Ye Olde Inn

I'm just curious if there are any updates in 2022. I see you implemented a whole plan of changes and improvements in the technical part of the website. Did you hire [/url] to increase the overall visibility? Off-page and on-page should go hand in hand, otherwise, you tend to have a brand new website, but completely unknown. In addition, once you have started on-page SEO, the website's ranking might suffer. Be attentive to DR, DA, and traffic and take the necessary actions to stop the decrease.

[quote="lestodante"]Just noticed something that requires an update too.
in the User Control Panel > Profile > Edit Profile there are folds with socials or IM programs no more in use since years:

[.. stuff that's gone the way of MySpace ..]

Maybe better to update them with modern socials like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or giving the user the chance to edit the social name so we could type in whatever whatever social we want (TikTok, Twitch...).
As for the logo, i think is very important... what about asking a professional to draw one for the Inn?

I also hope when the structure of the site/forum will be updated all the linked posts will not get lost (returning a 404 error message).[/quote]

Anything more modern should give you 4-5 pairs of things you can fill in. Use Twitter? Twitter, @you. Use Reddit? Reddit u/you… You choose the things that make sense to you. This is how it's generally done in Mastodon user profiles, though what that's for isn't well explained.

Ideally you don't want to lock yourself or other users into any given technology. Time may come that Facebook and Twitter and Reddit and whatever else people are using ceases to exist or at least ceases to be relevant to anyone.

Good ideas. Ah yes I remember the days of ICQ. I hated the others, but Trillian was cool for awhile.

Just noticed something that requires an update too.
in the User Control Panel > Profile > Edit Profile there are folds with socials or IM programs no more in use since years:

ICQ number:
AOL Instant Messenger:
WL/MSN Messenger:
Yahoo Messenger:
Jabber address:

Maybe better to update them with modern socials like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter or giving the user the chance to edit the social name so we could type in whatever whatever social we want (TikTok, Twitch...).
As for the logo, i think is very important... what about asking a professional to draw one for the Inn?

I also hope when the structure of the site/forum will be updated all the linked posts will not get lost (returning a 404 error message).

[quote="iKarith"][img]https://i.imgur.com/x6nPE6d.png[/img]

The dark forces of Chaos will inevitably grow in strength, foolish heroes…[/quote]
Reminds me of :?: The Basement. :?:

I'm not even doing that in the subdirectory—that's on my own system. I wanted to see what changing a couple of colors did for a dark theme. I've tweaked them a bit since I made that but … I don't think I like it as it is yet. Still tweaking it, but I'm still sick (as in some virus thingy—probably not [b]THE[/b] virus) so progress is kind of slow.

Also got in touch with Ron Shirtz. We'll be making some changes regarding that I think.

So stuff is moving, slowly.

Glad you're working in your own subdirectory--looks like you opened a gate to the upside-down. Feeling safe in our happy Inn . . . not worried at all about your experimentations. :bites-lip:

[img]https://i.imgur.com/x6nPE6d.png[/img]

The dark forces of Chaos will inevitably grow in strength, foolish heroes…

[quote="Daedalus"]I'm not sure if this is appropriate to mention in light of all the effort here, but I gotta unload an alternative idea: YeOldeInn done in the font style of the HeroQuest logo, arching metallic gold over stone. Hell, a hanging sign with an ale toasting Orc might look good below it. Too difficult for SVG?[/quote]

Yes, it can be done, in fact the 3D printed model of the HeroQuest logo can be turned into (and probably started out as) a SVG file. The question is whether Stig or I are able to do it. :mrgreen:

We've already seen that the automatic noise generation is inconsistent across implementations, but you don't have to use it. So the question is, if you don't, how much of that kind of effect do you want to use? Flat or gradient colors are easier to do in less file size.

[quote="Stig"]Hey, I've had a go at making an SVG logo here. It's "Ye Olde Inn" written over the hanging board. However the website says SVGs are not allowed as attachments.[/quote]

I've been using rsvg-convert to convert the output to png for posting here on the board and then uploading that to imgur with a Linux script.

I think I definitely like the text being "straight" more than curved like the original HQ logo. I [i]can[/i] curve it directly in Inkscape and export the path (which is necessary for doing any significantly complex effects out of it anyway), but I'm thinking ahead a little to a future page design where the navigation and everything is cleaned up a bit more when having the text be straight will provide more options for that.

I haven't accomplished anything with this stuff over the past few days … I've been feeling a bit sick lately, and then to add to that on Sunday I had a support [b]NIGHTMARE[/b] come to life. At work I do Linux tech support, and not for like what you'd expect to be normal Linux users. No, we give machines running Linux to people who would consider the average Geek Squad employee to be a master guru of technology. They're not technical users, at all.

So this one needed to do a backup, reinstall, and recovery … remotely due to covid. Normally we charge like $30 and do it for them. But because we're so short-staffed I'm like, I can help people do this remotely, it's not a big deal, I've done it before several times, etc. And this guy had only a couple of gigs to back up… He copied everything to USB following my instructions and then pulled his USB stick, without ejecting it. That's not a problem by default on Windows anymore, but Linux has the old default. He plugged it back in and said, "oh, my files are still there!" So no problem, right?

Yeah, the exact opposite of no problem. His files weren't actually there after fresh installation. Dammit, I could've had him run fsck (chkdsk equiv) and re-rsync everything back over. I mean, I probably wouldn't if it'd been me, but I don't just pull USB sticks randomly! But if I had, I'd have done the same check he did and I'd have lost files and been mad at myself. But I could've/should've taken the extra steps because it [u]wasn't[/u] me and I knew this user was not technical. But I didn't.

Yeah, so I've spent the past couple of days being mad as hell at myself.

This is why we tell you: [b]BACK UP YOUR FILES[/b]. It's also why I'm being damned careful to operate almost exclusively in a subdirectory of the website, and I've made sure that drathe is taking backups (and occasionally making them myself) while working on the website. Accidents happen. Don't let them happen to you.

So I've had a go at your suggestion Daedlus, and here's what I've done with my limited GIMP skill. I don't know how to upload an SVG (the website says it's not allowed) so I've added screenshots of SVGs.

The original sign:
[attachment=4]ye olde in with green orc.png[/attachment]

When converted into SVG, which limits the number of different colours, the gradient didn't look good:
[attachment=3]Gradient sign SVG.png[/attachment]

So I flattened the colours in the logo to look like this in the original:
[attachment=2]ye olde inn logov2 with orc flat.png[/attachment]

Which looks like this in SVG:
[attachment=1]flat sign SVG.png[/attachment]

I thought I could make a nice effect on the text by adding one darker colour to texture it a bit, which would convert better into SVG than a gradient of multiple colours:
[attachment=0]ye olde inn logov2 with orc textured.png[/attachment]

However that didn't covert well to SVG and looked splattered.

I reckon the flat one is the best of the bunch.