In the Community: August 2006

[Malachy]

kampkrusty.net (http://www.kampkrusty.net/)
A little inside information in a British accent assured me the widely popular Simpsons Home Radio will be returning very shortly. Yours truly will be guest-speaking.

kampkrusty.net/tsw (http://www.tsw.kampkrusty.net/)
Simpsons Wired has undergone a changing of the guards. Damien stepped down in an update on August 6th, and Stephen picked up later that day. The future for the premiere links site looks bright.

lardlad.com (http://www.lardlad.com)
Adam is reported to have taken his most ambitious step yet in web-design: multi-layouts. Not much is known at the moment, but St. Jukka had this to say: "looking forward to see how adam is going to do it."

krustylustudios.com/nick (http://www.nick.krustylustudios.com/)
Last month I mentioned a teaser page found at the above URL. It was changed at some time and is now advertising a Dr. Nick and Fat Tony amalgamation page.

thesimpsonsmon.net (http://www.thesimpsonsmon.net/)
Simpsons Mon released its third design at the end of July. The colors are sort of overly basic and plain but an improvement over the last. A rumor is also being whispered that Simpsons Mon will be merging with 80 D'ohs or iSimpson.

muntzmania.com (http://www.muntzmania.com/)
Muntz Monument will apparently close its doors in November. Webmaster Stephen explicitly stated in a Lisa Land update that he will not renew the domain. I pointed all the hosted sites in the direction of Simpsons Host.

skype.com (http://www.skype.com/)
I have a line-up of presenters for the audio-broadcast Simpsons Zip Choice 06, but I need two or three more. If you're interested, all you need to do is download Skype. No extra peripherals are necessary.

lardlad.com/bart (http://www.lardlad.com/bart/)
What's this, what's this? I can't tell if it's old or new, but I'm intrigued either way.

babysimpson.co.uk/lisa (http://www.lisa.babysimpson.co.uk/)
Lisa the Beauty Queen shut down earlier this month. Although it's one of the better character sites in the community, many had trouble controlling their giggles.

keytospringfield.com (http://www.keytospringfield.com/)
Still no sign of activity a month after the much-applauded teaser page appeared.

simpsonshost.com (http://www.simpsonshost.com/)
Simpsons Host opened at some random exact time, and the response has been mostly positive. Though the design was made by a third party, the biggest complaint is that there is no assurance of longevity.

simpsoncrazy.com (http://www.simpsoncrazy.com/)
Scott is redesigning Simpson Crazy, and Adam brought up the issue of ownership. Ben has long been uninvolved and at times unattainable; SC seems to be almost exclusively run by Scott. I also mentioned this in an interview with him at the beginning of the summer. And I don't want to discredit Ben in any way, but Simpson Crazy was never at the top of my list until Scott took the reins.

disadvantage of mega-hosts
Simpsons Central is a dead testament to the danger of having one or two sites host the majority of starter-sites. 10 sub-hosted sites shut down after Simpsons Central closed earlier this year. Note: This was written before Simpsons Host opened, not meant at an overt comment on that.

grabpic-use
A whiny girly-man recently brought up the issue of grabpic-use. It all comes down to one thing: overprotectiveness. If you make a grabpic and post it online, it's assumed other webmasters will use it for their projects. What other point would there be? I'll even venture so far as to say credit isn't necessary, though it's certainly a nice gesture.

third-party designers
Third-party web-design has become increasingly common on the internet, and The Simpsons community seems to currently be falling to its wrath. I'd say more than 75% of new sites are designed by people other than their webmasters. Stop it. I'd rather see an OK design made by the webmaster over a LETS-level masterpiece made by a third-party any day.

archive (http://krustofski.com/index.php?page=community)

[mikeymansimpsons]

Great work man. I agree about the third party designs, but SH was designed by Matt cos I had personal stuff going on.

[kampkrusty]

Thw World of Bart Simpson has been there for over a year now. I stumbled across it a while back

[grissom]

Interesting read, Malachy.

As for the third party designs, I would say it depends on the circumstances. For instance, when I requested a new design for TSF, I really didn't have enough experience to make even a fair design. My site was losing a lot of viewers because of the fact that people didn't like my original design. So I had one made, and during the time I had that design, I learned more about making my own. Then, earlier this summer, I did make a new design and it was pretty well received by the community. From now on I'll be making my own designs, but it was a big help to have a nice one at least until I figured out what I was doing. I don't support it in terms of laziness on the webmaster's part though.

