We have some major upgrades to inform members about this week. We don’t want to bore most of our artistic members with the technicalities of this change, but a short explanation is in order.

Over the last couple of weeks we received several reports of would-be members having problems joining the site. A bizarre new quirk was discovered in Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP with Service Pack 2 that was cutting off some of their member details on form submission—as such, they could not join. Anyone interested on what we found and how we fixed it may read Internet Explorer 6 problem with character sets.

The main concern for current members is that we had to change the character set of the site from ISO-8859-1 to UTF-8. Again, this is probably complete gibberish to most of our members—but what it means is that special characters such as em dashes (—) , smart quotes (“”), umlauts (ö) etc, that are in current articles, events, profiles and cut lines will now show up with funny symbols (in Firefox) and question marks (in Internet Explorer).

While we have been looking for some of these instances, it would be very helpful if each member updated their own profiles and articles. You should be able to copy and paste your information in the same manner you did for the articles and profiles orginally. Note that we have already updated some instances as we look through the site. But there are already around 250 members and a couple hundred articles, not to mention events and image names/cut lines. Our staff is very small.

In other news, we have added a new article to the Frequently Asked Questions page to explain the “Friends/Associate” function of the site. It’s an article you must log in to see. We are adding tutorials on using/administering guestbooks this week.

Finally, we want to welcome all the new members we have had this week. Among them are some published science fiction authors! (Yes, we’ve been scouring the web for a new branch of talent).

We hope that members add some new articles (literary and/or visual) this week to feature on the front page. Also, don’t forget to let your fans and co-workers know about us. (I guess that means we’re asking everyone to help promote our project here…)

As always, we are open to suggestions from members on new features to add or old ones to improve.