The Concordance has now been updated through "The Sworn Sword", in preparation for the upcoming release of A Feast for Crows.
One or two further update remains, bringing the Concordance up through the latest So Spake Martin entries and possibly pulling in new information revealed in the Game of Thrones RPG.
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.
Just in time for the upcoming WorldCon, we have launched our Calendar covering events of interest to fans of A Song of Ice and Fire and George R.R. Martin, such as appearances and release dates. At the moment, it contains an entry for each day of the WorldCon (with listings of the panels and events that fans might want to catch), as well as the UK and US release dates for A Feast for Crows.
Some more reports (from Conestoga) and emails have been added to the So Spake Martin collection.
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.
A couple of reports from the Book Expo in New York have been added to the So Spake Martin section. They include information from Parris, GRRM’s SO, on publication dates and writing plans.
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.
Once again, we have changed the software we use for managing our news, but we’re hopeful that Expression Engine will be something that we will stick with for a very long while. We’re also hoping that it will allow us to introduce some new features to the site, to the benefit of us as well as our visitors.
If you are a regular visitor to Westeros, you will notice that the news & updates are now being handled differently. From now on, the Westeros: Updates journal (this one, that is) will contain only updates relating to the site itself, divided up into categories that correspond to the sections of the site. Any news relating to George R.R. Martin or A Song of Ice and Fire will be found in the All Sorts of Weird Stuff: News journal, found within the new section that we are in the process of launching. We have also moved announcements dealing with game news (as opposed to news about the game’s website) to the Blood of Dragons: Announcements journal.
However, for those who prefer to have all the news in one place, we have also put up a Westeros: Digest journal, complete with matching RSS feeds, that incorporates all the news from the aforementioned journals. As always, we’re very interested in hearing about any problems you may be experiencing as a result of these changes. If, for example, you have linked to the old news & updates archives, or made use of the old RSS feeds, you will want to make sure to update these links as those pages will be removed shortly.
A report from To Be Continued IV in Chicago were GRRM is the Guest of Honour has been added to the So Spake Martin section, and more will likely follow in a day or two.
According to GRRM he has about 100 manuscript pages left to write of AFfC, and he expects that the publishers will rush the book out as quickly as possible once its all handed in. He also noted that he has some chapters done of the next book, and half of the next Dunk & Egg story.
As our visitors may have noticed, the layout of Westeros has changed somewhat recently. This is part of a larger project to partially redesign all of the sections and to move some content around as we add a new section. Hopefully, this transition will be as smooth as possible, but in the coming weeks it is possible that you will encounter various errors (missing pages, layout issues, etc) as we go through each step of the process.
If you come across any errors that don’t go away if you reload the page a moment or two later, feel free to drop us a line about it, as it will help us get them fixed more quickly. If the issue is layout related, please include a mention of which browser and operating system you are using. As the new designs we are introducing will be purely CSS based, we are expecting issues with older browsers, but we’re not quite sure which it is that can’t handle it. However, it should work fine in IE 6 and any of the recent Mozilla-based browsers.
Another Boskone report has been added to the So Spake Martin section.
A new addition has been made to the History section, dealing with the War of the Usurper.
The first version of the FAQ that we have been working on for some time has finally been completed.
Additionally, one more report from Boskone has been added to the So Spake Martin collection.
Three new additions in the form of reports from Boskone have been made to the So Spake Martin section.
As you may (or may not) know, Westeros is hosted for free by Noderunner.net. Since last year, the hosting is done at a professional colocation service, which naturally has greatly improved uptime, bandwidth and technical service in the case of problems. It is not, however, cheap and currently our host is footing the whole bill (roughly $3000/year) herself.
Therefore, she has asked those of us who host sites at Noderunner.net to contribute via PayPal donations. We’ve now done so ourselves, but we thought it might be a good idea to ask our own users if they too might be able to contribute a little. If you visit Westeros on a regular basis, and find it useful, consider making a donation to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and noting that it is for the hosting of Westeros.