Spodding

The Last Alliance website (www.thelastalliance.com) suffered a major blow last month when the hosting company took the drastic steps of deleting the source-code and database backups. Not 100% sure of the reasons for their behaviour but I can make some guesses.

Anyway, there are a couple of thousand LOTR gamers who feel betrayed and abandoned as a result of this. A number of TLA refugees began to trickle in to the One Ring and I could see that several established members of the site were starting to feel disgruntled at the newer residents. It’s a common and predictable reaction to an influx of ‘newcomers’ into an established community and one that I see repeatedly here in Australia and read about in other parts of the world all the time.

So I have spent the past couple of weeks attempting to resurrect TLA. My intentions in doing so are an odd mixture of philanthropy and selfishness. I feel compassion for those who have been abandoned and betrayed by the thoughtlessness that led to the collapse of their site, yet I really don’t want 2000 newcomers overwhelming the One Ring.

I could see that the people who most wanted to rescue TLA didn’t have the right skills to do the job, nor did they have any real plan of action. It seemed to me that all their eagerness was going to waste because they didn’t know how or where to begin.

So I have arranged for some webspace and put a temporary forum there for people to gather and keep abreast of the developments. While this is in place I have begun building a new version of TLA using a different approach, more in line with tabletop-hdr.de or belloflostsouls.com. It’s odd though, because I have somehow become the key player in two large LOTR websites now and yet I never intended to have a major part in any of them. And on top of that I have offered to assist thepalantir.org with their technical problems too (haven’t heard back from them yet).

Maybe I should start charging people.

I just uploaded the mighty fine-looking theme “Pixeled” available on the WordPress site. Remarkably easy to install – just copy it to the right spot and you’re done! Impressive. Although after playing with phpBB for many years I am surprised at how much is hard-coded into the style, so you do need to have sound HTML and PHP skills to modify the wording of the various bits.

Next on the list is to install the Lightbox gallery software – it’s such a cool way of displaying images. Been meaning for some time to understand how it works in order to integrate it into the OR galleries.

Welcome to spodding.tabletopwargaming – my attempt at offering unto the world the benefits of my spodding experiences.