Wednesday, July 10, 2013

The New Royal Website of Oz is here!

Finally, the new version of my website, "The Royal Website of Oz," is online!

This time, I'm running the site with Wordpress. Aside from a cleaner, easier-to-use interface, this allows for easier updating and user-generated content! You can submit an Oz story or a news report, and when it's approved, it will show up under the new "Ozmapolitan" tab.

Just register for an account (scroll down to the bottom of the home page), then when you're done, go to the bar at the top of the site:
Click "New" then "Post," then write in your new page.

When you're done, click "Submit for Review" on the right. After it's approved, it will show up on the site!

Similarly, you can embed externally hosted pictures or videos using the "gallery" option. It doesn't seem we can allow user uploads at this time. (YouTube and Photobucket offer embedding codes you can use.) Once approved, these will show up on the "Picture Gallery" tab.

Also, we have online playable versions of the games, as we have had under previous versions of the website. New in the "Downloads" section is a Mac version of the Denslow font which Sam has tested for us. The two versions download together in a zip archive file, but you can install the one you need.

Also, I'm working on getting flowing HTML versions of public domain Oz and Oz-related works on the site. These will be clean, non-marked HTML versions you can download (I understand most e-readers run plain HTML), and I'm expanding the scope to all public domain works by Baum, Denslow, Thompson, Neill and Snow. Each author of the Famous Forty (and Denslow) will have a bibliography page, while the Oz books and related works are listed in the main library page.

Plus, there are links to this blog, the podcast, the wiki, and the forums, though we were unable to make a universal login for the sites we're hosting on this server (the wiki, forums and main site). We tried, but it got far too messy and it just didn't work.

Some of this is still under construction, but I hope the interactive angle will help make this one of the best Oz sites out there! Feel free to offer suggestions and the like, whether it's a site that should be listed on the links page or a new feature we could try to pull off.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, Jared! I bet you already know, but just in case...
I noticed his morning that the Royal Forum of Oz is not online anymore. I tried also your Royal Website of Oz minutes ago with the same results.
Thanks,
Carlo (sorry if you got this message twice. It seems the first one didn't go through)

Jay said...

Thanks for the notice. It's been remedied. But please, send any outage notices to my e-mail (specified in the "contact Jared" link to the right) so it gets to me faster. I don't operate the server, but I'll pass it to the guy who does.