What's New

This is a short update this weekend. We are working on a new design for the website. It was originally designed for a minimum screen resolution width of 800 pixels. However, according to the W3Schools, a training website affiliated with the World Wide Web Consortium, the percentage of users who use a display with a resolution of 800x600 pixels has dropped below 5%. Though not one hundred percent accurate, these statistics have been compiled over years, and thus precisely show medium- and long-range trends. And they show that over the past decade, 800x600 use has dropped off almost entirely. As such, we have decided to increase the size of the site, and we will also take advantage of the situation to revamp the design. We'll keep you all informed.

At a certain point in the relatively near future, we plan to recode the site using a liquid layout, so that the site can automatically adjust to any display resolution. Even so, we will have to set a minimum width, which will probably be 800 pixels.

We have updated the Team Girl page with a new message from Eile and Sunny.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page. This completes the full series of images we have. We are in the process of collecting more, which we shall post in the coming weeks.

We have updated the Team Girl page with a new message from Eile and Sunny.

We have updated the Irish Songs page with a new song.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page. This completes the W series of images.

We have added a new page that lists Irish Songs and gives their lyrics.

We have update the Companions page.

We have updated the Team Girl! page.

We have updated the Artists Guidelines page with more information.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page. This completes the U and V series of images.

We have created a new page for the Team Girl! stories, in preparation to creating a Team Girl! website.

We have posted a new Team Girl! story, The Adventure of the Peril Gem.

We have updated the Artists Guidelines page with more information.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page. This completes the T series of images.

We have added three new Team Girl! stories: The Adventure of the Golden Mushroom, The Adventure of the Steel Gazelle, and The Adventure of the Toxic Celebutante.

We have posted an update to The Adventure of the Temple of Ubasti story.

We have updated the Artists Guidelines page with more information.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page. This completes the S series of images.

We have posted an update to the Engagement Adventure story. This update was finished over a week ago, but for some reason it never got posted.

We have updated the Artists Guidelines page with more information.

We have added a new Medb hErenn story, Sacrificial Offering.

And we have added more images to the Fantasy Women Artwork Gallery page.

We have added an Artist Guidelines page to provide detailed information for artists who wish to create portraits of Medb hErenn. It is not complete, but the most important information has been posted.

We have posted updates for all the Team Girl! stories.

We have posted a new Team Girl! story, The Incorporation Adventure.

We have added another unpublished story, The Price of Folly.

And we have posted an excerpt from a story in progress, Jellied Spiders.

We have posted an update of the story The Adventure of An Cúpla.

We have also posted a new Team Girl! story, The Engagement Adventure.

We have added another unpublished story, Pride and Fall.

And we have posted an excerpt from a story in progress, Medb and the Mud Wrestlers (working title).

We have posted an update of the story The Adventure of An Cúpla.

We have added more stories to the Excerpts, Serials, and Out-of-Print page, including a new series of stories in which Medb hErenn joins forces with Team Girl!™, two girls who have adventures.

We have added new information to the Dreaming and About Cats pages.

The eighth and last installment of the serial story "Desperate Acts" have been posted.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page.

We have added a new portrait of Medb hErenn by Lisa Forgan to the graphic portaits page.

The seventh installment of the serial story "Desperate Acts" have been posted.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page.

The sixth installment of the serial story "Desperate Acts" have been posted.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page.

It's been a slow week. Most of what we have done is cosmetic changes, except:

We have added a new portrait of Medb hErenn by Frank Perrin to the graphic portaits page.

The fifth installment of the serial story "Desperate Acts" have been posted.

And we have added a new artist, Frank Perrin, to the Artist Resource Page.

We added a tooltip jQuery plugin, so that pages that have footnotes would be able to display the footnotes "inline" rather than take the reader to a new page or a new part of the same page.

We have created a new page to display graphic portaits of Medb hErenn. We have also removed the portraits of the legendary Medb of Connacht from the Character Profile page. A few will be recycled as page decorations; the rest will be stored for possible use as content illustrations.

