Very recently, Linda and I were interviewed by Andrew Burns for the UK’s The Big Issue, a widely-circulated magazine that will likely be familiar to many in the UK.

Not sold on newstands, it’s only sold by homeless men and women who are given a means to work and an opportunity to improve their lives. You’ll find it being sold in many of the UK’s cities.

We’d been told that they needed a picture of us for the feature they’re writing on Game of Thrones... ... but it was quite the surprise to discover that we’re on the cover! The magazine will be on sale this week, and besides our interview, it also features a broader look at the series and show, and an editorial piece on fantasy literature and its appeal in the current economic climate.

If you’re in a UK, definitely give it a look if you’ve the opportunity. And if you see it, let us know what you think!

This morning, Linda was on Swedish national radio station P3, on the PP3 program, to discuss Game of Thrones. For Swedes—and Scandinavians and others who can understand Swedish—you can listen in to the program here. Linda’s appearance starts 18 minutes into the program.

Well, hot on the heels of our NewNowNext Award nomination, we can reveal that the latest issue of Rolling Stone has a brief profile of yours truly (aka Elio). Yes, rather a surprise when they contacted us! It was nice to discuss our involvement with the website and the fandom and so on, although I do see that the hour-long conversation lost some things in translation when it was boiled down to the smaller article…

We learned this news last week, and it looks like we can finally share it with all and sundry: Westeros.org has been nominated in the “Superfan Site” category of LOGO’s televisied NewNowNext Awards.  To say the least, it’s an honor to be recognized by those who selected the nominees! For those wondering, LOGO is an LGBT-geared entertainment channel,a sister channel to MTV. The NewNowNext Awards have been running since 2008, and have seen the likes of Lady Gaga on their stage. The awards show don’t take themselves too seriously, suffice it to say!

Linda and I were invited to the award show, but alas, we won’t be able to make it (and we’re quite gutted—not often one gets invited to a red carpet event!) That said, since we’re in the running, it’s up to the fans and visitors to the site to take the time and vote for us! You can vote in one of two ways:

Go through this here image ....

Or if you’re on Twitter, just tweet a message containing the hastags #NNNAWesteros and #NNNAwards (must include both) and they’ll automatically register your vote.

Just a quick note that the last week or so of our time has been taken up by the extensive work needed to upgrade Westeros.org’s content management system—Expression Engine—from the 1.x we’ve been using since around 2004, to 2.x—and we’ve finally brought up the site live.

You likely already know that we have a Facebook page, but you may have found that notifications of new items there have become rarer… or, worse still, that when you investigate the page directly, you find a lot more content being posted than you’ve seen in your news feed.

The reason for this are certain changes Facebook has made to how updates are sent along to those who like your page. Where before 100% of all updates were shared, now only 10 to 20% of followers see any particular update at any particular time. There is, however, a way around this that Facebook has made available: interests.

To add Westeros to your Interests, and get all updates in your stream, you can either create and populate an interest list as per the linked instructions. A more direct and immediate way to do it, however, is to go to the page in question,  , or alternatively you can visit the page, hover over the liked buttons, and select “Interests..” Name your interest list, add the site, and you’re done—you’ll get all of our updates, at least for as long as Facebook allows interested followers to see them all via this method.

We’ve already noted that NY Mag’s Vulture entertainment site placed fans of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones at the pinnacle of their mosted devoted fans list.

But a pleasant surprise was when Linda and I were contacted to be included in part of a series of posts on devoted fans. This past Friday, a short profile of us went up, touching on several subjects connected to our involvement in the fandom, from its earliest days to the present.

For those who might want to know a little more about the people behind the website, this is not a bad place to start.

(And for those who wonder, the statues in the background of our photo, those are from Valyrian Resin. They’re officially licensed, and I’m told a limited quantity remains. I should also add that though they can ship internationally, the web shop does not necessarily give an accurate estimate for shipping overseas, so consider contacting them for a quote.)

The last days, you may have noticed that Westeros.org has been down quite often. That’s because the server just couldn’t handle the amount of load being placed on it. Well, that’s a thing of the past (unless we see exponential levels of growth): the whole of Westeros.org and all of its parts (the Wiki of Ice and Fire, the Forum of Ice and Fire, Blood of Dragons MUSH) is now housed on the same, very capable server. This should mean that the extensive downtimes and great amounts of lag should be a thing of the past (*knocks on wood*).

