For the past few weeks I've been too busy to blog. I've been working on a community site for a friend who runs an eBay group called "The New Jedi Order". Finally, on the day of their Second Anniversary (which they're celebrating with a party) I've finished creating a basic site for them that is away from eBay Groups so that they have more control over what they want. As part of the new site I've rebranded and redeveloped the "Imperial Archives" Star Wars collector database as "The Collector's Vault" - and it should work on the iPhone and other mobile devices too.
Although the NJO community started life over two years ago as an eBay community group this website was created as permanent home for the fantastic community of fans, collectors and friends that the NJO has now become. Everyone is welcome here and the philosophy of the NJO is a simple one ... we are a "family" and what matters is belonging to that family and respecting each other.
The site consists of a forum (dubbed "The Cantina"), an events calendar, competitions, games, opinion polls, photo albums, reviews of Star Wars books, comics and games, checklists for collectors, and it's very own NJO merchandise shop.
The site will be live as of 21:00 GMT tonight, so be sure to check it out, and feel free to take part in the community.
Since I started working on that site such a lot has happened in the world of web development and entertainment! Google started providing their own OpenID service and Microsoft follow suit by saying the Windows Live ID will support OpenID (although only a tech preview at the minute).
Also, Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.1 would support HTML 5's video and audio tags. Meaning that you could do things like:
<video id="video-1" src="my-video.ogg">
Put you alternative content here (containing captions, etc.)
</video>You may be wondering why the video is a .ogg file - well the reason for that is that Firefox 3.1 will only be supporting .ogg files for now; though in JavaScript you will also be able to start the video playing using script such as:
document.getElementById('video-1').play();This ultimately means there are exciting times ahead for web browsers as Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer are likely to follow suit as soon as thry can and should mean a take-up of HTML much sooner that originally planned.
Rackspace Hosting, a UK based webhost has also expanded it's business as it's bought out other webhosts such as the Missouri based Slicehost, and Jungle Disk.
A number of highly anticipated Xbox 360 games have also been released in the last three weeks - Fable 2, Farcry 2, Fallout 2, Gears of Wars 2 and the voice-controlled Endwar. Here in the UK we've also seen the release of a Quantum of Solace game coinciding with the British theatrical release of the film of the same name. It's not a bad film, but it's action driven "story" (if you can call it that) wasn't as good as Casino Royale.
A site worth mentioning that I started using a couple of weeks ago is Free Site Validator - it is a site that will crawl your site and validate it. One good thing about it is that you don't have to create a login per-se, you can use your OpenID login.
