Hi Everyone!
Cat and I have been working very hard on adding some new features and “usability” additions to LG Tales.

Probably the “biggest” and “newest” update to the site, is our new “Table of Contents” feature.

In the image provided you can see that the story “For My Princess” (a clickable link that takes you to the first chapter of the story) by “Cat Lochley” (a clickable link that takes you to Cat’s story page) is available not only to read online, but also to be downloaded as an ePub ebook. You can see that the story was last updated on the 16th of Febuary, 2012.

Cat has provided a nice summary, and book cover image for her story. You can see by the table of contents that “Chapter 1″ is a ‘clickable link’ that will take you to that chapter, that there is currently “1 Review” for that chapter (also a clickable link) and that chapter 1 is 2704 words long.

You can see that the story takes place in the Pre-Victorian era (sometime before 1837) and that there are no content “Warnings”.

The primary Attributes of the story are “Caught with Consequences” and “Sweet and Sentimental” and that it’s currently rated for “All Visitors”.

While the story is currently “Not Completed” you will see that it is over 48,000 words long already, and has had over 13,000 reads.

I hope this little primer has encouraged some of you to come visit our site, and experience some new stories, for those authors out there, please don’t forget that we currently have a Story Challenge running!

Easter Bunny’s Gift Story Challenge

And last but not least, for all those littles that feel lost here @ BigCloset, don’t forget that we have a full Bulletin Board / Forum for you to discuss your Story Stuff , Inner Thoughts , or just Random Stuff too! (but you need to Register and Login to see most of the Forums )

-P/KAF/PT

P.S. incase I didn’t mention the url enough above, here it is again LG Tales — Stories

To use this new feature, just visit any available story, and click on “Story” or “Chapter” next to the “ePub” icon right under the “DisplayWord” icon in the top left corner of the page.

Please let us know your thoughts and feelings about this module, and let us know of any other features you would like us to add!

-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT

We are currently expanding this blog to include several pages of information that we feel would be helpful to authors. These pages will include information on various school systems in various countries with explanatory information to help those authors that are writing about areas they don’t have much experience with.

We are also working to add Forums to this site, in a way that won’t compromise it’s current lack of spam, and at the same time, give users/authors/readers the ability to ask questions.

As for general site info, we have begun work on an eFiction and Drupal ePub export module that will allow you to download your favorite stories in ePub ebook format (Compatible with Kindle, Nook, iPad, iPhone, MobiPocket, etc) with a single click. This module will go into play first @ TGFiction.Net, then LGTales, then the code will be released to the public once we are happy with it’s performance.

LG Tales is still suffering with “bridge” issues, but we are working on a solution that we hope to have running soon.

TGF is picking up slightly as one of our favorite authors has decided to rejoin our ranks, and is being very generous with her posting.

Please authors, post your stories to TGFiction.Net! If you have any problems, send us an email using the “Contact Us” links located all over the site, or leave a comment on this blog. We will do everything we can to help!

-HuGgLeS-
-P/KAF/PT

Postings from LG Tales will be prefaced “LGT-”

Postings from TGFiction.Net will be prefaced “TGF-”

And postings from this blog, will be prefaced “SPFN-”

Also we’ve added a few more story attributes @ LG Tales including “Seasonal Attributes” so stop by and take a look!

Well, it’s BETA Open.

What this means is that we are allowing user sign ups, and story posting, and have begun importing our list of stories and authors that we already have permission to post.

What this also means is that what you see now, may not be what you see in a month, or even a week, or even a few days.

Things change fast. We find issues, or figure out how to make something better, and we fix it/change it.

It’s a lot of work to build a new fiction community, and we are trying to use our experiances from other sites to build tight knit niche community for those that only want to read the more innocent, mostly G rated stories as opposed to the X rated fiction that seems to have started dominating many fiction sites.

We have nothing against the more adult fiction sites, in fact, we applaud them for everything they do, heck, we even run one! But we decided there was a need for a different kind of place for people that didn’t have to worry about a story being correctly tagged with the right rating.

Now, this is not to say that there will never be stories with some more adult situations on LGT. We are mostly trying to weed out the one-handed-kink that to many of us, is like SPAM.

Now for the more mundane updates…

Due to the fact that one of the authors @ TGF seemed to be gathering a fair amount of spam comments on one of his stories, we took a day or so out of LGT development, and integrated an automagic spam filter into the comment system @ TGF. This new system shouldn’t look ANY different to normal users, and what it does is this. Every time you submit a review, TGF sends a copy of the review, along with your IP address and browser information to AKISMET. AKISMET then takes the information, compares it to their database of known spam, and does it’s best to tag it as SPAM or not. If it comes back as spam, the poster is notified, and the comment is stored but NOT shown. The next step in the process is for an Administrator to check the postings marked as “SPAM” and verify their status.

This system was implemented using AKISMET and the AKISMET PHP 5 class by Alex. The next revision of our system will allow Authors to tag reviews as spam, just in case the AKISMET system misses one, but we are still working on a system to make sure that an author can’t exploit the system by marking all comments they don’t like as spam.

As of right now, this system is only implemented on TGF but it will be moved to LGT as soon as it’s fully finished. We will also be releasing this mod back to the eFiction community.

Now just so you know I haven’t forgotten, HUGGLEBUGS is on our list of things to do. It IS important to us, we just seem to be really busy lately.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, you can now follow The StoryPortal Fiction Network ( SPFN ) on Twitter ( http://twitter.com/spfn ). Not only will you get news updates from this site, but you will get STORY UPDATES from LG Tales and TGFiction.Net and even HuggleBugs.Net when it’s back online!

-Kirstyn Amanda Fox

Partially due to waiting for new software for a bit, but also because I had to do a lot of server work lately.

Firstly there was the rocky upgrade that caused us to move from Amanda, to Amanda2, to Amanda3 (server names).

Then there was the OS and Software upgrade of another server I manage for someone else. Which actually helps me pay for our primary server.

So I’ve had a lot of good excuses.

I have done some good work in my opinion on skinning a “Joomla” version of the LGT site should in fact we choose to go with the Joomla/eFiction bridge, so the fact that PHP-Fusion/eFiction bridge is already themed no longer makes a big difference. I was able to mostly duplicate the style of the PHP-Fusion theme in the Joomla theme for those that have seen one or the other, or both…

Once the j!fiction (Joomla/eFiction bridge) is installed and running I will let a larger group of “alpha testers” in to view the sites to see what others think of each offering.

N-E-Ways, that’s the news for now.

Oh, for those that haven’t noticed I installed new submission/advanced search forms @ TGFiction.Net that were a work product of code I wrote for LGTales, so the new site is definitely helping the old sites TOO!

-Piper/Kirstyn Amanda Fox/PiggilyTails

You might not notice anything, as that big “firewall” of sorts is still up, but we are quite possibly going to SoftOpen or do a Technical Preview in the next week or so.

There are still a few small bugs, and a few quite large ones too, but we have started working on gathering approval to post some lovely stories, and have for the time being settled on a site format.

-HuGgLeS- and check back often!

-P/KAF/PT

LG Tales Cast of Charcters - The Girls

P.S. The HuggleBugs MySQL database got corrupted during all the server moves a couple weeks back, and I hope have it restored, and the site working again shortly.

I’ve been doing a bit of work on the graphic portions of the site, since I can’t do any of the “structural” work…

AND

Other than that… Not much….

I need to get some work done on TGF, but I’ve been mostly useless the last week or so…

I need to get HuggleBugs Updated…

Hey, FictionMania is back.. YaY! (not really yay, but oh well)

-P/KAF