A few more posts from the Center Stage event, as GRRM has snuck in a few last responses before officially closing out his participation. Of particular interest are his remarks on future books he might write in the setting, and a number of questions concerning Targaryen historical matters.

For those using Firefox, we’ve now introduced OpenSearch plugins to all areas of Westeros.org. There are three primary ones: the main search plugin searches sites such as The Citadel, while the forum and the wiki have dedicated plugins. Just check your search bar and you should see the option of adding our search plugins to your collection. What this will allow you to do is quickly and easily search the site, forum, and wiki from anywhere on the Internet.

A massive update to the So Spake Martin collection today, including GRRM’s posts to the Barnes & Noble Bookclub event. The event appears to have been the most popular of the B&N Center Stage events, drawing nearly 300 total posts across four topics, with GRRM posting answers more than fifty times (and often providing answers to multiple questions in those posts); the next largest, by Anne Rice, appears to have drawn slightly fewer than 200.

We have completed one of our periodic checks of the links in the So Spake Martin collection, generally found in the “Chats, Interviews, Etc.” section. Dead links have been replaced with active ones (often thanks to the Internet Archive). There’s some great material in there, for those who’ve never perused them before. Of particular note are chats such as those hosted by Opus Press and Dromen and Demonen. One interview is currently dead, a 1996 interview with Amazon.com. We will be contacting them requesting permission to host it ourselves.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with two reports from Technicon 25. In it, George R. R. Martin’s progress on A Dance with Dragons and the third “Dunk & Egg” story are discussed.

Also, a spoiler-filled report concerning a chapter from Dance that GRRM read, and ensuing discussion and elaborations, can be found at the “A Song of Ice and Forum”, here.

For no reason currently known to us, the forum is unavailable. Some other services are also down—the IRC chan and nickservs, FTP—which suggest that the server itself may be knocked offline (possibly due to an upstream router issue). More news when we have it.

The So Spake Martin collection has added a link to his audio interview for World Fantasy Con 2008, as well as a new piece of fan correspondence discussing the use of Valyrian steel and twist endings.

We upgraded the board to the latest version of the software, but this necessitates us doing a rebuild of the contents of the database to take advantage of effeciency improvements. Unfortunately, the database is so large at this point that the rebuild process simply chokes, and with it goes the whole board, and then the whole server. This is a problem not only for the members of the board, but for the other sites hosted on the same server, and we’d like to be a good neighbor.

So, what we will need to do is prune the forums of excess posts, the usual house cleaning, and then run the rebuild.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a new audio interview with GRRM. It’s a very good one, actually, from the Law Talk podcast. A number of questions about the setting in relation to law are asked, as well as questions concerning magic in fantasy, the trend towards the medieval setting, the proposed HBO series, and more.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a link to an interview with GRRM conducted by Entertainment Weekly, drawing from a pool of questions submitted by fans. There are some very candid and interesting answers, as well as information regarding the proposed HBO series which confirms details previously reported, including something only hinted at in our earlier report: HBO has gone so far as to conduct a budget study for the project.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with reports from the World Fantasy Convention, as well as to a newly-published interview originally given during the San Diego Comic Con.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a link to a new interview with George, which also features Daniel Abraham and Gardner Dozois as it’s primarily focused on the forthcoming release of Hunter’s Run.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a number of reports from this past weekend’s Trinoc*Con, where GRRM made an appearance. Some interesting tidbits include George’s remarks on the warging abilities of the Stark children, future Dunk and Egg stories, the Sandsnakes, and more.

The So Spake Martin collection has been updated with a link to a new interview with GRRM at iTunes, and a report from a Q&A at InConJunction.

Westeros.org has been immortalized in the latest My Elves are Different comic. Alas, it’s not entirely for good reasons, but the comic is amusing.