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What's New At Blondie's Ratcave? First visit? Use the menu on the right. Otherwise, see below for the low-down on all that's new on the site. April 27, 2006 Just some housekeeping...the images and videos lost their old home without notice, but they are on their way back up at another location. All galleries are working now, and the music videos and video clips will come up again over the coming day or two. Sorry about that! December 25, 2003 Merry Christmas! I've added two more wallpapers to the Downloads are. Have a great day! December 15, 2003 Just a small update today! With the help of some friends, I have some lovely fanart, both old and new, in the Downloads area. There are also a couple of recent stories in Fiction. I know of a really nice fic that's in beta at present, so keep your eyes open for that shortly! Also, after a long debate on the subject, I've reluctantly gotten rid of the orange graphic background and replaced it with matte colour on the text areas of the site, in the interests of everyone's eyesight. December 3, 2003 An end of an era! Gertiebeth, who has graciously hosted us for several years now, is calling it a day and shutting down most of her hosting servers. Gertie, thank you for your generosity and support all these years, and all the best for the future. I've moved the site over to a combination of deslea.com and Steph's Webphilia (Steph has already been hosting some of our multimedia for a while). I've also added two music videos - a new one of mine, and an older one made by Yvi and Kitsunegari earlier this year. Stop back next week, because I'll be adding some Krycek/Marita Christmas wallpapers for your enjoyment. November 7, 2003 A fabulous treat today! After years of trying to source them, I've finally got my hands on a second production unit tape of unused takes from the filming of Patient X. I'm uploading 249 screen captures and some video clips of the kiss as it could have been. The quality isn't fantastic - the takes had not yet had audio dubbing or colour correction - but I've done some tweaking, and they're still fabulous to watch. The alternate kiss is particularly interesting. I've also added some comments and thoughts about the outtakes here. October 7, 2003 Lots of things today! We have eight new stories in Fiction, among them Spica's beautiful piece Dagger Moon. Also there are the first two episodes of XFVCU, the new virtual series. The series is set eighteen months after The Truth, and Krycek has emerged from witness protection at the conclusion of the FBI/XF's cover operation to expose the conspiracy. Now married to Marita, he's back on the expanded X Files team, partnered with Fowley, and stirring up his own brand of trouble from within. Images have moved for faster load times, and I've added DVD captures from Teliko. Please note that the whole site has moved to another part of Gertie's server, so if you have any internal links to the site, they'll be broken. You'll need to fix them. Also, while tracking down people to let them know on the banner exchange, I found that most of the member sites were not displaying the banner anymore, so I've pulled the plug on that. My apologies for any inconvenience; however, this should be the last restructure for a while. In Spookys news, the 2003 Spookys has seen a revision of the categories. Blondie's Ratcave will no longer sponsor Krycek/Marita or Marita Characterisation as an award, but don't worry, this is good news - they're both standard categories now. Many thanks to the Spookys committee, and especially Alice, for this. Finally, watch for another, very cool update in the next few weeks. I've been able to secure some outtakes from the shooting of the Krycek/Marita kiss scene, and I'll be posting images and clips. They're still in transit, but Maidenjedi, who was a go-between in getting them to me, has seen them and says we'll be very happy Skampers. June 5, 2003 Quick images update, with re-captured DVD stills of Patient X, including The Kiss. A lovely new story by Spica in Fiction, along with an old classic, Nynaeve's Beekeeper series. I was given this some time ago by the old Beehive archive (along with the rest of their holdings) but up until now I was missing the last chapter. Finally, there is a new songvid available via Music Videos. May 19, 2003 Quick video clips update, with the cut scene between Krycek and CSM in Two Fathers now available for download. I'm so disappointed that this scene was cut! May 11, 2003 Quick fiction update, with just one new story, gorgeous bittersweet Motion And Rest by the delectable Vanzetti. Also, we have a new gallery of DVD captures of Krycek and Marita in The Truth. Enjoy! March 17, 2003 Just a quick fiction update, quite a few new stories, including a novella by yours truly. Enjoy! December 17, 2002 Five new stories, fixed URLs for the video files (which were down for a couple of weeks), new music video, and an update on the Spookys. October 4, 2002 Big update! We have lots of new and recent Skamperfic, and I have also reinstated some of the image galleries, with gorgeous DVD captures courtesy of Gertie. I hope to put up the old artwork galleries and more screen/DVD captures soon. Have a great day! June 8, 2002 Small update. Gorgeous new wallpaper by Tere in Downloads, beautiful new fic by bardsmaid in Fiction, and reinstated Profiles and Quotable Quotes, with new content in each. There's also been a huge upgrade at ArchiveCentral, which powers our fic archive, so new stories have different formatting than older ones. Have a good week, people! May 31, 2002 Welcome to the new-look Ratcave! I'm still as madly in love with these characters as ever, but the site had pretty much ground to a standstill. I finally worked out why...I was sick of the design! So, I've come up with this new layout, and I'm totally loving it! The upgrade is happening in stages. The fiction and multimedia are done now, with heaps of new fic, music videos, video clips and slideshows. Plus, we have new wallpapers and a screensaver in Other Downloads. Later this week, artwork, profiles, webrings, awards and the banner exchange will go back up - we've got heaps of new art in the wings! Last but not least will come the still images. Those will take a bit longer because I'm going through those to work out which images are worth keeping and which should be replaced. The new interface for images will be a lot more user-friendly than the old frames. Okay. Grass-roots stuff. What do the changes mean for you? Well, firstly, it means you should have fewer troubles with the site. I've ditched the javascript, and dynamic content is now done in server-side scripts like CGI or PHP, so it won't rely on any plug-ins from you. I've also ditched the frames and streamlined the navigation. In theory, this layout will be a lot more user-friendly for very small and very large resolutions. I've added lots of content - mostly in fiction and artwork, but also in profiles - and I've condensed a lot of content, too (for instance, audio and video clips are now in the one section). So there are fewer physical "pages" than before. But most of the content is still there, and some is improved (some of the images, for instance, now come from the DVDs). I have removed some less popular content - the novelties, for instance - and information on very old defunct programs like Blondie's Choice. I'm also gradually moving over my fanfic holdings to a new project called Archive Central. The reason is that I have several fanfic archives, and there's no point in me uploading multiple copies of the same story. It also saves me valuable coding time. This won't make much difference to you, except that newer stories will have different layouts than the older ones, and that layout may change again down the track (the archive is still in development). Hopefully, though, it will lead to more frequent updating. These days, I'm all about saving time on the nitty-gritty tasks behind the scenes! Anyway, that's enough geek-talk. Go! Look around! Enjoy! OLDER UPDATES |
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