tells something about herself.
As I mentioned earlier, I have somewhere I have to go tonight. So I take a break to change into shirt-and-tie (and pants), then back to the keyboard.
Now it's content time - which means making sure the homepage has something scheduled for tomorrow. (TMP is actually driven by a series of databases, and I can set up items for any date in advance. Sometimes I'm working several days ahead. Right now, I'm not...)
I decide to start with On the Internet, since it's fun to do. (Sometimes I save it for last, since it's also easy to do.) What I like about it is that it's one of the places at TMP where individual Joe Gamer can get his moment in the spotlight. It's also often about actual gaming, rather than just the accumulation of new miniatures (fun as that is!).
How do I find items for On the Internet?
- online submissions - Sent in through the website. These go directly into a database, and are easiest for me to publish.
- email submissions - These are next on my priority list, since they're slightly harder to process.
- things I've seen - If I see something interesting, I email myself a note to mention it at TMP someday.
- things I find - If it's a really slow day at TMP, I run some search utilities on "mailing list"-type email to see what's new out there.
- old favorites - Sometimes it pays off just to go back to good websites I know of, to see what the lastest improvements are.
Lately, I usually don't get past #2 before I find my desired two items for the day. Today, one item in the automatic submission bin (well, there are more, but they're from people putting news items in the wrong spot - I'll deal with that later). I get a chuckle, as the submitter has mis-spelled the name of his own website (should be PaintFront, not PainFront). Then again, you'd be surprised how many people spell the name of their own companies wrong, or give me the wrong URL for their websites!) Oh, wait - the PaintFront item is requested for a future date, so I'll hold off on that...
Now to my email stack. I have 50 possibilities - and I pick two items out for today.
Again, I use an admin page to set up the On the Internet items. (You can tell it's an "old tech" page by the grey background.) On the left side is the input form, and on the right side is a rough preview of the item.
The first item for today is from Wayne Turner over at Battlefront - he's been doing a really great job of online support for their Flames of War game. He's sent me the list of latest updates at their website. Unfortunately, he doesn't include specific links for the individual items, so I quickly Opera over there and get that info. Two items aren't linkable since they're just on his homepage, so I leave them unlinked. (One of them is New Releases! - I've tried to encourage Wayne to send me actual Hobby News submissions when Battlefront has new items out, but that doesn't seem to work for them.)
Wayne also didn't pick a picture, so I do a quick browse and find one that looks interesting to me. It's too large for our format, so I do a quick resize, then adjust the contrast (when you shrink a picture, they sometimes look darker).
The second item for today is from our old friend Zaphod Beeblebrox (you know him from Last Painter Standing) - he's got a new gallery entry from a friend of his, in honor of the Conan author. I open up two browsers - I find it easier to edit in Internet Explorer, and to browse in Opera. He's given me the link to the site, but I grab the specific link to the gallery entry as well for readers' convenience (both will be shown in the item).
Then comes the picture. I like to include a picture whenever I can, as it grabs more attention for the particular site. I download the photo from the website, and check it's actual dimensions (often, people make the mistake of posting some large picture on their site, and using HTML to make it smaller - bad idea, don't do this, it just makes your picture look crappy). Turns out this picture was posted at actual size, which makes it narrow enough for our format - but the height might make the file size too large. I run a quick compression check - picture works like a charm.
I upload all the photos to TMP, and confirm the two entries in the database. (And switch over to another admin tool to confirm it's right.)
(Tomorrow, you'll notice that the items appear in backwards order - first in, last out.)
I'm now seven hours into my work day...