This post is coming to you from lovely Seattle, WA, where some of our team will be spending the weekend at PAX 2010. If you’re at the show, give a shout on Twitter (@warhornllc) or through email if you want to get together for a game or just shoot the breeze, and keep an eye on Twitter to see what we’re up to.

As we’ve mentioned before, we’ve been working on a new look for the main site for the past several weeks. It recently occurred to us that our trip to PAX is the perfect excuse to launch the new look, so we burned the midnight oil all week long, and the result is now live. Check out the site if you haven’t already and let us know what you think. If you like what you see, click on over to the sponsorship page and consider donating to the cause.

You’re almost certainly wondering what’s next on the horizon. Well, we’re putting the finishing touches on our most ambitious feature to date: single sign-on. When we roll it out, you’ll be able to log in once and register for any and all event sites using a single central Warhorn account. Among other benefits, you’ll have a dashboard showing all of the events for which you’re registered and those you’re organizing. The process of registering for an event and paying registration fees will be streamlined and easier to understand. This will remove one of the biggest pain points consistently underlined by our users – the need to set up a new account for each event site, all of which are totally disconnected from each other. We’re super stoked to be getting ready to roll this thing out and have just a few bits and bobs left to finish up, so look for it in the near future!

We added “Shroud of the Ancients RPG” to the game system list. Enjoy!

We added Living Traveller to the campaign list. See you in the Spinward Marches!

We’ve added Shattered Empires RPG to the list of game systems and Chronicles of the Shattered Empires to the available campaigns. Let us know if there are any other new games or organized play campaigns that you’d like to have added to the system. Have fun with the new campaign!

As I mentioned on Facebook a while back, we’ve had our heads down on a partial redesign of a couple key parts of the main site. It only took a few weeks longer than expected, mainly due to a barrage of bugs in some of the open source software we use, but here we are!

Home page: We’ve gotten some feedback from non-users that the home page wasn’t particularly clear about how Warhorn could be helpful to them. As a short-term measure, we added some text that attempts to hit the highlights for organizers and attendees. We also show the events that are occurring this week so you can click around to see some timely examples of event sites. This is a temporary redesign of the home page; we’ll be doing a complete overhaul later this year, so if you have suggestions, let us know.

Event listings: The listings have been completely rewritten to:

• Show only 25 listings per page so that you don’t have to wait for a giant page with thousands of listings to load
• Filter listings by location so that you can quickly find the events happening in your city, state or country
• Sort listings by title, location or date
• Update the listings table in-place when you’re paging, sorting or filtering so that the site responds faster

We’ve also made it possible for you to specify whether or not your event should be visible in the listings when you request your site. Finally, we’ve moved the blog to its own domain – be sure to update your bookmarks and RSS subscriptions.

We’re super excited to make this update because it marks the first time we’ve put 2e code into production. Originally we were going to wait and ship a completely new, totally rewritten 2e site, but as you can probably tell, life has continually gotten in the way for both Finn and me, and we haven’t been able to make progress as quickly as we’d have liked. We decided recently that instead of making you guys wait forever for vaporware, we’re going to start giving you 2e features incrementally so that you can take advantage of the improvements we’ve been working on for the last year and so that we can get some real experience operating the new software.

I’m also stoked to announce that the next feature we’re working on is hands down the most-requested feature of all: single sign-on! No more setting up an account for each event site – you’ll have one central Warhorn account that will give you access to every single event. We’re still designing this feature and thinking through how migrating everyone to the new central accounts is going to work, but we’ll have more information available soon.

We’re also planning to update the look of the site in the near future. We’ve been living with this temporary look for too long, not to mention the fact that the event site design hasn’t changed in ten years! Again, we’ll let you know more when we’re closer to launching the new look.

Once these projects are done, we’ll have a great base to start bringing over the 2e features that we built last summer and fall. I hope that by the end of the year the site will hardly resemble its 2009 incarnation.

Anyway, let us know what you think about the new stuff. Thanks!

Made a small change to the calendar view to show the current month by default. Not sure why it didn’t work that way already – I know I changed how it worked at least once before, but it was so long ago I’ve forgotten why! Anyway, let us know if there are any issues. Thanks to Todd Morgan for the poke.

As discussed in the previous post, we recently added a Facebook “like” button to each event site’s overview page. As expected, some organizers weren’t too interested in this feature, so we’ve added the ability to turn it off. Just go into event setup and search for “Enable Facebook integration?”; you can choose “no” here to make the like button disappear.

Other organizers beat us to the punch and had previously established Facebook pages for their events. For these folks, it doesn’t make sense to create yet another page on Facebook when they have established connections with people and existing conversations. To address this situation, we’ve added the ability for you to specify the ID for an existing Facebook page. Search for “Do you already have a Facebook page for your event?” in event setup (if you can’t find it, go to “Enable Facebook integration?” and choose “yes”, and the page ID field will show up). Your facebook page’s ID is right there in the page’s URL; for example, if my page’s URL is http://www.facebook.com/pages/AwesomeCon/123459876534321, the ID is the number in green.

