Championship Standings Now Online

The championship standings are now online - they are updated live by Bill Thurlow, as he processes and validates the results. I'll try and find a way of subbing to the results page via email, and update the blog when it's there. Till then, keep an eye on that page.

Website Refresh

The Society of Ancients website has had a refresh for 2010. There may be some glitches in there; if so, let me know directly. Many thanks to Tim Mayall for doing testing work on the new site over the last few weeks.

As part of this, subscriptions for 2010 are now available from the store. 2009 subscriptions will continue to be available until after November's issue goes out.

Anyhow, hope you like it.

Got a Blog?

I've added a blog aggregator to the website, the idea is to pull together the various blogs kept by society members. In the starting stages right now, so there are relatively few on there. If you have a wargames or ancient history related blog, and you're a society member, contact me, either using the contact details in Slingshot or the contact form on this site (set the topic to "Website Stuff").

The aggregator is here. At some point I'll change the template to better fit with the rest of the site.

Website Additions

The following items have been added to the website:
Under Battle Day:

• Battle Pack for 2004 (Gaugamela) - note the map wasn't high enough resolution; I'll work on updating it and revising this document
• Battle Pack for 2005 (The Sambre)
• Battle Pack for 2006 (Dorylaeum)

Under Downloads (in the Members Area):

• A revised high res main map for Age of Augustus (Slingshot 261)
• High res versions of the Age of Augustus Parthian and Barbarian maps. The Barbarian map includes several revisions supplied by Paul Burton, the author
• A high res version of the map for the Attila DBA campaign (Slingshot 258)

Website News and Blog Merges

Hi. I'm going through a process of merging the three blogs on this site, starting with merging in the website news area, which is easier. Slingshot News will also be merged at the point where I can work out how to move the posts over into this main blog. Website news is for any (medium to major) changes to the website, and in future, when new stuff is posted to the members area, some indication will appear here also.

Update: the Slingshot news blog is now merged in as well. There should be a couple of items per issue in this blog, one being the announcement and table of contents, the other being (a probably trimmed down version of) the editors report provided to committee meetings.

Members Area Open on Website

Hi. As you should be able to see from the tabs on http://www.soa.org.uk, there is now a "Members Area" on the website. The purpose of this is described in more detail in the editorial of Slingshot 263, but, briefly, the idea is to provide an area for additional material and also for stuff which is specific to the running of the society, such as minutes. The members area also allows for the facility of free member "home pages" (actually they can consist of multiple pages) on which you can host your own hobby and history related material, only accessible by other members.
There isn't *that* much there at the moment – at the time of writing there are just some hi-res versions of the campaign maps from the recent campaign articles in Slingshot, and the homepage area. Some content from the main site may migrate inside the members area.
For the members area, your userid will be your membership number; you'll need to get a password from the webmaster. Either write and supply your name (first and last name) and membership number, or use the contact form from the "Contact" tab – put your membership number in the message. Also say whether you'd like a homepage setting up.
Thanks
Mark

Windows Issues

Tim Myall mailed me to tell me about a bunch of issues on Windows IE, starting with the home page. I’ve been going through and fixing the various issues that Tim called out, and a further group that I subsequently found. Right now the home page is fixed, and some other problematical pages such as the Slingshot Previous Issues is fixed. There are some alignment issues on some remaining pages, which I’ll iron out this week, and a couple of issues on some of the pages with fancier menus.

Some observations:

I use a Mac, and had hoped some of these issues were caught by simply asking the committee to provide feedback from their Windows machines. Daft idea. I will try and check on Windows (under emulation) when I add pages going forward.

The pages in question all work under (on a Mac) Safari and Firefox and (on Windows) Safari, Chrome and Firefox. The home page issue is down to a bug in IE6 and IE7 which has been fixed in IE8. The remaining issues I need to fix are problems only in all versions of IE. My strong suggestion - if you want a better Internet experience, and can’t afford to drop Windows completely, at least get yourself a better browser.

Events

The events page was extremely slow, basically because it loaded the events from a very slow third party calendar server. Accordingly, I’ve replaced it for the moment with an embedded Google Calendar, which is less pretty and functional but which takes less than 20 seconds to load. It also allows somebody else to maintain the events list, which is in line with the intent of being able to distribute responsibility for the website in line with various people’s remits, rather than concentrate it because nobody can edit it but the webmaster. Anyhow, the address has now changed, and you may have to refresh the site in your browser to pick up the new tabs.

Printing

I had a complaint pointing out it was impossible to print out a page sensibly. This has been fixed, for those pages with substantive (text, or styled text with images) content. For some of the fancier pages (such as and including the home page) it’s not really possible to get a sensible print of the page. In general everything you find on the home page should link to a more content-full page elsewhere, which can be printed. Please use the Contact Us form to let me know of any further problems with printing (use the “Website Enquiry or Comment” topic).

Championship Online Results Submission

A new form has been added to the championship pages to allow you to submit results online; you can find it here. You can also download a printable copy of the results form from the Downloads page, in which case you’d then have to mail the result to Bill Thurlow (our society ombudsman; you can find his mailing address on the inside front cover of the latest Slingshot).

Website News

What, three blogs on one server? Actually it’s just an easy way of providing news feeds and there’s a deliberate decision to avoid having news from one source bump major society news off the main page. I’ll use this one for simple updates on changes/fixes to the website. Hence, the entries are going to be fairly short, much as this one is.

Society of Ancients Web Store up and running

Today's big marketing push - the SoA web store is live on the new site. Well done to our webmaster, Peter Barham. Use the navigation bar on the left to move between mass purchases of games and mass purchases of publications. My top buy - the DVD, which contains all the issues of Slingshot from just before the ice age up to and including 2005 (but it's only available to society members, so make sure you join up at the same time). By the way, I'm not sure people realise that the subscriptions are by calendar year - whenever you subscribe in the current year, you get all the issues for that year so far, and then get the issues sent through for the rest of the year, as they come out.

Couple of other announcements as well - if you re-upped your subscription in time (I think before the end of February) you also get an incentive, which has been for quite a while a game - this year's game is called "Roma Invicta?", is written by Garrett Mills and Phil Sabin, and provides a strategic perspective of Hannibal's campaign in Italy, 218 to 216BC. Now, we've had a number of production delays with this, and ultimately it ended up with the same new printers who published the latest Slingshot. It's just arrived with members in the UK, and you should also be seeing it further afield in the next few days.

And ... there is a new mailing list for society members. If the committee has your email address, you should have received an invitation. We've started it to try and provide a closer means of communication between the society's committee and the membership. I plan to start running polls on it as regards various thoughts we have for Slingshot. So if you haven't responded to your invitation, please do so!