3/1/2006 - There are always two, a master and an apprentice

Ok everyone, we have two people who have already submitted a dozen or so links each.  Just to remind everyone,

we are only counting one link from each website, so a couple links will be invalidated because one come from the home page and then the 2nd might have came from the forums of the same website (only one of the 2 links would be counting in that case). 

The number to beat so far is around 9 (I don't have the e-mails readily available at the moment).  Luckily a lot of you have blogs and friends with blogs, so some of you can rack up links pretty quickly. 

The forums are being upgraded tonight, expect some fuzziness.  If we encounter any problems we'll just take them back down, roll back the database changes and try again another night. 

I'm not absolutely sure the dice roller will make it in right away, but there is some new support for modules that makes it look like it should be much "simpler" than it was last time. 

Hello all!

   Those who already have DDO realize that our schedules are a little off.  Jason plays an hour or so earlier than us usually and likewise stops playing an hour or so before we do.  Still, we're having a ton of fun, played a couple hours tonight and really enjoyed ourselves.

The MEU guild is growing, but I think most of the players play earlier than us, as when I log on I often see someone just as they log off.  Hopefully we can get people to keep joining and eventually enough people will be in the guild that their schedules will overlap enough that we can fairly keep people busy.

As part of these efforts, we came up with the idea for our next contest.

Dndorks is changing, traffic is going up, the code is being upgraded here and there, and we're testing out the new Community Server 2.0 upgrade from our existing 1.1 (its quite a bit of work).  WIth all that, we're hoping to get the word out there about the site. 

We're asking our fans to get links from as many other websites as possible linking back to dndorks.com

Here are the rules

• Only one link per site counts for credit.
• Each link must be legitimate (aka the link can't be against good taste or against the rules of the website that  the link is on).
• The first person to link from any given site receives credit for that link, followup links won't be counted.
• The contest ends March 19th at midnight pacific standard.  No submissions after that time will be counted.

Send a list of all the links to me via the contact form or rmathis@-no_spam-dndorks.com .  We'll be adding a page listing all the links submited by person after the contest is done so if you ask a friend to do a link exchange it will be valid and count both ways. 

What are the prizes? (yeah, I know, the important part) 

The person who submits the most links will receive their choice of either a retail box of DDO shipped to them or a 40 dollar gift certificate to Amazon.com. 

The two runners up will receive either 2 month of gametime via PayByCash.com  or 20 dollar gift certificates to amazon.com

With that, let the game begin!  Good luck everyone, and we appreciate any effort put into this contest!  If done well, hopefully the next contest can be even bigger!

Hello all! The contest was supposed to end last night. But I've been having some e-mail problems so I'm going to give everyone until 6am Pacific Time tomorrow to get an e-mail to me letting me know where they linked to us from. If you did "not" receive an e-mail confirmation from me confirming I received your e-mail in some way, please send your e-mail again! The number one position is currently around 25-30 links (I haven't counted, going to go through them before I announce the winner), the rest are floating between 10-15. If you have more, make sure you get it in sometime today!

T-shirts! We're going to have t-shirts hopefully within the next 2-3 weeks. We're going to have some sort of contest to win some free t-shirts, and then the rest will be sold for a reasonable price (so far we're looking at around 12 dollars +S&H). We're going for ultra-high quality, navy blue color shirts as our first real go. So far we're looking at getting a number of Medium, Large, X-large, and some XX-large. If you are some other size and you think you'd like to buy (or try to win) a shirt, please e-mail me via the contact page, I'll include a couple of whatever alternate size. If the whole thing goes well and we like the company we're dealing with, more shirts and other products should be coming out soon.

Hey, Everybody!  There's a new review up for the Player's Guide to Eberron.  Check it out and let me know what you think of the review, or if you've read the book yourself, let us know what you thought of it.

Comment aquí...

The dndorks crew have all preordered DDO and are really looking forward to playing next weekend! 

