Due to a large explosion and fire which occurred in the data center where OGR2.0’s webhost is hosted, OGR2.0’s site experienced downtime through much of this weekend.

I’m pleased to see we’re back up and running so that I can get back to work. Thanks for your patience!

In the meantime, have you checked out Javelin’s TinyTalk site? A great podcast with some very interesting interviews and information. The latest was with Shawn McCann, Canada’s first Innovative Learning and Gaming Librarian!

Will I set up a wiki? As much as I love wikis, I don’t know whether or not I have a use for one. I’d love to install one. I even have a preferred wiki in mind. But really, do I want to reinvent the wheel? I know Brody already has a MUSH wiki (I just need to find the address again) and MPUG/PUGGY has one up, then there’s the TinyMUX wiki and no doubt countless others. I’d rather provide a gateway of sorts to those resources which are already available and help promote them.

Granted, if I find a need that’s out there in the community that is not being met and a wiki would be a good solution to it, I’ll consider it. But at this point, I don’t think I’ll need one or make use of one (much as it saddens me since I’m such a wiki-pusher).

I’ve been asked if I’ll be keeping the Embassy list from the old OGR site. I think my answer is ‘not as such’ for the time being. I might create a list of Embassies OGR hosted over the years but I won’t be keeping the telnet and website addresses live, considering I have no real easy way of knowing at this point which ones are still working and which ones are dead. What I’ll likely do is link to one of the many game lists out there (or several of them, depending on what’s still maintained). I might see about some kind of DIY list that includes a way to submit links and report dead ones, if I’m feeling particularly clever. But the clickable Embassy list will be one of those things that will be sloughed off.

Along with a complete design overhaul, I plan on reworking the content and purpose of the new OGR2.0 site, as I’m calling it. Archival materials such as the old class/workshop logs and articles will be preserved and hopefully managed a little better.

I have a little bit of a surprise as well.

For any of the old ‘MU* dinos’ such as myself, I came across a folder of articles which I had thought long gone, destroyed in one of the many hard drive crashes over the years.

I have managed to uncover the old Studio H website articles, generously donated to OGR by ttyp0 from Studio H. These files were handed over to me and I was given sole rights to reproduce the files on the OGR site for preservation once Studio H closed down. I’m rather excited to be able to provide these to the MU*/gaming community, since they really were quite the source of good information. Many thanks to ttyp0!

Sorry for the site being unavailable recently! OGR experienced some technical difficulties and as a result, I decided that now was as good a time as any to start on the site revamp. I’m hoping to get a lot of the archival material back up at the very least by the end of April 2008. Please feel free to check back here later and even add this to your usual RSS feeds! ( http://ogrmux.wordpress.com/feed )

~ Siobhan