We have added a new link to the Links Resources Page.

The third and fourth installments of the serial story "Desperate Acts" have been posted, along with new excerpts from "Medb and Scheher".

And we have added a new artist, Jainsong Chain, to the Artist Resource Page.

Kevin L. O'Brien has commissioned portraits of Medb hErenn from three artists. We have received the first, from George Ward, a nude study of Medb in full battle frenzy. We have placed it on the Character Profile page.

The second installment of the serial story "Desperate Acts" is up.

We are in the process of upgrading the Search Engine Optimization features of this site. For this update:

• We have added TITLE tags to the links in the page footers;
• We have ALT and TITLE tags to the dropcap images;
• We have added dropdown menues to the site navigation bar;
• And we have added META tag keywords to each page of the site.

We took the links from the Worlds of Medb hErenn page and placed them on their own pages:

• General Concepts
• The Ireland of Medb hErenn
• The Earth of Medb hErenn
• The Otherworld
• Alternative Worlds
• The Dreamworld
• The Future World

We have added a new artist, George Ward, to the Artist Resource Page.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page, as well as re-organized it a bit.

We have added an Excerpt, Serial, and Out-of-Print page that links to stories that have gone out of print, excerpts to stories in progress, and unpublished stories presented in serial form.

We have added new artists to the Artist Resource Page.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page, as well as re-organized it a bit.

We have added a page on Quantum Mechanics.

We have added a page on Hilbert Space.

We have added a page on Legal Tender in Ancient Ireland.

We have added a page on The Irish Bardic Tradition.

We have added a page on Multiple Higher Dimensions.

We have added a page on The Holographic Principle.

We have added a new artist to the Artist Resource Page.

We have converted the Contact Form to a new, more efficient system.

And we have added more artwork to the Female Warrior Gallery page.

We have made a cosmetic change to the top navigation of the site, putting in a gradient background to give it more dimensionality.

We have added a page on Dreaming and the nature of the Dreamworld.

We have added a page on Existentialism and the Irish Character.

We have created a new Site Resources page, one that gives a list of links to third-party sites which we believe complements the official Medb hErenn website.

We have added new images to the gallery of female warriors.

And we have made a site-wide editing update to correct numerous small errors and make minor editorial changes.

We are steadily adding new material, to keep the site active. There have been too many additions before now to conveniently list here. The best place to find previous additions is the main Sitemap; an alphabetical listing is linked from there. Recent page additions of note include:

• an essay about cats in the Medb hErenn universe
• a treatise on Faerie lore
• descriptions of Medb's companions and friends in the Dreamworld
• an explanation of Medb's barbarian philosophy
• a frequently asked questions page
• a gallery of images of female warriors

We have also listed future pages that are not yet created, on The Worlds of Medb hErenn, the Irish Mythology, the Irish History, and the Character Profile pages, as well as the sitemap pages.

Finally, we have added new names to the list of artists and new entries to the list of Irish supernatural beings.

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 cannot handle PNG image transparency, so to make the new banner and footer images work, we used a CSS/XHTML-based PNG fix.

Three major changes were made for this update:

1. The top navigation was simplified. Instead of using large image rollovers with shifting gradient backgrounds and fancy text, simple background colors and plainer text were used, with shifting colors to create the rollover state. The navigation bar was made thinner as well.
2. The contact link in the banner image was removed, and additional links were put in, for all major pages not listed in the top navigation. Additionally, a few extra links were added to the mini site map in the footer of each page, so all main pages are now listed at the bottom of every page.
3. The banner and footer background images were replaced with transparent images to solve a problem we saw with brighter monitors: people could see the outline of the old images because the background did not precisely match the background of the page.

One important minor change for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) purposes was to set all Home links to the base URL of the site instead of "index.html". According to our SEO people, Google automatically records "Home" links using the base URL in addition to the "index.html", which makes the algorithm think there is duplicate content on the site. Duplicate content is a no-no, and Google penalizes for it, but setting all Home links to the base URL in the page code eliminates that glitch.