Hopefully these two tweaks will give each of you the opportunity to link up with Facebook (or not to) in exactly they way you prefer. As always, let us know what you think. Enjoy!

Facebook recently added the ability to put a “like” button on any web page. Seems like a nice way to give organizers an additional channel for contacting their users and spreading the word about their events, so we dropped one on the overview page for every event site. The button links to a Facebook page specifically about your event which you can use to communicate with your attendees, upload photos, and so forth. In return, folks can show their support for your event by liking it.

If you’re the organizer for a Warhorn event site and want to access the Facebook page linked to your Warhorn event as an administrator, drop us a line at info@warhorn.net with your Facebook username and we’ll get you hooked up. Similarly, if you’d prefer not to have the Facebook like button appear on your event site, send us a message to that effect as well. Soon you’ll be able to control this stuff yourself through event setup.

As always, we’d like to know what you think about the features we add. Comment on this post or on our Facebook page or send us a tweet. Hope you enjoy the like button!

The last update post was something along the lines of “it’s been a long time since we posted, but here’s a description all the great work we’ve been doing”. I wish I could say the same thing now, but instead I have to explain why we’ve been pretty much silent since the beginning of the year.

As some of you know, I left my job last summer to start Warhorn LLC with Finn and begin the Warhorn 2e project. The plan was to spend my full time on that until I could no longer afford to work without compensation, at which I’d have to go back out into the world, find a job, and transition Warhorn to a nights-and-weekends project. (Luckily Finn has a number of balls in the air with regard to business ventures and doesn’t have the same kind of either-or prospect.)

As work progressed, it became clear that in order to solve the major technical problems with the current site, update the interface to modern standards, and add some features that would collectively make 2e compelling enough for subscribers to give us a few bucks a month, the project was going to take a lot more time than I had available given the available funding. It basically came down to me having until the middle of January to get as much done as possible. Around the time that I wrote that last update post, I started sending out resumes and interviewing. One thing led to another, and February 1 was my first day on the job at Outside.in - in New York City.

So that’s what I’ve been doing for the past few months – moving from San Francisco to Brooklyn, starting a new job, busting ass on an important, highly visible project for my new employer, and getting settled in my new house and life. And back in the Bay Area, Finn’s been working on other projects that keep him out of the poorhouse.

Things have settled down a fair amount since I first got to NY though, and we’re both itching to get the Warhorn train going again. To get back into the swing of things, I’ve been putting some effort into addressing a few nagging issues that have plagued the current site:

1. The hardware that hosts the site has been upgraded and some components reconfigured to minimize the instances of downtime that had been getting more frequent in the past few weeks. The periods of downtime were due to some inefficient resource usage caused by fundamental architectural problems with the 10-year old site. With the recent changes, I expect these instances to diminish in frequency or disappear altogether.
2. The site request form has been redesigned to be easier to use and to address a number of frequently asked questions. I’m particularly happy that I was able to get some date picker widgets in that form! Sadly it’s not so easy to get them into the event setup form …
3. We now support traditional hyphenated event slugs. The slug is the part of the event site’s URL that uniquely identifies the event. For example, in the URL http://warhorn.net/awesomecon-2010, the slug is awesomecon-2010. We’ve used a number of slug styles in the past, from alllowercase to CamelCaps, but now that an obscure technical limitation has been removed, so we can hyphenate the words in the slug as is traditionally done in blog posts and news articles around the Web. I hope you’ll agree that this makes event URLs more legible and useful.

Now that’s all well and good, but what we really want is to get 2e out there for you all to use, even if only an early version that is a preview of things to come from which we can get wider feedback. We’re firing things back up this week and should start to see progress again quickly.

Furthermore, we’ve done a pretty poor job of communicating with you all. We promise to do better, with more frequent and detailed updates, so that you have a sense of what we’re doing on a week-to-week basis. As we begin to build momentum again, we want you to feel it and get excited to see us driving toward a goal. Part of this will be using the right tools to connect with you. Our main home is here at our blog, but we’re also on Twitter and Facebook and over at the Wizards community site. Follow, fan or subscribe so that you get the latest updates, but also please take the opportunity to let us know how you feel about Warhorn and 2e, and shoot us any and all questions.

We’re excited about the new phase of development on 2e, and we hope that y’all are too. Stay tuned for updates. Thanks for your support!

Just a quick note to announce planned downtime on Sunday, 4/18 from 12am to 4am for site maintenance. During this window, the site will be completely offline. We will follow up with a blog post and a message to the discuss list when service is restored. Please let us know ASAP if you anticipate any issues with this maintenance period. Thanks!