With the Age of Conan on the horizon, I've completely redone my guild's website: Left Hand Path. We're all set, cruft-free, to enter the world of Hyboria.

It's been...

• 3 years since I started playing World of Warcraft.
• 9 years since I owned my first dedicated webserver.
• 10 years since I became spoiled with broadband.
• 11 years since I first played an "MMORPG".
• 13 years since I started this website / blog.
• 16 years since I began working in the videogame industry.
• 18 years since I first played a "MUD".
• 20 years since I received my first "Internet" email.
• 24 years since I owned my first computer.
• 25 years since I learned my first computer language.
• 34 years since I first played a videogame.

I just upgraded and reinstalled my server yesterday. Everything had gone smoothly in my dry-run tests on a local machine, but a bit of bad RAM that needed to be replaced caused a wee bit 'o troubles and more downtime than I'd planned.

It's not very often that I experience direct server downtime. The uptime on my server was approaching 3 years since the last full reboot, but it was also long overdue for a kernel upgrade because it was limiting my software choices.

So now here we are, running on a fresh install. There are bound to be little issues on my various sites with the newer software. I've tried to kludge in a few brute force fixes right away, we'll see how that works. I'll also be fiddling with some new features, so don't be surprised if some things break. Hopefully only minor things. ;)

Just a small lesson in web etiquette that some people tend to miss. I know it's pretty easy to use the 'ole nets these days, what with Myspace and Facebook and all, but there are some basic concepts which most folks should understand.

The old "don't be a dick, right-click and save-as" motto still exists as far as I'm concerned. Embedding content from Youtube, Flickr and the ilk is obviously cool, they provide those links right there to promote their bandwidth for your own personal usage, that's what they're there for. Copyright is also something fairly flexible: case in point, the Trogdor image below I originally used to reference the fine folks at homestarrunner.com, a typical example of fair usage.

I'm not going to get on any high horses here, just realize that embedding images from sites where the theme is not a shared-hosting service is asking for a bit of abuse at your own expense.

I know, I could set all of the images stored on my server to disallow referring, but there are circumstances when I'd like to use my own storage elsewhere (ala forum signatures and whatnot) and I'd rather not micromanage that. So when someone else treats my server like their own personal storage facility, like say... for their Myspace page, I have a tendency to do something like swap this:

for this:

Before you tell me how evil I may or may not be, consider that the standard photos most people substitute in these circumstances are tubgirl and goatse.cx. I think I'm being rather kind, comparatively speaking. Pretty soon I'll just remove the image and they can have a nice pretty broken image icon instead. =P

I've just made a small update to the MMOROG comments->forums bridge, enabling a template theme that matches my blog better, although it still needs more tweaking.

Overall, my forums site will still use the LeftHandPath theme, but I'll work on making appropriate themes for all of the sections supporting my other sites. This is all part of my attempt to consolidate forums for the numerous sites I update.