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.

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.

Thanks to Sparks introducing a MySQL backend to chat, which made sure that channel and user data would be retained indefinitely, the Westeros.org chat has become much more functional. However, as many may have noticed, the login page was not working correctly for quite awhile, with all users being assigned a random name regardless of what nickname they put in.

Well, that problem has now been fixed as well! Feel free to drop by the new, improved Westeros.org Chat and say hi.

Visitors to the site may or may not have noticed a lot of things changing of late. We are finally hard at work on getting all content on the site handled dynamically through ExpressionEngine, which will make it easier to update, easier to indicate changes to existing materials and easier to search.

Some of the major changes done just recently are an overhaul of all of All Sorts of Weird Stuff (for example, the various licensed products and the artist links now reside in a wiki called Derivations) and changes to the FAQ and the Prophecies under the Citadel.

We are also working on some major changes to A Ring of Ice and Fire (the current ring code will be exchanged for something spam proof) and we also expect to turn the Artwork section into a proper dynamic gallery quite soon.

Every six months or so, we like to raise funds to help cover some of the costs incurred in running the A Song of Ice and Fire Board. Because of most excellent site admin (who also provides hosting for Westeros.org in general), the cost of the board is much lower than it would be at a commercial hosting package, but there’s still some cost. If you use the board to any degree and enjoy your time here, please do donate! To donate, you can go here where a group action for $500 is being hosted.

It should be noted that Fundable does take a percentage of the money raised (7%) but the convenience of it is that those without Paypal accounts can just use their credit cards without having to sign up for anything. Furthermore, Fundable actually requires fundraisers to be $500 or more; if a fundraiser fails to reach its minimum, the funds are basically sent back to the donors. $500 is more than we need this time around (in general, we look to raise roughly $750-$800 per year to help with the hosting costs). We contacted Fundable and they have assured us, however, that if we don’t reach the $500 mark, they’ll still pass on the money. This is one reason why we’ve made it a 2 week fundraiser rather than a month-long event, since we’re not concerned about reaching $500. That said, we do hope to raise at least $350.

Again, if you wish to donate, please go here. Thanks for your continuing support!

Thanks to the efforts of our incredible sysadmin, Sparks, the whole site as well as the MUSH are now back up following the hacker intrusion on the server yesterday.

We have also taken the opportunity to upgrade to the newest release of ExpressionEngine, so if you spot anything that doesn’t seem to be working properly anywhere on the site, do let us know.

Discovered this a bit belatedly, but Westeros.org has had the honor of being selected as a Site of the Week by Sci-Fi.com, the official website of the Sci-Fi Channel.

Another part of the site, this time the main Westeros section, has been redesigned to accommodate a sidebar and fix a few other issues.

If you are experiencing any problems with the new design at resolutions of 800x600 or above and in modern browsers (IE 6 and upwards, Firefox/Mozilla or recent versions of Opera), please drop us a line and we’ll try our best to fix the issue.

Version 1.4 of ExpressionEngine, the excellent content management system we use to handle all the dynamic data on the site, was released today. As some of you may have noticed, we experienced some small problems while upgrading our site, but that has all been fixed now, and we hope to soon be able to take advantage of some of the new features offered in 1.4 to enhance the site further.

By the way, pMachine now offers a free version of ExpressionEngine, called ExpressionEngine Core, and we can really recommend this to anyone looking for a great blogging system. Its more powerful and more flexible than anything else we’ve tried.

In a bid to help artists produce more A Song of Ice and Fire art, Linda and I have decided to just put the word out that we’d be very happy to assist any and all artists (whether working in a professional or a fan capacity). We’ve consulted on art and other matters for Guardians of Order’s A Game of Thrones RPG, DB Pro’s "The Hedge Knight" comic book adaption, and Testors’s forthcoming miniatures line, and are keen on helping anyone else who wants to speed up their research and get things to look just right. Need to know what a castle is supposed to look like? What kind of cloth is used in the setting? How a particular scene, and the participants in it, are described? Ask us! 

In fact, the previously reported downtime did not take place due to a snafu on the provider’s side. It has now been re-scheduled for today, beginning at 2000 CST and ending at approximately 2400 CST.

The server Westeros.org is hosted on will be down for several hours this evening (American EST) for a hardware upgrade. It should be back up once the upgrade is completed.

At the WorldCon in Glasgow, the Brotherhood without Banners presented us with the first-ever Raven Award, for significant contributions to GRRM-fandom. We were both very thrilled and honoured to be selected as the recipients of this award, and it will undoubtedly spur us to work even harder on the site.

We already said it over at our personal site, but it bears repeating here as well: thank you, everyone! The Brotherhood without Banners is a truly great group of fans.

We’ll be off on vacation from June 18 to July 1, most likely without any Internet access at all. So, no updates for the next two weeks, and if you need to contact us, we won’t be able to respond until we’re back.

The newest addition to Westeros, All Sorts of Weird Stuff, has now been officially launched. Here you will find information about GRRM and A Song of Ice and Fire that isn’t theme- or story-related. In particular, we will attempt to bring fans all news of relevance to the series or any of Mr. Martin’s other writings. We will also collect our reviews of GRRM’s books and stories in this section, and provide information about the various licenses related to his works, such as the CCG, the RPG and the miniatures.

At the moment, the News section is the only one that has been completed, but over the next weeks we hope to have time to add content to some of the other sections too.