Been a while, hasn't it? The last Staff Blog update was back in September, so I thought it would be a good idea to give an update to what was happening around the Gaming Union Network at large. ;)
As stated before, most of my time lately outside of a very hectic university semester has been a secret project for Gaming Union. While we're still not able to unveil it just yet, things are progressing nicely and more "normal" updates to Tales Union should be resuming in late January/early February if everything goes as planned.
There's a number of small modifications that will be made driven by the changes on the previously mentioned project, but the main focus will be getting sections like Games up-to-date and fixing some of minor bugs that have appeared over time (including a new and improved tag and pagination system), as well as getting sections like the Gallery back online.
As you can see from special features like the articles and the This Week in Tales, we're planning on resuming the posting schedule from back during the Summer, albeit with the absence of the Cosplay of the Week feature for the time being until the secret project is finished.
Long time no see everyone --- been almost a month since Tales Union's last Staff Blog update. Since I haven't been very vocal on what has been going on, many might be wondering what's behind the recent vacancy of the community posts. That's what this news post aims to discuss, so let's get started! ;)
As many already know, Tales Union is part of the broader Gaming Union Network. My recent work has been coding for a new project for Gaming Union, the center of the network. While I can't give any specific details as to what exactly what I've been up to, I can say that you'll be amazed once you see it.
I've been the lead coder for the project, which is why Tales Union has somewhat suffered in community postings over the last month. That combined with a hectic university schedule (yay for two midterms back-to-back in two week :p) have taken up most all of my free time.
Thus, community updates will be stalled again until mid-October once the new project launches and my midterms are over. After both of them are over, things should be back to normal around here.
It's that time of the week (well, a day late, but we have a good reason for that :p) again --- it's another Staff Blog entry! As some of you may have noticed, we didn't have an entry last week. That was due to the launching of our new Videos section, among other things.
We were knee-deep in coding the section last Monday, so we couldn't reveal it just yet since the front-end wasn't really done (we only had the database backend setup at that point). We know our fans have been waiting for this section to re-launch, and we're glad it appears to have launched without a hitch.
It's pretty similar to the version we had on the old site, and even has some new additions like being able to share the video on the various social media channels. One missing feature we're working on is allowing comments to be made through the forums, much like comments for news stories. No ETA on this feature, but we are hoping to have it added sometime in the next few months.
Hello everyone, it's Shawn again. If you didn't see her post in last week's Staff Blog, we have a new staff member, Ashley, who is in charge of news reporting. Unfortunately there hasn't been much news to report on, but after the "tidal wave" of news that came earlier this month, it's understandable that we'd have a bit of a lull. ;)
If you caught one of our tweets last week you'd notice that we stated we weren't doing a This Week in Tales post and would explain in this Staff Blog entry. Basically, when there's no or very little news (as there was last week with only one piece of news for Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X), we won't be putting up a post.
Find out about the latest schedule changes in the full story.
Hey everyone! I think some introductions are in order. My name's Ashley, though some of you may know me as emo_nemox7 on the GU forums. I'm from Michigan in the States and I'm the newest addition to the Tales Union staff. I'll be helping take care of the massive flood of news that's been coming in. I've been playing video games, RPGs in particular, since I was about twelve years old so I like to think that I know more than the average casual gamer.
I'm sort of new to the Tales series having only played two games; Tales of Symphonia and Tales of Legendia. I'm very interested in the series though and I plan to play as many more of them as I can, including the new ones if they make it over to the west. I know in order to do my job its not necessary to have played any Tales games, but I feel like it would make more sense if I had. Chances are that if someone who is actually excited for the news is reporting it then the news itself will be exciting, at least that's what I think anyway.
I may be new to the series but I'm not entirely new to the world of news reporting. Before being given the position of news reporter here at Tales Union I was a news reporter for a Final Fantasy site for a brief amount of time. I hope I can use that previous experience to give the news to the readers in an interesting and refreshing way that way with the overflow of it no one gets bored reading a story. I'd hate to end up boring the readers into a coma and have them miss an exciting announcement! Well, that's all for now. I hope I can get to know some of you around the forums and I'm looking forward to working with the rest of the Tales Union staff!
Man, this week sure has been busy, hasn't it? With new news for Tales of Graces f, Tales of the World: Radiant Mythology 3 and the next PS3 Tales title, as well as the sudden posting and removal on one of Namco Bandai's Facebook walls, we had to temporarily push back the Staff Blog and Cosplay of the Week postings for this week. Now that things have cooled down some, why don't we get right down to business? :)
As you can see from this week's title, we have a new staff member, Ashley. Some of you might know her as emo_nemox7 on the forums. She'll be joining us as a News Reporter, and with the current influx of news coming from Namco Bandai, you'll be sure to see her around. ;)
As we stated in the last Staff Blog, the lack of content updates (namely the Imagery and Video sections) has been due to some behind-the-scenes updates. We still have a little bit to go, but for the most part the new backend is complete, which should help us get news and content posted and developed even faster than before.
Long-time readers of Tales Union may have noticed we haven't had a staff blog for the last two weeks. There's been numerous events going on Tales Union and the Gaming Union Network lately, one of which being the departure of Gaming Union's former Managing Editor, Kyle Wynen, as well as some behind-the-scenes updates.
And what are those behind-the-scenes updates, you may ask? We're currently working on crafting a major update to the backend managing system that is used on each of our Unions. While nothing will change for you, the user, this will allow each Union's staff to add and update content much easier than before, which in turn, will allow us to push out content much faster and quicker than previously. I've been spearheading this project, which is why there hasn't been many updates on the content front on Tales Union.
But enough about that, you all wanted to know about the updates, right? Continue reading on to learn more. :)
Today is Monday, so it's time for another Staff Blog entry! :) After revealing the Games section re-launch plans in our last entry (with the actual launch of the section coming midway last week), we're having yet another section reveal, but we also have made some minor changes since last time.
In the last few news posts you should have noticed that the "sidebar" in the news articles looks a little bit different. After some talking with the Tales Union and Gaming Union staff, we decided that the sidebar was too cluttered and jarring compared to the softer design of most of the layout. We've redesigned the headings to look much more like the Characters and Glossary sidebars. In addition, we shrunk the existing social media icons, as well as adding Facebook "Like" and Google Buzz posting functionality. We're open to adding more in the future, so please contact us if there's any specific services you think should be included and we'll look into them.
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