Hello all,
At the beginning of the year, it was decided that the OA website should receive a general redesign as well as a number of tweaks and upgrades. The first of these have now been made. Specifically:
a) The announcements banner on the OA main page now displays the links to V:FT and the OA books in a lighter format that is easier to read.
b) When a search of the EG is performed, the articles that are generated will now display 'short' URLs when opened instead of the 'long' URLs that were generated previously. These short URLs will continue to function after the search page is closed and can be copy/pasted into a search bar or document while remaining functional.
c) An extraneous writing credit has been removed from the Topic pages and the message '@ 2014 Orion's Arm Universe project' now displays at the end of every page in the EG.
d) An 'Additional Information' tab can now be displayed at the end of a given EG article, if desired. This tab can be used to display links to information that relates to a given article, but was not directly involved in its creation or is not inside the EG website. Examples would be links to papers elsewhere online, stories or art galleries within/outside the site, etc. We've used the Development Notes tab for this sort of thing from time to time, but will be gradually switching the relevant info on those pages over to the Additional Information tab as well as placing all new information of this type into the AI tab moving forward.
In addition to these actual changes, we also learned from our webmaster that the site already has functionality to do some things that we wanted. Specifically, it is possible to edit the text on the OA main page, including adding hyperlinks to other online locations. While we have no immediate plans for this functionality, it is likely that it will come into play in the future, either before or after the eventual replacement of the OA main page with a new and improved version.
Ok, I think that covers things for now. We will continue to keep the membership updated on additional site upgrades and changes as they happen.
Thanks!
Todd
Editor - Orion's Arm Universe Project
At the beginning of the year, it was decided that the OA website should receive a general redesign as well as a number of tweaks and upgrades. The first of these have now been made. Specifically:
a) The announcements banner on the OA main page now displays the links to V:FT and the OA books in a lighter format that is easier to read.
b) When a search of the EG is performed, the articles that are generated will now display 'short' URLs when opened instead of the 'long' URLs that were generated previously. These short URLs will continue to function after the search page is closed and can be copy/pasted into a search bar or document while remaining functional.
c) An extraneous writing credit has been removed from the Topic pages and the message '@ 2014 Orion's Arm Universe project' now displays at the end of every page in the EG.
d) An 'Additional Information' tab can now be displayed at the end of a given EG article, if desired. This tab can be used to display links to information that relates to a given article, but was not directly involved in its creation or is not inside the EG website. Examples would be links to papers elsewhere online, stories or art galleries within/outside the site, etc. We've used the Development Notes tab for this sort of thing from time to time, but will be gradually switching the relevant info on those pages over to the Additional Information tab as well as placing all new information of this type into the AI tab moving forward.
In addition to these actual changes, we also learned from our webmaster that the site already has functionality to do some things that we wanted. Specifically, it is possible to edit the text on the OA main page, including adding hyperlinks to other online locations. While we have no immediate plans for this functionality, it is likely that it will come into play in the future, either before or after the eventual replacement of the OA main page with a new and improved version.
Ok, I think that covers things for now. We will continue to keep the membership updated on additional site upgrades and changes as they happen.
Thanks!
Todd
Editor - Orion's Arm Universe Project