Since a great deal of our stuff is completely original it'd help to catapult us up there in terms of hits, comments and maybe even new members, so it's something we should get into the practice of doing once an article goes up. I can look into it then write a tutorial or something, or we can have one or two people dedicated to doing it for every new article that goes up.

 

[Lex]

On the back of what I just said: Shademp, I've edited your excerpt to reflect the article a bit better. Originally it said "The Difference a Year in Production Made" which is absolutely fine if you know the content, but I just added "To FFVII" to the end, I hope you don't mind.

In addition, we need to start using SEO, because it's a keyword search algorithm and it works really well in searches. If all the writers could scroll down when you're in the edit function for an article you can see "all in one SEO pack blah blah" - basically just fill that form out when you're writing an article and it'll appear more often in searches.

It shows you a preview snippet of what it'll look like in a search engine - basically using this function you can tell it what you want it to display, and it actually gives you feedback on what's best to use buzzword-wise.

I must sound like I'm in desperation to get hits, but I know we don't really care about hits all that much. It's simply that I think it's good for the site and the community and it'll boost interest and activity

 

[The Twilight Mexican]

We could just include "Final Fantasy XV developer" in every title. =P

 

[Lex]

but we are not Shui Ta

Actually I haven't seen him up to his usual antics recently. Maybe he's been fired. One can dream <3