I’m very proud of my web staff today, as over that rainy weekend they were able to push out a brand new website for the Barony.  Go take a look: windmastershill.org.

You’ll spot the brand new Baronage Blog, which Guenievre and I will use to communicate with the rest of the populace, as well as pimp up comming events and projects, and to report on such things once they have passed.

Also, our Baronial Calendar is now 100% web user generated.  That’s right, if someone wants to hold a meeting, practice, get-together, A&S workshop, what ever, they can go up here and add it to the calendar themselves.  No need to email it to someone, who will have to hand code it and then ftp it up to a website.

So, Windmasters’, go sign up and look around.  Other Baronies, bow down before the awesome that is our new website!

We thank everyone for their congratulations and well wishes.  The out flowing of support has been greater than we ever imagined.  We expect to take just about everyone up on their offers over the next couple years.

As for blogging and LJ, we intend to keep on posting things just as we did before.  You folks seem to like what we’ve said so far, so seems like there’s no reason to change course there.  Don’t expect juicy gossip, or baronial politics to spring up here, not even on filters.  However, we won’t be going back and friends locking our entire journals.   That said, there’s a good chance our updates will be a little less frequent.

Thank you again, and we hope to see you all at Ymir!

For them that care, the site is basically one big WordPress blog now.  We can use the blog feature for updates (like these), and use the “pages” feature to publish our more static content.  Through the use of some plugins and such, we can push posts (like this one) to our respective Live Journals – so not to worry, we’re not going to go become “real bloggers” and forget all you nice people over in LJ land.  We’re also running an OpenID plugin, so you can probably log into erminespot with your LJ username.  Cool huh?

On top of that, we’ve been able (through some custom coding) to get our del.icio.us tags to pull to the relevant site.  So, let’s say I’m cruzing the intarwebs and find an awesome armor site.  A quick tag in del.icio.us and it’s already posted to the armor links section of erminespot.

We’ve also revamped the gallery (mostly by ripping it all down and moving to zenphoto).  I’m slowly going though and tagging the photos and putting in some captions, so anyone can search on my gallery for all the pictures of say, yourself, or of fighting… you get the idea.

Why the swap from the handmade css layout to the wordpress blog style?  Well, we found that there were two large barriers to getting new content out there.  The first is our own slackness, and there’s no code to fix that.  The second was building an html file, getting all the formating down, and then ftp’ing that up to a site.  The blog at least takes away that last hurdle.

Erminespot is currently undergoing a renovation.  We hope you like the new look.  We’ll be working to add more content more frequently through our new WordPress implimentation. We’re sorry if you were looking for a specific page, but it’ll be back shortly.

Yours,

G&G