Though it isn't possible to go back and describe every change we've ever made up to this date, we can hit the highlights:

• Calls to Action (CTA's) — These are elements that encourage visitors to a site to do something. They can consist of buttons they click or they can be links highlighted in some fashion, but they exhort the visitor to click on them and go to another part of the site where he or she can perform some kind of action. By their very nature, they are meant to be obvious and attractive.
• Rollovers — These are changes in the appearance of a navigational element, a button, a link, or an image when you hover the cursor over it. They are controlled using CSS rather than Javascript, so they will work even if visitors have turned off Javascript support in their browsers. Some can be as simple as changing font and background color, while others can be highly elaborate, using images and special effects.
• JQuery — JQuery is a plug-and-play Javascript library that allows you to create special effects quickly and easily. It uses CSS to create basic functioning elements, then elaborates on those elements; that way, the elements still work in older browsers and those that have Javascript turned off. So far, these are the JQuery elements we are using:
  • Lightbox — This allows users to click on a thumbnail of an image and see a larger version without leaving the page they are presented on.
  • Accordion — This allows pages to contain large amounts of text, but hidden away in panels so that a visitor doesn't see it until he or she clicks on a link. Then the panel opens and displays the text. This allows pages to load quickly and look small, while containing the information the webmaster wants to display without taking the visitor away to a new page.
  • External — The latest versions of Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer will no longer support XHTML Transitional, which is what most web designers have been using for the past two decades. Instead, they will support XHTML Strict, which requires designers to pay close attention to their code syntax. One feature that Strict does not allow is the target="_blank" command used with links to open them in a new window. However, using JQuery a designer can add class="external" to the link to accomplish the same thing.
• Secure Contact Form — This allows webmasters and owners to block SPAM emails.
• Privacy Policy — This is an exact statement of what kind of information a website collects and what it will be used for.
• Banner Links — These are links to pages of interest not included in the top navigation placed directly in the banner image.
• Footer Site Map — This is a list of the main pages presented at the bottom of every page.
• Footer Masthead — This provides copyright and site designer information, as well as a link to the Copyright Policy.
• Large Left-Hand Logo — This is for branding and product recognition.
• Favicon — This is the little image seen in the URL window of browsers, in tabs on open browser pages, and beside page titles in listings of Favorites. Search engines look for favicons, and if they don't find them they penalize the site's search engine results rank.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — SEO techniques are used to get search engines to place a website high up in their results listing. They not only consist of what not to do, but also what gives the best results. Here are some of the techniques we are using:
  • Page Specific Titles — Page titles should not be generic, but should accurately reflect the content of the page.
  • Descriptive Header Tags — Search engines look for H1, H2, and H3 tags in pages. They only penalize for missing H1 and H2 tags, however, all three can be used to put keywords into pages. The H1 should accurately reflect the page content — in fact, it can simply copy the page title — and the H2 can be used to place a catch phrase on each page, but the H3 tags can be more specific and more varied.
  • Keywords in Text — Keywords are best placed in the page text, but they should reflect the content of the page. Search engines penalize lists of keywords that have little or nothing to do with page contents. However, legitimate key words in the text can also be placed in the keywords meta tag in the page Header.
  • Bolded Text — Search engines also look for bolded words, treating them like keywords, so it is best to bold legitimate keywords in your text.
  • ALT Tag Comments — ALT tags are comment tags placed in image and link code that show up as text in the page if the image is missing or the link is disabled in some fashion. ALT tags are good places to put keyword-rich phrases and descriptions.
  • Frequent Page Additions — Search engines tend to ignore static sites, and so one of the best ways to optimize a site is to add new material at frequent intervals.
  • In-Site Blog — One good way to add new material is to create a blog inside your site, and then post entries at frequent intervals. Though any kind of entries will work, ones that reflect the content of the site work best.

Many more changes were made, but they all are similar to those listed here.