[Brad Clarke]

hey hey what about the launch of my broadband video player. lol. Anyways everything slese was a good read, the only reason most poeple rely on other poeple to make designs is because they dont have time to do it, or jsut really suck, id rather see a good design than shit, but thats just my opion.

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

But it's not hard to make an "okay" design... as long as it's not horrible colours, bad navigation and images randomly scattered then it should be fine.

Scott is redesigning Simpson Crazy, and Adam brought up the issue of ownership. Ben has long been uninvolved and at times unattainable; SC seems to be almost exclusively run by Scott. I also mentioned this in an interview with him at the beginning of the summer. And I don't want to discredit Ben in any way, but Simpson Crazy was never at the top of my list until Scott took the reins.
I have been in regular contact with Ben since we were hacked (before then, the only email address I had didn't work). But yeah, nearly all of the content on the site is done by myself. Ben used to post everything product-related, but he's pretty busy these days.

And don't be expecting the redesign anytime soon, there's still a long way to go. I wanted to get it open in time for Season 18 but that is very unlikely now.

[sweetmercifulcrap]

I'll do that skype thing

I'm a fag like that

[tim]

i'll do it too, depending on when it is.

and, oh yeah, about TU, since scott and ben moved SC, all of the information regarding PHP/MySQL databases and absolute paths changed slightly, and i've been getting a weird error (as you can see) right now. it will be fixed when it's fixed.

[camelenchilada]

great read, malachy. i love these.

[mikeymansimpsons]

Excellent Jon, can't wait to do a broadcast with you. Malachy, I'm having trouble recording, I'll PM later with the probs

[Adam]

ah the world of bart simpson. some might not remember but i used to own that site but i decided i owned too many and it closed. i think after i relaunched the milhouse file i threw together that design and chucked the page up to show a few people. i certainly dont have the time to launch such a site, but it was a neat design anyways. glad you found it (how did you?) :)

as for multi-layouts on lets, i hope people dont have the wrong idea. my main gripe is that too many sites have the title and the navigation and then a bunch of text slapped in the content portion. multi-layouts on the new lets are more akin to the current design's 'promo card' page being different to the 'quotes' page. just this time they'll be more varied and more of them.

[Rich Uncle Skeleton]

ah the world of bart simpson. some might not remember but i used to own that site but i decided i owned too many and it closed. i think after i relaunched the milhouse file i threw together that design and chucked the page up to show a few people. i certainly dont have the time to launch such a site, but it was a neat design anyways. glad you found it (how did you?) :)
It's listed in Google (http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=http://www.lardlad.com/bart/&complete=1&hl=en&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8), so my guess is he just happened to type in a certain word combination that threw it near the top of the rankings?

[Malachy]

I can't remember exactly which, but it was linked to on an archive.org of 100 or the tree or some other old site. I was looking through links pages from back in 2002; was there ever another Bart site in that location?

[Solid Snake]

keytospringfield.com (http://www.keytospringfield.com/)
Still no sign of activity a month after the much-applauded teaser page appeared.


The design is coming along and is nearly there, well, from what I saw of it about a week ago. But lord knows what Nick has up his sleeve.

[Adam]

the very same bart site with a different design was housed there for a little while. not long, though.

[Jake]

Stop it. I'd rather see an OK design made by the webmaster over a LETS-level masterpiece made by a third-party any day.


For me, a third party webdesigner wouldn't be a bad idea for two reasons: 1, no one has High Speed internet within 20 miles of where I live that I know, and 2, unless I take time off running my business, there's absolutely no way I can have time to design a site that's not on Geocities. It's not that I lack interest, it's drawing all my content is what eats up my free time.

[Henrik P]

Intresting read. I can't wait for the new designs on SC and LETS.

[SubSane]

Great update as always.

[conor.]

haha i just found an old external harddrive with all my old simpsons webjunk on there, i also have all the old files to a milhouse divided somehow?

been thinking of putting together something little again to kill sometime, anyone have any ideas or need help updating sites?