For those not in the know, preorder accounts are able to begin playing February 24th.  Guilds formed during the preorder event will certain special recognition based on how many members they have by the end of the event.  With that in mind, we're hoping to invite as many of our fans to join us as possible!

We have chosen the Riedra server and our guild name will be: The Morgrave Explorer's Union. 

We have at least 7 players, and will welcome more from the site. :)

Hope to see you there next weekend!

Edit: Obviously the new site is live.  What this means is the technology behind the new site is up, and now the actual artistic people like Jenn and Jason can poke and prod at it along with lots of complaints(...I mean suggestions) from you, the fans as to where things should get moved around as well as how I'm an evil micro$oftie who hates people who use lynx and things like that. ;))  I'm looking forward to having a good week of rushed coding in response to it all. :) 

Needless to say the site next weekend will probably have several modifications from the site that is up today, but I wanted to get this site up and in testing before we upgrade the forums to Community Server 2.0 (which will open an entirely new and different can of worms).

We got our new RAM in the mail the other day, 2 GB of ECC corsair DDR2 RAM, which will move us up to 4GB total!  For that reason sometime in the next couple nights the server will be going down for (hopefully) a short time when I drive over to the datacenter and upgrade the server.

This is a Good Thing™ because the new site is potentially more server intensive, I haven't verified it is, and haven't installed all the caching I want yet, but it just seems like it would have to be.  I'm also looking into building or buying a database server that I'd also host in the datacenter, which would allow me to free up CPU off the webserver and according to our agreement with the datacenter another server would move us from a 2MB pipe to a 3MB pipe which could only be an improvement. :)  (We actually don't use our 2MB that intensely as it is and our bandwidth is only around 1100GB a month, we have 1000GB multiplied by our pipe per month allocated to us so we have plenty of room in that department to grow, and would have even more once I can justify the expense of a new server) 

Ultimately server improvements mean that I can host more intricate gaming applications without burdening all of our sites (TWC, webcomic.net, h2ocitymagazines, buffetbusters, etc).

All in preparation for the new site and some of the features that will be come available. :)  Some of the submitted writers have moved onto Round 2, so hopefully we'll have our new writers picked in the next week or so and more regular articles will become a reality in the next few weeks. It isn't "absolutely" too late to join the competition yet, but its getting close, so if you wanted to try for a position as a writer, please get "something" to me to hold your position in the next few days and we'll try and accelerate you into Round 2 asap. 

Thanks

Hello all,

   I'm finishing up the Dndorks Character Vault, which is one of the last major sections of the new Dndorks.com.  "hopefully" that will mean a launch sometime this weekend. 

With that launch we'll have a new archive section (we've been asked for one for some time), a search by script function, improved comic comments, and a closer tie in with our forums in general.  The new characters will have their own cast page in addition to the already existing cast page, and our revised Article section will be up and ready.

With the next version of the article section our search for writers will come to a close, writers will be chosen and assignments requested.  It isn't too late to submit examples of your work if you want to become a paid freelance writer for Dndorks (the fancy title is to help compensate for the low pay... ;))! 

Our store is going to be improved (and hopefully our timeliness, right now it takes us about 3-5 days to ship a book, we're "really" sorry about that but some of the books are large/heavy and we don't have enough different sized envelopes for every different type of book).  With that in mind I'm kind of looking for someone to help with adding inventory to our E-bay store.   If you live in the Las Vegas/Henderson area and need something to do with your free time for a bit of pay, contact me via the Contact Us form and let me know, maybe we can work something out. 

We have someone who can make silk-screens, so in the near future we're going to attempt to make some shirts, I'll be letting everyone know more about that in the near future (hopefully).

Now with the launch of everything it doesn't mean all the content will be filled, so one of the things we'll be doing is going through our script archives and updating the scripts (for the search by script function), and we may be following a suggestion by Nova (from the forums) and letting people participate by entering in some of our scripts that we don't have the original scripts for. 

I'll have more in a few days...  Thanks everyone for your support and e-mails lately! Its been helping me keep going. :)