First small update: random quotes at the bottom of the site. Not a big thing in the slightest, but I've been having fun scrolling to the bottom just to see what the quote says!
Another very small update: the homerow (showing the featured announcement, leaderboards summary, and featured member) has been moved back up the front page to just below the banner image. This has been done mainly to make room for an upcoming Staff Picks section, which will be shown underneath the Literary Spotlight where the homerow used to be.
So there's a word for that thing too... While we're on the topic of this "homerow", does anyone else experience some sort of bug where (when they haven't reviewed that day) they're suggested a work that is then said to have been removed by the author? Why would I be suggested to review works that are private?
Staff picks have now been added to the front page -- just look under the literary spotlight.
Staff picks update every 24 hours at 4am GMT. At the moment, you can only see the most recent picks, but a page showing all past staff picks will soon be added.
The picks are chosen by YWS' mod squad. It's up to each mod as to what they pick, so expect a lot of diversity among the picks that show up!
This is a change you won't notice until your work is in the literary spotlight, but from now on, once your work reaches that exalted status, you'll receive a PM notification about it letting you know. This is something I've been meaning to do for a while as I receive at least a couple of messages every month along the lines of, "Hey, I was told my work was in the literary spotlight. Can you tell me when it was there.?". But, it required a large rewrite of the code.
That code, which was some of the oldest on YWS, has now been rewritten. In the past, the spotlight was always calculated on the fly, meaning it was calculated right when you visited the front page. Now, it's calculated once per hour via a server-side script, and the values are saved in the database. This has the advantage of not only making PM notifications possible now, but also of being faster.
Hall of Fame The HoF goes back to Dec. 31, 2004, when featured member started. Many thanks to @Hannah for compiling all the info for 2012 onwards!
Staff Picks You may notice there's a lot of Staff Picks from way long ago. It was originally introduced in 2009, but discontinued in early 2011.
Literary Spotlight If you visit the above two pages, you'll also see a link to the Literary Spotlight in the sidebar. This is a page I'm still working on, and it'll be completed tomorrow.
By default, it displays the top 100 works of all time, though I think some of the counts may be off. I'll have to go through and update them later today.
If you wish to see the literary spotlight for any particular day, just choose the date from the form at the top of the page. Dates prior to February 22, 2008 are not available as you couldn't like works before then. Also, dates in the future are also of course unavailable (though Sokka may disagree).
You can also get a listing of the top 10 works for each type (poetry, short, novel) by month if you choose day 0 when searching.
In any case, have fun with it! It can be pretty neat seeing the featured works from the past.
By the way, I'm fairly sure this marks the last new addition for a while. After this, it's all pretty much upgrades to existing site features. The next big one I'm working on is an overhaul of the publishing center, and if you would like to see my work on it as I work on it, go to: In Progress -- Publishing Center
It probably won't be ready until this weekend at the earliest, but that's not to say there won't be other updates between now and then; it's just that the updates will be quite small (in at least one case, it'll literally be just a link: button to create a club from clubs tab).
Another small change for the literary spotlight: the spotlight topic for the entire previous month is now set to automatically post on the second day of every month.
Today has been a ridiculously busy day, but I promised an update -- no matter how small -- every day through the end of May. So in keeping with that, and testing just how small an update can go, I present you with:
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A link to creating a club has been added to the sidebar in the Clubs tab. It will appear only if you have completed a minimum of 5 reviews. Why have a minimum? It's a spam prevention tool (the reason it did not exist before is because I'm worried about too many clubs being made). However, anyone can still create a club by going through the settings dashboard as before; the link just makes it somewhat easier.
Now, adding this button was no easy endeavour. It was an arduous task, requiring at least a few minutes (perhaps several!) in order to add it. It necessitated the completion of complicated tasks, such as adding 5 lines of HTML and opening the file manager on my computer.
I'll walk you through this difficult and time-consuming process:
Step 1, access the file manager:
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The file manager is the second icon down on the left. That's Ubuntu 15.04 with the Pacifica icon theme and Numix GTK theme.
Step 2, access the YWS server:
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Yes, the YWS server's name is ywsfred. I pretty much always have it mounted as a drive on my computer. I also do occasionally play Sim City 4. My biggest city, New Annapolis, is a thriving dystopia.
Step 3, locate the appropriate template file:
Well, I know it's not the file for Shakespearean Insults that I'm looking for. It's either sidebar, or sidebar_club... hmm...
Step 4, add the code:
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A template conditional statement already exists for the chatbar, preventing access to it for anyone with less than 5 reviews. So, I'm just going to re-use that. Also, I don't want the Google Bot to be creating clubs, so let's make sure it's restricted too.
Right now, only two topic tags are broadly available: accepting and closed in the storybooks forum. However, more will almost certainly be added in the weeks ahead.
Where they're available, adding a topic tag is easy. You'll see them right around the subject line when creating a topic, or when editing the first post of a topic. You can add multiple topic tags, and they'll be displayed in the forum index. When viewing them in the forum index, they're even clickable and it'll show you a list of all other topics tagged with that topic tag.
A brand new topic tag can only be created by a member of the YWS mod squad. If you would like one created for general use, feel free to send me a PM.
'Hush, hush!' I whispered; 'people can have many cousins and of all sorts, Miss Cathy, without being any the worse for it; only they needn't keep their company, if they be disagreeable and bad. — Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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