We thought we should give you an update on exactly what we're working on at the moment, so here it is!

With the mini-Blog

• The procedure for showing posts is rather mess, so that'll have to be fixed.
• Adding polls to promote user activity and generally get ideas about what you readers think.
• A top commenter's section in the side bar, giving a link back to them as a thanks for adding to the site's content!
• On the back end, I want to make an algorithm that can quickly detect SPAM and remove it from the moderation queue.

Kingdom of Alrond

• We're continuously working on KoA; we're almost up to where we left off with Sheep Farmer. It's taken us this long because we've had to rewrite everything, obviously and make sure it's up to par with our new systems of the mapping and just generally exciting stuff!

What we were planning on doing was do a substantial amount of work to KoA, just enough to make it usable, and then make the site live for BETA users to use in it's not-yet-finished form. However, in KoA's coding we've used some PHP5 and MySQL5 features that our hosts, BEA Solutions' shared server doesn't currently have as I mentioned before. This means that I'll have to either wait till they upgrade, switch to another host or purchase a dedicated server.

Switching to another host is really out of the question. We've been with BEA Solutions from the start and have set up a pretty good relationship with them. Also, I doubt that we'd find anywhere as cheap as they're doing our package, so yay for them!

Waiting seems like the easiest thing to do. Though I don't think they'll be upgrading in the foreseeable future, so it may be a bit of time. In any case, KoA is no where near finished enough for even BETA users to see so it's not really us having to wait, since we have to carry on coding it up anyway.

My final option was to get our own server, rather than a shared one. These start at around £150 a month, so KoA would have to be a finish product for us to release it and be able to have enough money from advertising to cover that. Here at Shamess Productions, we all love the idea of having our own server to manage our selves and have complete control of. The only limiting factor here is the price.

It looks like we're going with option two at the moment, wait for BEA Solutions to upgrade. But we're only settling for this option by default.

I'm in the process of changing this static front page over into a dynamic blog, thus tags don't work yet. Bear with us on that front. To be fair, with two posts why do you even need tags just yet?

Finally, the article section is down pending... well, pending me fixing that page!