The future of Koholint

On August 22, I will be leaving for Japan, and I will not return for at least 7 months. I’m working for the Heart School, which is based primarily in the Kanto region (which includes Tokyo). I currently do not know where I will be staying or teaching, but I do know where and when orientation is, at least. My goal in Japan is to become completely fluent in Japanese, and ultimately pass a standardized test called the JLPT2.

The extent to which Japan will affect my involvement with this site is still unclear, as I do not know my daily schedule. I do know that my hours will be flipped, and I may have more regular contact with European friends than American. Come October, FFXIV will have been released, and this site will take on the role of organizational forum for whatever community we build there. If I have a lot of downtime, I would like to start learning advanced CSS and PHP practices, which will help me fix all those little problems with the site.

I’d also like to take a moment to officially welcome the survivors of the Vegapunk forums. I know a lot of you had already found your way here, and I appreciate that. Please feel free to invite any of the other regulars here, as they’re more than welcome. I say that not only wanting to draw new visitors, but because I miss them!

A small list of what’s in store for the site in the near future is after the jump.

Organic Groups module addition: This will allow me to designate groups of members on the site, and apply permissions accordingly. This will allow for new forums and content pages to be created that can serve focused discussion among members of a group. When I install this later today, I will also make such a group for some of our friends working on a fansub project and one for FFXIV.

Display unread replies: A new link for the top of the forums and sidebar that will only show you replies to threads you have replied to.

Chat updates: I will be adding a timestamp to the current chat, or replacing it with a more advanced one (again). There is one chat I’ve always had my eye on, but using it requires a more advanced knowledge of PHP than I have. Because I plan to gain this knowledge in the near future, I’m not going to attempt to perfect any of our current solutions, since it will ultimately be wasted work.

Other small updates: There are a lot of updates to the software of the site now available that I will be working towards installing shortly. These updates may yield small changes here and there, hopefully all improvements. For example, the quote tag can now handle an embedded quote.

Some sort of rules list: To prepare ourselves for the day I start to actively pimp this site across the tubes, I’ll set up a list of the general rules of conduct.

More forums: These will just cover more subjects, hopefully giving you guys some idea of what you can talk about.

And further down the line...

Webcomic: I have a lot of concepts for comics currently drawn out that just require a bit of cleanup to actually post. The only thing stopping me is the desire to have a dedicated comic gallery that allows for easy navigation of each comic. Once I’ve implemented this, expect to see some fun stuff on a weekly basis.

New layout: I’ve liked this design for a while, though it has its complications here and there. When I learn CSS better, I’ll be designing something from scratch, using original art and everything.