A Fresh Start

Filed under: Site News — Fish at 8:20 pm on Friday, October 27, 2006

Hey everyone,

You are either saying “Man, JediNet has been down for the past week! I wonder what’s up?” or “Man, I guess JediNet finally gave up the fight. That site had been dead man, dead.”

Well, first off, I’ll be the first to admit that posting Star Wars news hasn’t been my top priority in this post-Revenge of the Sith world. Not that I disliked the film, I actually enjoyed it quite a bit — more than I expected to. However, I personally don’t have a lot of interest in the whole EU scene and JediNet’s staff had dwindled over the years. It turned into Shada posting collecting news and my hopping on every once in a while to post major news.

Well, technical matters intervened and lit a fire under me. Last week when I was uploading pictures from a friend’s wedding to a personal site I had hosted on the JN server, I noticed that there were some issues. My FTP transfer kept cutting off, and when I logged onto the server remotely I couldn’t stay connected. A phone call to tech support was placed. I was told that my hard drive was toast as well as the motherboard.

I had been hosting JN on a Windows 2003 server because the site was running on a custom ASP program. This cost about a hundred dollars a month, and that made it necessary to fill the site with ugly, annoying banner and interstitial ads — when I took over JN in 2004 it was paying for itself every month, I’ll be the first to admit that the revenue from the months surrounding Episode III’s release helped to pay for my new computer (a PowerMac G5, which seems so outdated now a year and a half later)… but as of late, well, not a lot of Star Wars news being posted, less people visiting and I was paying out of pocket monthly even with all the banners. Had I not been hosting some other sites on the server I may very well have pulled the plug a few months ago.

The server crash seemed like a perfect opportunity to do just that. However, after a day of work and a lot of reading of The Unofficial Apple Weblog and Engadget, I said to myself “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you had a community-driven site where folks could write about Star Wars.”

JediNet, as an established domain, seems like a good stepping stone for just that. So here’s the deal. I’m inviting you, the person reading this, to set up an account here and post. It could be a review of the latest Star Wars book or comic, it could be news that just broke and you’d like to share with fans, it cold be something about an interview with someone you’ve done for your web site. I’m going to leave this open and unmoderated to start — consider it an experiment. If folks start abusing the posting, I’ll be forced to add moderation… and of course we’ll be working on bringing back some of the old JediNet content to you in the coming weeks. If anyone would like to lend a hand, set up a user account and drop a comment in here. In the meantime, enjoy and happy posting.

14 Comments »

Comment by Parabola

October 27, 2006 @ 9:13 pm

And I’d be the first to admit to being an MIA staff member for the past while. Sure, there are plenty of real-world excuses - grad research paper, new full-time job - not to mention recurring SW burnout and frustration with the old format.

This new community format is just the kind of thing to give me a kick in the rear; I hope the Timeline can fit into the plans. Give me a shout, you should have access to the email address associated with this account.

Comment by T-bone

October 27, 2006 @ 9:22 pm

Lookin good.

Comment by Shada

October 27, 2006 @ 9:31 pm

So that’s what happened. Nice of you to tell us. ;-) Since I was the only staff member pulling my weight around here and everything (just kidding!) (thanks for the shout out. :-) ). But I’ll try to post any significant collecting news over here. I don’t collect much any more myself, running out of room and funds, but I do like to keep up.

Comment by janlomona

October 30, 2006 @ 8:29 am

Great idea, another cool place to swap Star Wars knowledge and stories. Enjoyed interviewing Jim on Lightsabre earlier this year, glad he’s still in the game.
Not sure about the large letter format, but these tings get altered as they go on, and with such a good name as JediNet I’m sure it will all go great.
Best of luck guys.

Comment by Trilogist

October 30, 2006 @ 9:17 pm

Hmmm … we definitely need to look into that. I’m viewing this page with Firefox under normal circumstances, and everything looks fine, albeit a bit purplish ;)

But viewing this page in IE and I see what you mean now. It’s HUGE! I’ll check into that.

Comment by Parabola

October 30, 2006 @ 10:01 pm

Uggg, IE strikes again. It hadn’t occurred to me to check things in that browser yet, it looks just fine with Firefox. Somehow IE isn’t playing nice with the style sheet … I’m using it as a basis for my Timeline reformatting, and it looks way messed up in IE.

Comment by Fish

October 31, 2006 @ 6:00 pm

Ok, everyone with IE problems, get a Mac? :)

Seriously, I’m going to look into it — from calling to set up hosting to getting the site online took about 5 hours, so my apologies for the speed bumps with the fonts.

Oddly enough, it loads up fine on the version of IE that ships with Windows Mobile, but I guess not everyone is accessing from a PocketPC? :)

Comment by Parabola

October 31, 2006 @ 8:18 pm

Any brave souls out there using IE7? I wonder if its handling of CSS is a little closer to the actual standards.

Oh, for what it’s worth, things look fine on a BlackBerry Browser. :)

Comment by Shada

November 2, 2006 @ 8:59 pm

Looks fine on Firefox. A little purple, but I like purple.

Comment by aPPmaSTer

November 6, 2006 @ 1:32 pm

Just something I noticed. The site feels a little empty now that it’s just a blog. I know that there isn’t a lot of new Star Wars info coming in these days, but it’s still very possible to have new content coming in all the time.

I think it’s time for the fans to take over. That’s what JediNet always was wasn’t it? “For the fans, by the fans” right? So why not do just that? Make fans participate in continuing the Star Wars legacy. I’m talking Fan Fiction, Fan Art, blogs, etc. It could be a whole new beginning to JN.C.

Comment by Trilogist

November 6, 2006 @ 7:10 pm

Smashing idea! And the fans are certainly welcome to contribute content to the site. Simply register and post away!

Comment by Suzanne

November 20, 2006 @ 11:56 pm

Nice to see JediNet back online. I like this colour scheme much better too.

Will the old pages be accessible at some stage? - I have a lot of dead review links out there. ;)

Comment by bloggochicago

November 25, 2006 @ 9:26 am

Hi. Tried to access the old JediNet Timeline and found it gone! So I’ve registered an account here. Will the Timeline be back up? I’m not sure how WP savvy you are, but it’s possible to put it on its own page. I’ll be happy to lend a hand.

Comment by Barb

November 25, 2006 @ 9:29 am

Oops. I left that comment before updating my profile. This one should leave my real name and a link to my blog, also in WP, where you can reach me.

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