Ooooh, it's beautiful! I haven't tried out any of the new features yet, but it sounds great. I noticed that the actual text is narrower now, to fit with the width of the pics. (Or maybe the text was always 600 pixles wide, but I never knew the exact width, and now the pics are as wide.) I looks strange to me right now, but I think that's something I'll get used to quickly and probably like when I do.

I love the "Chapters Appeared In" idea. I think I would use that a lot. Tell us if you need any help listing old chapters for characters or something like that. I'm sure there's a lot of people her who wouldn't hesitate to go through a large piece of the story and make a list of characters or chapters. Devin might take it upon himself to find all Sela, Maud and Elfleda chapters.. And Verity would do Brude, and I could do Eirik and Sigi and Malcolm.. And Alred for Cassie..

Well done!

EDIT: What a Christmas present!

Oh, and for the width of the chapter text, I have three different settings for that depending on the width of the images in the chapter. I hated how the older, smaller images were always shoved over to the left. So you weren't imagining things.

I miss the last comment on the forum link.

This is great, first on the agenda I'm going to reread all of my old posts then reread all of the posts of Sela, Maud, and Elfleda while I wait for the next chapter!

This new layout is really cool.

Thats the fun part about it. Meryt I remember my first comment when Caedwulf was born but I don't remember my second or third. This is going to be so much fun I woke up to a new Lothere layout with fun options.

Thanks Tiffany!

I'm reading my old comments and its 10 pages!

I'd wear it.

And my Team Vash shirt and leafy banner!

Edit: Tiana's wrath is hilarious!

If we have an Offical Team Vash T-Shirt it has to include Pen's quote on the back.

"Vash. He's like an emo Peter Pan."

I'd wear it.

With nerdy pride.

"You read that where? The internet? Nerd."

Another feature!

If there is still a chat, perhaps we could get a way to recruit people when they are obviously online. Or at least wave at them. It feels so odd, knowing that someone is on and you just have to stare at their name.

I think mixing all the latest comments together will be to messy. I'm having trouble remembering which comments I've read as it is, and I think I'd be more confused if it was all a big mix.

I'd like the "who's in the chat" option. I haven't been in the chat at the same time as someone else yet.

Uh... so I've been trying to avoid asking this question for a while now, because I know I sound stupid enough online as it is, but I can't seem to find the link, so... how exactly do you get to the chat?

Actually, that link doesn't forward you to the chat anymore. This link however, works for me:
http://www.lothere.com/chat/login.php

That will teach me not to test these things.

I think the plain link /chat/ should work now too.

Oh Lothere, this is beautiful! I love the leaves that overlap the banner and make it all Lothere-y!

And I read a few of Tiana's comments... I'm beginning to really look forward to her posts. They make for enjoyable reading, because you have to picture this small scotish lady who looks quite cool and collected... And then Careballs and Dante comes into the room and she punches him in the weiner.

And then the devil shows up and turns to her and says, "Get in the handbasket and lets go."

Happy new years everyone!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Her life was more than mine;
like a proud shooting-star, into the night.
She crashed through the air with a rip like a knife.

Two whole pages of Tiana's wrath! We could start a pamphlet.

That's still on the program, but I didn't realize anyone wanted it, per se.

I was working on the assign-characters-to-chapters functionality, but the bookmarking thing will be a heckuvalot easier. Maybe I will just switch priorities.

Err, if you want something, just say WANT and I will try to do it. Don't be shy. At work we have a business analyst who does the figuring-out-what-users-want part. Left to my own devices I just putter randomly about my code.

It's because you're using IE 6. When I made the new site I consciously chose not to make any special efforts to support that browser. I can't tell you how many hours I "waste" at work getting sites to work halfway-decently in IE6, but a lot of schools and government agencies still have a lot of old IE6 installations around, and that's who many of our clients are, so... I'm stuck with it at work.

But this site is supposed to be fun.

The "gray squares" problem is due to IE6's inability to support PNG images with alpha transparencies. That is, a PNG image where some of the pixels are not 100% transparent or 100% opaque (which is all you get in a GIF image with transparencies) but at various percentages in between. IE just displays everything that's less than 100% transparent as a gray pixel.

The banner image is actually a background image with another mostly-transparent PNG layered on top of it, which is how I get the little scrolly flowers to overlap the preview banner. But since IE 6 displays the scrolly image as all gray... you can't see the background at all. I suppose I could hide the little scrolly flower image for IE6, that wouldn't be much work and wouldn't degrade the experience for people with better browsers. At least you could see the preview then.

I am clueless about the smileys. Is that the smileys in the main site or on the forum? Which ones are huge?

I am not sure what you mean about the menu bars and stuff, but IE 6 has some quirks when it comes to rendering complicated layouts, so it's probably something to do with that. I don't know how I could fix that without altering the layout for everyone, and risking breaking that, and I don't want to go there. I'm just going to sit tight and wait for IE 6 to go extinct.

My diagnosis is: you obviously need a better job where they give you a 21st century browser.

The saddest part is, I work for a software engineering institute.

And they think it's a good idea for you to use IE6?

Ok, I've changed back to Safari 3 and I still can't login.

My cookies are most certainly enabled. I have no idea what's going on. What's the sad equivalent of the bunny dance?

Yep, everything you described is totally what's going on. I'm using Safari 3.2.1. I'm only accepting cookies from the sites I navigate to and I can't login to the forum or the main site. The page just reloads. I assume it's accepting my name and password and I'm still not logged in. And Firefox was work'n fine!

*Walks away, utterly confused.*

I tried that. I emptied my cache too. Oh well, Firefox seems to be working fine with everything. Maybe I'll just stick with that for now.

OMG Lothere, I figured it out and it was stoooopppiiiddd.

Ok, my laptop is aged and decrepit so the battery shuts off randomly every once in a while. It did that a few days ago and I had to turn it back on by reseting the PRAM. And when the machine re-started, it thought that it was 1969. So I reset the time and date to the actual time and date. THEN the computer did not register the adjustment but made another adjustment of its own which should have technically taken me to 2049 BUT MacOSX does not allow you to set the date beyond 2037. SO for days, my machine has been thinking that it's 2037 and I had not noticed. But then I was getting all sorts of weird messages from Safari AND Firefox saying things like, "The security certificate for www.google.com has expired." And umm... Yeah, eventually it dawned on me to check the date my system was displaying.

Anyway, I don't know why that was keeping me from logging on here but it was.

I greatly, greatly envy the speed of your thought process, Lothere! Oh if only I had been born smart...

That's what I get for shutting down my computer at 8 PM and watching a movie and going straight to bed. It went down around 10PM.

I seem to be getting a lot of fake traffic to random pages lately, perhaps spam bots scoping out the place, and it has overloaded the database twice now in the past few days. I will have to be looking into that.