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El-Hazard Online / Major site overhaul for El-Hazard's 15th anniversary
« on: May 24, 2010, 06:33:36 pm »
In order to celebrate the El-Hazard's 15th anniversary EHOL was completely renovated. Therefore, if everything goes according to plan, you should see a lot of new stuff on the 26/05/2010!
This was something that started with the forum upgrade carried out by Rob and was promised some time ago, but it took longer than expected for two reasons:
Regarding the latter, EHOL grown a lot thanks to the generosity of Jason Bertovich (Makoto) and Aaron Ziegler (Spanner). They co-authored a fantastic site called The Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard: The Magnificent world (some of you may remember it, as it used to rival, in a jokingly way, with EHOL), hosted on Geocities. However, after Geocities' shutdown they generously let the content of their site to be ported to EHOL and so it lives on. The main challenge of the merge was that some content was redundant. Therefore, there was considerable effort to maintain things coherent.
Besides the new content, thee main difference between “old” EHOL and “new” EHOL is that the latter is now powered by MediaWiki, instead of a custom Perl-CGI engine.
Despite the conversion to MediaWiki, the EHOL’s interface and decoration was kept as similar as possible to the old one. The skin used still has some minor graphical bugs (if you run EHOL in Firefox/Opera/Safari), but they will be addressed over time.
It should be noted that the site isn’t intended to work as a wiki per se: The anonymous editing and registration are disabled, as well as the toolbox and talk pages. The reason for using MediaWiki is to make the life of the editors easier. With MediaWiki is much easier to upgrade and upload content, correct text errors, etc. Let’s face it, EHOL doesn’t have the user base it had a few years ago (which is understandable), and therefore on the one hand, it has to be managed in an efficient way and on the other hand, if it had public registration it’d be easily vandalized (due to the lack of full time maintainers).
This conversion allowed EHOL to gain new features:
Some of these pages are uncompleted:
These will be uploaded in the upcoming weeks, as they weren’t done in time for the 15th anniversary.
We do hope you enjoy the new EHOL and are looking forward to hearing from you!
This was something that started with the forum upgrade carried out by Rob and was promised some time ago, but it took longer than expected for two reasons:
- lack of time (all pages had to be recoded semi-manually);
- a lot of new content (100+ pages) was included (see changes bellow).
Regarding the latter, EHOL grown a lot thanks to the generosity of Jason Bertovich (Makoto) and Aaron Ziegler (Spanner). They co-authored a fantastic site called The Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard: The Magnificent world (some of you may remember it, as it used to rival, in a jokingly way, with EHOL), hosted on Geocities. However, after Geocities' shutdown they generously let the content of their site to be ported to EHOL and so it lives on. The main challenge of the merge was that some content was redundant. Therefore, there was considerable effort to maintain things coherent.
Besides the new content, thee main difference between “old” EHOL and “new” EHOL is that the latter is now powered by MediaWiki, instead of a custom Perl-CGI engine.
Despite the conversion to MediaWiki, the EHOL’s interface and decoration was kept as similar as possible to the old one. The skin used still has some minor graphical bugs (if you run EHOL in Firefox/Opera/Safari), but they will be addressed over time.
It should be noted that the site isn’t intended to work as a wiki per se: The anonymous editing and registration are disabled, as well as the toolbox and talk pages. The reason for using MediaWiki is to make the life of the editors easier. With MediaWiki is much easier to upgrade and upload content, correct text errors, etc. Let’s face it, EHOL doesn’t have the user base it had a few years ago (which is understandable), and therefore on the one hand, it has to be managed in an efficient way and on the other hand, if it had public registration it’d be easily vandalized (due to the lack of full time maintainers).
This conversion allowed EHOL to gain new features:
- Feeds integration – you can now subscribe two feeds: one for the recent changes in the site content and another for new forum posts (that started working when Rob upgraded the forum);
- IE8 Web Slices (WebChunks in Firefox) support – the navigation sidebar can be made into a Web Slice, which allows you to access EHOL’s main menu easily;
- Thumbnails are generated dynamically, which increases their overall quality;
- YouTube video integration at the Goodies/Media section;
- ISBN search. It’s possible to search an El-Hazard book on select library databases using its ISBN (already provided by us in the book’s page);
- New introduction section (from Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard), featuring locales and characters description, as well as a lot more information about El-Hazard;
- New Radio Dramas guides/summaries (from Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard and Hitoshi Doi);
- New Books and Comics (from Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard);
- New Cards and Trinkets (at the goodies section - from Wanderers' Guide to El-Hazard).
Some of these pages are uncompleted:
- The soundtracks section is missing some of the cover scans. This is mainly due to the fact that the old scans were from SonMay/EverAnime (i.e. bootlegs). However, we now have access to the originals, so they need to be scanned and uploaded;
- The books section is missing the books scans;
- The Manga and Comics section is also uncompleted (some pages and all book scans);
- Some images are also missing in the goodies section.
These will be uploaded in the upcoming weeks, as they weren’t done in time for the 15th anniversary.
We do hope you enjoy the new EHOL and are looking forward to hearing from you!
) cheaper Region 1 NTSC DVDs of the OVAs.
) the OVA special edition box.
(there aren't many Hanken Cels from OVA2 around).
