No, still not done with the promised page yet. :( I'm trying!

I was fiddling around with the galleries on the fanart page in preparation for something else I wanted to do; the resultant fiddling has apparently deleted all of the titles and other information about all of those images (dates, comments, sort order, etc.). I guess I should've anticipated that and at least c/p'd some stuff, but I didn't! Oh, well! I'm going to have to try and remember all the crap I wrote and put everything back the way it was from scratch. The pictures themselves are still there, so don't worry about that; they're just missing their titles and all other pertinent/interesting/blah information, and they're not in the neat semi-chronological order they were in before. I apologize if this has inconvenienced you–though it's probably a bigger inconvenience to me than it is to anyone else–and will fix it as best I can as soon as possible.

(There's also the minor problem that I bet this fiddling broke the links to some of my images elsewhere–my sporadically updated art threads on a few forums, for example. Oops. I guess I'd better go fix those at some point, too. The recent ones, anyway.)

There will probably be a SUPER SPECIAL SECRET TOTALLY NOT PREDICTABLE SURPRISE starting later in the month, though, so there's that!

Back so soon, Phoenix?

Just two quick updates today. I finally got off my butt and finished that Riolu render that's been sitting on my hard drive for weeks. I also added a page to the menu under Main. Simple, and more for my benefit than anyone else's, but you can consider it a bit of a teaser if you like (and something to point at when you yell at me for taking forever to do something).

Now that I only have one day of school left in the quarter (!), I should have time to finish that guide revamp as well as start on some other stuff on that list. The operative word in that sentence being "should", but I will try!

EDIT: Still not 2 AM! But it might as well be, because the only possible explanation for the sudden disappearance of the Sceptile layout is that I am exhausted out of my mind and therefore hallucinating!

...or it could be that I made a new layout and got a styleswitcher, but that's nowhere near as interesting as hallucinations!

Anyway, yes! New layout, based on that picture of Lugia and Jolteon I drew and mentioned back in April (and not February as my memory continues to insist)! The structure of the pages is... well, exactly the same, but I figured it was high time for a lighter color scheme and this was the quickest way to get something semi-cool-looking. I do intend to drum up some new layouts that actually have new layouts before the end of the year, but those'll have to wait a bit.

If you miss Sceptile, though, he's still around! A new section has been added to the menu; just click the "Leaf Storm" link under Styleswitcher and everything will go back to the same soothing, sexy dark green you've come to know and love. I've wanted to bring the styleswitcher back for a while now, but the CMS is finicky when it comes to that sort of thing and I couldn't find a working solution until today. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it around!

While making the Storm at Sea layout I also took a minute to tweak bits of Leaf Storm. Namely, the subpages of sections like Fanfiction and Misc. Writing should not be so horribly spaced out in the menu there. That had been on my nerves for a while but I was too lazy to fix it until now. All better. Oh, and I reduced the number of news items shown per page to 5. No reason for the front page to be that damn long.

If you experience any problems with either layout or with the styleswitcher, contact me and give me a heads-up. I'll do what I can to sort it out.

Is it 2 AM yet? No? Oh, well, I'll post anyway.

Brief update to announce that dcNET is now affiliated with FireChao.com! Don't let the name fool you–this neat little (but quickly growing) site's content is primarily Pokémon-based. Of particular interest are their sections on the popular adoptable site GPX+; I'm not a huge fan of that sort of thing myself, but for those of you who are their GPX+ EggDex and other comprehensive resources should be a real boon. They also have forums, an oekaki, interesting guides... give them a visit!

Since that "setting deadlines" thing worked so well for the ref scale (what a concept!), I think I'll just go ahead and set myself another one for fixing that bloody awful ASB for Beginners page: October 4th. That's when my next school quarter starts, and I'd like to get some crap actually done around here before I get bogged down again. Hold me to it, please! (I'd like to get a few more things ready by the 4th, but I am a pathetic panda and probably shouldn't try to do too much at once. Baby steps, Phoenix, baby steps.)

EDIT: ...have I ever actually had more than one thing to report in a single day before? Wow. Anyway, dcNET has its first affiliate: Floatzel.net! In case you haven't heard of it (and if you haven't, why not?), it's a big, booming site with a lot of great content, covering Pokémon, Mario and several other topics. Among its attractions are a popular series of "Let's Play" videos and the most hardcore Pokémon fan quiz I think I've ever seen. Give them a visit if you haven't already.

First of all, I finally got around to cleaning up the last of the sitely pages that was in dire need of a makeover (under "Main" to your left). Nothing drastically new or fancy there, but now they're more up to date and I am less embarrassed to say that I wrote them.

More importantly, I've made a pretty big update to the ASB reffing calculators. They've been woefully bad (especially the energy calc) for the longest time now. I was originally just going to fix the formulas in the Instacalc calculators that were already there, but in the end I just decided to put the poor things out of their misery. I've completely redone them in Flash; they are now more intuitive, cleaner, slightly less ugly and, best of all, impossible for you to mess up by accidentally changing the name of a variable or erasing too much in one of the fields. The damage calculator is more or less the same, but I have changed the way I calculate energy so that it actually makes half an ounce of sense. If you've been using the old calculators, stop that and go play with the sexy new ones instead.

I will probably also be adding a written version of the scale to the site for reference (after all, it's not that great an idea to use a scale without knowing how it actually works).

Ohey look I finally finished that fakedex website I've been telling you about! The dcNET Phoenixdex is (and will be for a very long time) a huge work in progress, but no reason I can't show off what I've got so far, right? The link has been added to the menu as well.

In addition, I've decided to open up affiliation. On the off chance you want to see your button over there on the left and wouldn't mind advertising dcNET, well. There you go. (Yes, I know that there's no "affiliates" section on the menu right now. An empty section would look pretty stupid, don't you think? I'll add it in when I get my first affiliate.)

I still have a few days left on my break, and now that I can stop rushing through getting the Phoenixdex up I *should* have time to do some more stuff around here.