Website News and UpdatesHere you can see any of the newest changes and additions to the website. Changes are always being made and posts are added here quite often.



I have added 11 new cavern-themed stock photos. These pictures were taken almost a year ago at the Antelope Canyons by Page, Arizona, USA. They're called canyons because there is no fully closed ceiling over it, but for organizational purposes, I'm filing these under the new caverns tag. My favorite parts are the color and the lighting these pictures came out to have. Because of the poor lighting in the caverns canyons, I had to carry a tripod as I walked through. They say that you can see the sun's rays at a certain time of day inside the canyons, but when I visited it was cloudy and it even drizzled for a few minutes.


Enough of my stock photos for now, since the last stock photos update, we have had several submissions by Jenny and one by Amy. I thought Jenny's cat photo was pretty amusing, and I especially liked Amy's sunset photograph. You can see all of our newest stock photos (and some older ones) by clicking here. And if you use any for any of your designs, do not hesitate to let us know (and give credit). =)

| Posted by Haily | 4 Comments - Post a Comment! | 

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You can now vote for the best forum set in our Obsessive Forum Sets design competition. The objective of this competition was to create and submit a forum set based on an obsession of yours. We have received entries from Frisby, James, and Jenny. The obsessions we have received include Coldplay, clown fish, and makeup. The winner of the competition will win 2 weeks of free advertisement for their site, so click here to see the entries and vote for the best one.

| Posted by Haily | 7 Comments - Post a Comment! | 

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For this design competition, you will be submitting forum sets to our forum sets section. The theme of the forums sets will be whatever you currently have an obsession for. Whether it's a certain tv show, a certain music group, a certain person or character, a certain game, sport, food, website (hint-hint), or anything at all, if you can make an awesome forum set for it, then you have a shot at winning this competition! As always, first prize will be two weeks of advertisement for your website (125x100 banner on the right sidebar). Click here to submit your entries! Deadline for new entries will be June 2nd, 12 pm PST.

| Posted by Haily | 8 Comments - Post a Comment! | 

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So you have a website. What do you think of it? How do you know it is something to be proud of? When it comes to determining if one should be satisfied with or proud of one's own website or not, a webmaster generally looks towards certain things such as visitor statistics, revenue, and visitor interactivity with the website. You should also know that these things alone do not define the success of a website. In reality, success can be subjective. Linking it to concrete things such as popularity or profit, for example, does not change that. In this article, I will cover some alternative and perhaps unconventional (yet, effective) things to look at when determining the "success" of your website.

| Posted by Haily | Read Full Article - 5 Comments | 

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As work begins to progress on IC's next project, GlacialCMS, you will ultimately be hearing more about it as I make more references to it. With this post, my goal is to fully explain to you what Glacial is/will be, when you should expect it to be completed, and why it's exciting.

What is Glacial?

To begin, Glacial is going to be an open source content management system that will boast strong page-management and community-building features. Glacial began after repeated suggestions for a downloadable version of IC's member system. Glacial aims to be as simple and effective as WordPress, as robust of a community builder as phpBB, and as innovative as other open source scripts such as Firefox.

When will the first version be out?

I'm only beginning tangible work on the project these past several days, so I am not entirely sure how much longer it'll take me to complete it's first working beta release. Definitely sometime this summer, but that might be a bit too vague. If I were to guess, or at least set myself a deadline, it would be the first half of July. I could get the first beta version out before, or maybe even after, depending on what happens and also on how many features I want to build into it's first release.

Wait, did you say "exciting"?

What? How could you not think this is exciting? Lately, Glacial has been really getting me excited for a variety of reasons, and these same reasons should get you pretty excited too:

1. Since the Stock Photos section was added, IC hasn't gone into any new areas, and open-source software development will be a new one. This is exciting because IC is growing while sticking to it's mission all the while contributing back to the community of webmasters that support it.
2. It's being built to be fully intuitive and aims to be glitch-free and highly polished. Combine that with:
3. It's also being built to be IC's next CMS. The staff already knows how confusing and unpolished the site is (on the staff-side especially).
4. It's going to be a free download! How is "free" not exciting?

That's basically it. Anymore questions about GlacialCMS? I will answer them here. =)

| Posted by Haily | 17 Comments - Post a Comment! | 

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Although I've written a couple of articles for IceCaves before, this is my first ever blog article (mostly because I never really understood the concept and how the system works). Actually, take that out of the brackets, I still don't understand how the system works which is why my article looks ugly and spaced out and why there is a duplicate of it running around under a different, better but longer title. Haily, can you fix that for me? I can't delete it because I'm thick and probably missing something important.

This article is a review of the features, pros and cons of six different lightweight content management systems plus a shortlist of a multitude of others.

| Posted by Jenny | Read Full Article - 15 Comments | 

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The votes have been set and tallied, and here are the winners! Each winner gets a trophy in their profile and a plug for their website in this news update. The first place winner wins two weeks of advertisement for their site! The competition requirements were to submit a photograph that effectively captures an image of an animal. Congrats to the winners!

1st Place - Rachel - comp entry - bluestapler.net
2nd Place - BrokenWings - comp entry
3rd Place - Jules - comp entry - rabidish.org
4th Place - Moo - comp entry - crimms.co.nr & Frisby - comp entry - figmint.uuuq.com

Congrats to everyone! I would have also shown the rankings of the other four entrants, but they were all tied to either 5th or 6th place. Mostly all the votes went towards Rachel and BrokenWings. Plus, the names above are the ones that will find a new trophy on their profiles. =)

The prize of 2 weeks of advertisement will go to Rachel of bluestapler.net, but since we had so many entries, I'll also give it to the second place winner, BrokenWings. If BrokenWings doesn't have a website, then I'll give the prize to Jules of rabidish.org who got third place. Rachel, please send me a 125x100 banner for Blue Stapler or I can make the banner for you if you would like. I shall contact BrokenWings.

One last bit, yes, these results are two days late--voting ended on Monday. D: Well, I couldn't get the chance on Monday (hence, the previous update), but I just didn't remember yesterday. I would like to specially thank Kyra, who reminded me with her chat box post in which she lamented for not being able to join the comp. Thanks! >.<

| Posted by Haily | 12 Comments - Post a Comment! | 

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