Site Cleanup, New Features, and Hiring Staff

It has been quite some time since I’ve made an update around these parts. For those of you who do not recognize me, I am your humble server administrator and programmer. What do I do? I’m the guy that keeps this place online and has been covering most of our server bills.

Anyways, because of the overwhelming display of support we received from you guys in the form of donations to cover ZI’s unholy hosting costs, I spent a good deal of time this weekend reprogramming many aspects of the site. If you saw pages randomly breaking, that was likely me in the middle of work. Things don’t look much different, but a lot of bloat was removed from ZI’s code, which equates to slightly faster load times for the viewers. Huzzah!

However, there are a handful of new changes on the frontend for you guys that I would like to introduce:

• Lightbox: With all new entries going this point forwards, clicking on an image thumbnail will open the full version overlaid in the browser window, without sending you away from the page you are trying to read. Go ahead, try it on the one above!
• Retooled Comments Area: Due to an obscene amount of spam we have been receiving, I rewrote the comments module. Not only does it load cleaner, but the “Preview Comment” mode works now, and we have enabled reCaptcha to hopefully hold spam-bots at bay.
• Search Engine: If you would kindly glance to the top of the menu to the right, you will notice a new search bar. Since there is getting to be an obscene amount of content and articles on the site now, the Search bar will help you find things that much easier.
• Cleaner Archives: The Archives are cleaned up, and display articles in a similar manner to the new search engine, allowing you to quickly scan titles and excerpts from the articles without having to scroll forever to get to the next article. Furthermore, all of our articles are now findable from the Archives page, versus the “20-most-recent” setup we had previously.
• Clickable News Headlines: We noticed through one of our statistics tools that lots of people click on our news headlines, even though they didn’t point anywhere… until now! Clicking headlines on the homepage, archives pages and search results pages now sends you to the full article.

That said, Nate said he had some brief announcements to make as well, so I’m handing this off to him now:

(Nathan) Hey folks, I’m that guy that you see around these parts daily either bringing you news, Spirit Tracks content, or providing some thought-provoking articles. Of course, you all already know this. I am happy to see Dennis take some time to clean up around these parts; it was desperately needed. Along with all of what was already said: The URL’s to all of our game pages and game content have changed. Now, they are much more user friendly and search friendly. So if you had any of those pages bookmarked (such as the up and coming Spirit Tracks Walkthrough page) you will want to be sure to update your bookmarks.

Along with that comes a search for a few more people to join our ranks. We are not just looking for anyone however, but rather people to fill a few select ranks:

• Video Editor: Our local video editor, Ilmari Arnkil (Uncle Meat), has retired from the staff. His contributions in the various aspects of the site will be sorely missed, with his mad video editing skills possibly being the biggest lost. . We are in need of someone to fill this role for our future video projects which include listings, video walkthroughs, among several other “secret” projects to be revealed at a later date. If interested, please contact us.
• Fan Artist: There are a lot of reasons we need artists, but none is more pressing then the current request to help us form and create our Spirit Tracks content. We need everything from enemy and character art to bosses and items. We even plan to use some of the art in our walkthroughs. You can find out more in this thread on our forums, or feel free to use our contact form.
• Contact Us Page: I have already linked it a couple times, but we now have a nice contact form to get a hold of the webmasters of ZeldaInformer. If you have any questions, feedback, or find any broken content on the site… this is the place to let us know.
• Submit News: We have also added a Submit News form. As you can tell, ZeldaInformer is one of the premier news providers on the net for Zelda, and with how busy we are sometimes we can overlook things. Let us know about entertaining stuff that pertains to Zelda. Whether it’s a new article, a funny video, or even some nice fanwork, be sure to use our submit news link located on the right navigation under menu.

That’s it for today guys. Stay tuned as we have some special new features coming your way in the next few months.