I've remade the Pokemon Sprite Resource for the last time. Basically I unified all the sprite pages into just one template that's easy for me to edit, ditched the super long lists of Pokemon names and instead incorporated a bit of jQuery and dropdown lists (I got the idea from the Sugimori Art page), and basically just made everything way more user friendly. So unless I add more sprite sets there (which I will later, but not anytime soon), you can finally stop hearing about the tweaks I'm making to that page (since through it all nothing really has changed that much to justify all the work I put in, but it's just too darn fun working on the Sprite Resource!) and I shall be moving on to making pages of actual substance.

Also, I had to disable the comments for a while since I moved all the articles to a new platform (since I really hate the default way that Joomla articles work), and I can't figure out how to make the old commenting module work with my new article platform. When I get it fixed I'll turn the comments back on. And yeah, this renders the user accounts pretty much useless. I'll probably remove the log-in thing and put it back in place when I reinstate the article comments. I'm still planning on adding some interactivity to the site with the user accounts, by the way!

However, after switching to the new article platform, I finally got the News Archives working the way I wanted it to, so that page is finally up, along with a link to all the old updates from the site before the move to Joomla.

Aaand one more item of news: visit our new affiliate, Azure Flute! The site has a lot of beautiful graphics up for free use, and I recommend you take a look!

On personal news, I'm on Spring Break right now so expect a lot more updates! Ones that contain actual new pages of content too (I'll finally get around to making new art and making that darned art tutorial I've been hinting at)!

So I moved the Sugimori Art, Pokemon Art, and Animated Icons onto an image gallery platform (more specifically JoomGallery), which automatically creates thumbnails and sorts the images for me so I can stop having to do it manually. It may not look like it but it actually took a long, long time to customize the gallery to the way it is now. The creators of the gallery were obviously very paranoid about there being duplicate files in the same folder, so every time I file was uploaded, the script would automatically attach 10 or so random digits to the end of the file name plus the date in order to differentiate it from a file with the same name. I think they went completely overboard with that, so I had to wade through a bunch of source files filled with code that I could hardly understand, but somehow managed to find the exact right file and the exact right line, and modify it in a way so that the file name would go through completely untouched when it was uploaded. Woohoo. And the gallery automatically created really ugly URLs for each category folder, so I had to follow a similar process to eliminate that and clean up the directories. All in all, it was quite a lot of work but I'm really proud of myself, especially since I just guessed most of the way and somehow ended up with more or less the result I was looking for.

But anyway, wow, I went completely off topic. Basically, I hope you guys enjoy the new gallery system. I think it's pretty nifty, and I tip my hat off to the creators of it for providing such an awesome open source script, despite its few faults. :) I think the image resource pages look a lot better now. I will sooner or later move the entire sprite resource onto the gallery too, but I'll just leave it the way it is now for a bit more since I worked so hard to create the lists and everything...

Also, I've pledged not to update the site anymore in the next two weeks (since lately it's become addicting and I've been spending way too much time on it). My school's Science Olympiad competition is in 2 weeks and I've barely started on anything, and plus I just had my term finals last week, wrapping up my "easy" term, so now I'm in my "hard" term, which has a way more rigorous schedule filled with classes I don't enjoy. :(

Sooo it's 3AM in the morning and I've finally finished moving the site onto Joomla, a content managing system. :) Up until now this whole site has been more or less based off of static content but the features that a CMS offers were just too good to turn down! So I decided to move it onto a CMS sooner than later, even though right now everything is still pretty much the same except now people can log in to the site using a forum account, if they have one. As a user, not much has changed but as the admin of the site, pretty much the way the site is run and the way I edit and add content has been completely overhauled, so this is a pretty big deal for me!

There's not much to do with a site account at the moment except not having to continuously type in a username over and over again when commenting on the news articles (which you can now do.. hoorah!), but I will implement more interactive stuff onto the site later, as soon as I get some more skills. I'm thinking of incorporating the user accounts with things like the Masked Pokemon.

Anyway, I've been working all week on this, and I know there are still some style flaws in the site here and there which I shall fix tomorrow or in the coming days. I'm too tired to do it right at the moment though. Hope you guys enjoy!

EDIT: Some more details that have changed/things that I am planning that I was too tired to elaborate on last night: The News Archives page is down because I'm working on syncing articles that I archive to show up on that page. Meanwhile, you can still visit the old news archives here, which I will also provide a link to on the new archives page when it's up. Also, I'm probably going to move all the image resources like the Sugimori Art and original Pokemon art onto some image gallery platform so I can stop manually creating thumbnails and updating the page, and just let the image gallery system do it automatically. And I'd also like to apologize again for some of the ugly styling on certain parts of the site. It might stick around for this week because I really have to stop working on the site and work on my intersession homework for next term, which is due on Monday which I haven't even looked at yet. :<