It took a lot of work, and a couple of missteps, but the new Podtacular.com is now live!

Hosted by Foo Mo Jive, Podtacular started in July 2005 as an unofficial podcast discussing all things Halo 2, including game tips and strategies, interviews, custom gametypes and the Xbox Live community.

Having originally built the site on the e107 publishing platform, there were problems from the start, with everything from the templates and structure to the constantly-changing core (which is still in development). This caused a couple of nasty problems to show up in the course of developing the site, so I had to back out and look for an alternative. I just couldn't risk building what I hope to be a great community site on a faulty foundation. I didn't want it to fall apart at any given moment.

So I moved everything over to the CivicSpace platform, which runs on the Drupal "engine." As it turns out, CivicSpace is built almost entirely around the idea of a community site. So it's well equipped and well-developed for web standards and an organized site structure. And then there are all of the plugins, also called "modules," that extend the CMS even further. The level of configuration within it all is staggering and at first, a little intimidating, but for standard users, I think it'll be a comfortable fit.

So if you're into Halo 2, Xbox games or just online gaming in general, check it out. I'm even scheduled to appear on the next podcast sometime soon!

With Web 2.0 being all the rage lately (and already inspiring a backlash of sorts), I've been slow to really take the time to see what it's all about. I know it was sparked by some small companies taking some new approaches to how the web works--the most notable being companies like Google, Flickr, del.icio.us and even 37Signals--but I also know there's more to it than that.

It seems to be more of a movement than a technological advance, but the darling of the moment is AJAX, or Asynchronous Javascript And XML. I know there's some neat things AJAX can do in regards to the end user experience, and I also know that it's been around for years, mostly under the guise of DHTML. And for that reason, I'm leery of taking advantage of it.

Until I found script.aculo.us, where Thomas Fuchs has compiled a number of recently developed scripts and techniques to handle the most common AJAX effects and functions into one downloadable and easy-to-use package. Seemed easy enough, so I took the bait and started playing around with it.

For starters, I wanted to rearrange my home page a bit, but wanted an easy way for visitors to find all of the information on the page without have to scroll around. So I wanted a button or link that would instantly send the user to the right part of the page (either top or bottom). Now, I've seen this done plenty of times, and have put together a couple of scripts to do it myself in the past, but I wanted to see if scriptaculous could do it for me. I looked through all of the functions, and there it was--"Effect.ScrollTo". All I had to do was tell it which div to go to using the ID selectors and -presto!- there it is!

So now, maybe I'll be able to implement some basic functions with relative ease, even though I don't see any immediate need for anything else. Maybe it's just about keeping up with what's new, maybe it's about needing to know what the future might hold, but I wanted to see what was up with all this AJAX business, even at a basic level.

What I don't understand is all the rest of that fuss about Web 2.0.

With a recent visual upgrade and some heavy back-end improvements, the new, new Newtype USA site is alive and well. There were some kinks to iron out and still some pages to transition over and populate, but for the most part, people seem to like the new look and organization overall. It was another proud moment for me, being the sole individual behind putting it together. It’s definitely keeping me busy these days—staying on top of it all.

Then I received this e-mail:

The print on your site is way too small and it is difficult to read. I have to copy and paste the words into a document inorder to get my way around the site. Could you please do something about that?

In all my work to make a flexible design that would render across almost all major browsers, all my work to stick to the strictest of specs and standards, I had managed to overlook an entire portion of the audience. I had made a giant assumption about our visitors and their accessibility needs and someone called me on it. The shame…

After hitting some snags trying to get some sort of site management tool for work, I've now got some great stuff in the works. I'd already exhausted any possibilities of a well-designed, user-friendly ASP application and without a separate database, was getting to the point of just using a crude flatfile system. I know, I know, Movable Type (which powers this site) has a flatfile option, but it's also very flexible and works as either a CGI or PHP application. Yet, for some reason, there was this unwritten rule that the site had to use ASP scripting only. I say "was" because once I asked about using a PHP application and had a new database set up, suddenly the gates were flung open.

Perfect. Now I needed to find a suitable application. Capable of handling several users, very platform-friendly, had an intuitive user experience and most of all, little or no cost. Man, did I not know how many choices there were. From the start, I decided to look at open source systems only. That would not only lock the cost at zero, but would also provide a vast support and development community. So with that in mind, I started doing some research.

I have to admit, one of the things I had in mind when I signed on at my job was getting in on some web design action. It wasn't exactly obvious how I'd be able to do that, but because I had experience in web design for several years, it was something I was interested in. When I found out that there was a separate team working on web development, I was a little disappointed, but figured that was all for the best. Good, let them handle it, I said. At least, that was my initial reaction.

Like most companies who operate under a parent entity, the site was being managed under an umbrella structure, meaning that one team handled design, development and maintenance of ALL corporate sites. Unfortunately for us, there was a time when priorities had shifted and the magazine dropped in both relevance and status within that structure. In turn (at least this is what I was told) each division was given back control of their respective web presence, in order to free up man-hours for other projects. As a result, the magazine's site quickly grew stagnant. Because it relied on a database-like back end, it became a chore just to update content and almost impossible to get quirks and bugs stamped out.

That's when, after several months of nudging, I just couldn't help it anymore. One day, I simply asked, "why don't we just do this ourselves?" and surprisingly, I didn't meet with much resistance. Instead, I got the go-ahead to work up some ideas.