What?!? A new way of doing the Newsbox and Guide?

Yes, the sign-up is now different. You have more control over it, and is less of a chore for me to maintain it. However, you will have to do things a bit differently. And not only that, if you were in the old box, you'll have to sign up again.

Was this what you were betatesting?

Yep. About 20 betatesters were asked to sign up, with an alphatest group of 5 (myself, Seven^3, Scott and Tony of PDI, Mark of Zortic, and Aubrin of Midcentral). 10 signed up for the beta, and out of the total, about eight got it all before I said "Ok, it's good enough. Shut down the old box."

What's changed with the Newsbox on our pages? Do we have to edit it?

Nothing! Well, if you have it wrapped in a border table, you can remove the border table. It comes with it's own. The code you should have is:

<SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JavaScript" SRC="http://gear.keenspace.com/scripts/ksnews.js"></SCRIPT>

How so? How do I sign up for this new Newsbox/Guide?

You need to get a few things together, first. Grab your newsbox image and name it "newsbox" (use .gif, .jpg, or .png for endings. Case is sensitive! Use all lower case names). NOTE: The image cannot be larger than 150x150. GIF animation is allowed, but the filesize cannot be larger than 64K. Optimize those animations! Flash animation is not allowed in the newsbox -- so export those .swf files to .gif.

Second, open up a plain text editor (Notepad, Emacs, or BBedit, as long as it saves as Windows/DOS or Unix plaintext). You need to edit a "newsbox.xml" file (it's like broken HTML, kinda like the forums). Here's what lt looks like:

<!-- Comments like this are ignored -->
<keen> <!-- You need this tag -->
<name>Stalag '99</name> <!-- Your comic's name -->
<img>newsbox.gif</img> <!-- Your comic's newsbox image (not a URL!) -->
<url site>http://stalag99.keenspace.com</url> <!-- URL to your comic -->
<url first>http://stalag99.keenspace.com/d/20010101.html</url>
<!-- URL to your first comic -->
<newsbox>Newsbox Description here</newsbox>
<guide>Guide Description here</guide>
</keen> <!-- You need to clean it up here -->

You need to edit that file to match your own comic. You can remove the "guide" tags if you want to be just in the newsbox, but why would you want to? Once you have that all saved and ready, FTP into your account and change to /public_html. Make a "keen" directory, and put both newsbox.xml and newsbox image in there. You may change the name of the newsbox image, but it *MUST* exist or else you will not be listed.

Once done that, let me know by going to the Gear forum and drop me a line on the "Newsbox II and Guide signup topic." Also include the <script> tags I described above.

I will be updating these weekly, so if you make changes, it'll semiautomagically update.

Who are you?

Kelly "STrRedWolf" Price, of Stalag '99.