Westeros: Updates

Calendar Update

2008-05-29T12:46:25-05:00

The calendar has been updated with dates for George R. R. Martin’s appearances in Spain. He says more dates may be added, and that dates for events in Portugal are forthcoming.

Forum Outage

2008-05-27T22:10:10-05:00

The server hosting the forum appears to have gone down at some point, and all services (including the forum) were down. Now some of them have started up again, suggesting there was some sort of crash, but unfortunately the Apache server that allows web access seems to be down still. We’ve notified the system administrator, and with any luck the forum will be up soon.

So Spake Martin Update

2008-04-21T09:43:05-05:00

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.

Search Plugins

2008-04-21T09:11:19-05:00

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.

So Spake Martin Update

2008-04-19T13:36:49-05:00

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.

So Spake Martin Update

2008-04-08T10:40:29-05:00

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.

So Spake Martin Update

2008-03-31T17:57:42-05:00

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.

Board Down

2008-03-28T20:42:42-05:00

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.

So Spake Martin Update

2008-03-16T10:03:05-05:00

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.

Upcoming Board Outages

2008-01-25T12:05:21-05:00

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.

read on >>>