Hey folks,

Just a heads up that I've been working on breaking out poetry, roleplays, etc. out into their own areas, as per the poetry feedback/survey I had up here in the Pub a few months ago. I spent the better part of the Easter long weekend writing scripts to migrate existing poems, roleplays, writing exercises, plays, screenplays, song lyrics, and non-fiction out of the main stories area and into their own larger sections.

This should alleviate a lot of the concerns folks have had about not being able to find certain types of writing among all of the other stuff on the site. Now, people who are particularly interested in reading only prose, or poetry, etc., will be able to filter out the rest of the content easily.

The "Stories" menu in your navigation will go away, being replaced by a new "Read" menu. This new menu will house links to browse various types of writing, and some of the stuff that's already in the Stories menu right now.

This is an interim change until I'm ready to launch the new site design, but it's something I needed to change anyway, so I figured I may as well the architectural changes live on the site so you guys can start using it earlier. Some stuff may not be perfect, but I'll be revamping a lot of it in the new design, so it'll be fine as-is for now.

The new breakdown will be as follows:
- Stories
- Poetry
- Writing Exercises (including Roleplays, and a number of new categories)
- Other (which encompasses pretty much all non-fiction, as well as screenplays, plays, and song lyrics)

This is a pretty big deal in that I've migrated all of the existing non-prose content out of the stories area and I've had to re-categorize a lot of it. I've tried to maintain most of the original categories for stuff I've migrated, within the new areas, but some of those old categories just don't exist outside of the Stories area. This means that some works will just fall under "uncategorized" within their new respective areas, and will need to be manually re-categorized by the authors. Not a big deal, and I've managed to maintain a lot of the original info, but you may find that some of your poems (etc.) need to be re-categorized appropriately after I push these changes on the server.

In terms of writing, both standard and addventure formats are still accepted in all areas. This won't change for now, although I may add some new options within the poetry category, and there will be some new features for managing characters in collaborative stories and roleplays at some point down the road too. I'm just not ready to do that quite yet. :)

The only real change to writing right now will be that you'll have the option to select either Story, Poem, Writing Exercise, or Other when you post a new piece of writing, and the category lists will update as needed. That was a mandatory change, once I split stuff up into super-categories.

As it stands, I still have a few hours of work to do before I can launch these changes on the site (and when I do, I'll need to take the site down for an hour or so to migrate all of the existing stories to the proper new areas.) So... you can probably look for this update to hit the server sometime before this weekend. If I can manage it earlier, I will, but I doubt it'll be before Wednesday night at the absolute earliest.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask. I'll be posting a bit blog update about it once the changes go live, though, explaining how it all works.

Cheers,
-nick

@Burnthestars Well, the update doesn't really have much to do with browsers. I develop the site in the latest Firefox release, so I haven't seen any problems there.. you may want to take a look at any plugins you're running and see if they could be affecting things. I'm not sure what you mean by "the pages don't load right", but I haven't seen anything amiss in Firefox 3.6.

As to Chrome - I don't test that one as much, and I know there are some issues, but unless they're huge, I'll probably wait until the site redesign goes live before address issues there. It's a very small percentage of our user base so I have to prioritize stuff that affects everyone ahead of it. :|

@Burnthestars Looks like you're not getting the site's main stylesheet at all there. I'm not sure what could be preventing it from loading, but you might want to try clearing your browser cache in Firefox. Here's instructions on how to do that:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/How+to+clear+the+cache

That's definitely not an issue with the site, though. :/

@Elemental The new "Read" page will show a selection of the latest posts overall, and eventually the new homepage will show you recommended reading. There will be other spots to just see everything overall.

@Burnthestars Glad to hear it. :)

Okay, back to the topic at hand - any other questions?

@FogCat I'm trying to keep stuff that could potentially have its own dedicated area in the "Other" category for now. Hence lyrics, plays, and screenplays are in there, as well as non-fiction. Eventually they may get their own areas, depending on popularity. Poetry and Stories are pretty clean as it is, so I don't want to start mixing them up with content that could debatably be in other areas anymore.