Many thanks to the community who contributed to help make it possible, and of course to our amazing host, Sparks, who did all the heavy-lifting of getting things together!

We set the fundraiser for Westeros.org at what I thought was a not-very-modest goal—about twice as much as we ever really asked for before—and it turns out, I very much undervalued how much the site means to the community of users! After less than a week, the fundraising has come to a close… and we raised something north of $3000! An amazing job, one and all, and we truly appreciate it. Many, many thanks to everyone who contributed, to those who would if they could, and everyone who’s contributed to make it such a terrific community site.

It’s that time of year again, folks, to support the Westeros.org community. It’s not just the forums and website, that have seen far more activity and membership than they ever have, but it’s also the Wiki of Ice and Fire (the premiere ASoIaF wiki on the web) which is one of the most visited parts of the site—well over a million unique visitors per month, coming by to look up all the details that you, the community, have put up there to share your knowledge and love of the series.

If you’ve ever used the resources of Westeros.org, discussed a theory on the forum, browsed the wiki—please consider chipping in a bit of money for the fundraiser! The funds raised will go directly to our wonderful server admin Sparks to defray the costs of hosting , and allow us to start looking into upgrades that might further improve the speed and stability of the servers.

Many thanks for your time, consideration, and (we hope) your donation! ChipIn allows payments through credit card or Paypal; sorry, we can’t take money orders, cheques, or cash, but we do appreciate the thought!

HBO has quietly been adding a few new items to its store in the run-up to season 2. Besides getting more of the Cersei Lannister posters in stock from season 1, there’s some brand new shirts that are rather cool (including a Westeros map shirt), plus some knick-knacks such as house sigil and character magnet sets. You can find these, and much, much more, over at the Westeros Store.

Two new interviews have been added to the So Spake Martin collection of correspondence, chats, interviews, and signing reports. The first was brought to our attention by GRRM himself, at the Feather Factor where he discusses his vices, his looking into buying a new car (Gullwing > SuperSports, George!), and more. It’s a nice interview, different than the usual interviews with Martin.

The other one is an audio interview with the gentlemen at Sidequesting, and starts about 8 minutes in. They discuss the series, the world-building, whether GRRM will return to science fiction some day, and football, among other things.

The HBO Store has recently added quite a few new items… in the form of laptop, netbook, tablet, phone, and MP3 player skins featuring the words and heraldry of the various great houses. Have to say, the Baratheon iPhone/iPod

“phone and MP3 player” skin is actually quite striking. We’ve also added links to the heraldic coasters and a mug set in the last few days.

Presently, the store also has a free shipping offer going on if you use the code FREESHIPDAY at check out.

Thanks to a tweet from HBO UK, we realized that quite a few things have been added to the HBO Store in the last weeks, items prominently featured on our store page for fans of HBO’s Game of Thrones. Some hoodies have turned up—I guess this is the right season for them—and there’s quite a few collectables, from house posters to shot glasses(!) and now what strikes me as the coolest of them all, a dragon egg paperweight that looks rather cool.

HBO’s finally listing the Bluray and DVD as well, though without any box art or release information. We’ll be keeping an eye on that, to say the least. (And before you ask, the US HBO Store remains US-only so far—sorry!)

We’re experimenting with a new nameserver host for all Westeros.org sites. We’ve switched to Cloudflare, which uses its nameservers to cache static content (images, scripts) on its servers distributed across several continents, and to serve that content from the server nearest to the user. This should, in theory, improve site performance and marginally improve server load, as the server will spend less time pushing images and scripts and have more time to churn through the database which powers Westeros-proper, the wiki, and the forum.

For most of you, this change should happen in the background and will require no action from you. However, in some cases your ISP’s domain name server may change in an incorrect fashion, or your own computer may be holding on to outdated information. This may lead to your not being able to reach some Westeros sites but not others.

In this case, we recommend flushing DNS on your computer (if on a Windows PC: Start -> Run -> cmd -> ipconfig /flushdns; for Mac OS X users, please see this.) That should correct the problem in many cases. If your own ISP’s name resolver is at fault, usually they will update their records in anything from 2 to 4 hours. Please be patient and try again after that time (making sure to use ipconfig /flushdns again).

If problems persist, please e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and we’ll try to help you resolve them.