The Writer’s Guild Foundation has asked that we share the following press release about a big event they are hosting on Tuesday May 5th from 7:30-9:30pm at the Writer’s Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, California. If you live or will be in that area we strongly recommend that you attend the event.

AN EVENING with RONALD D. MOORE
Tuesday, May 5 – 7:30-9:30pm – At the Writers Guild Theater (135 S
Doheny Dr., Beverly Hills, CA 90211)
Light reception included

Join us for this unique opportunity to learn from the writer, developer, and excecutive producer of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA… one of the most successful sci-fi series in a frakkin’ long time. Ronald D. Moore is one of the most successful writers of television science fiction working today. He is writer/executive producer of Battlestar Galactica. Previous writing and producing credits include Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Good Vs. Evil, Roswell, and the acclaimed HBO series Carnivale. He is the winner of two Peabody Awards, an Emmy (plus many nominations) and a Hugo Award, as well as a WGA nomination.

Thanks,
Jonathan

Purchase tickets online at http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/63131 or call 800-838-3006

Prices:
$20 General Public
$15 WGA members
$10 Student with ID
(prices slightly discounted online)

So I generally stay out of our entertainment section of our forum, but I got a message via our Mod reporting forum that someone indicated that this content was “Spam”. In this case it was “Spam” as it was posted twice in the same thread, however it was the first time I ever seen or read it. It did publish yesterday. The title in the Onion is ‘Obama Depressed, Distant Since ‘Battlestar Galactica’ Series Finale‘. It features Obama reading the Battlestar Forum.

I saved the page for posterity, but here is a screenshot of it:

Obama reading 'BSF'

Very cool find!

We were contacted by a high ranking public relations person from G4 to alert us to a special segment on last night’s episode of Attack of the Show.  Grace Park, who plays Sharon on BSG, stopped by the show for a bit to answer fan mail and questions about Battlestar Galactica.

G4 has been kind enough to allow us to show Grace’s segment to all of you using our blogs, wiki, and forum.  You can view the segment below.  Many thanks to G4 for granting us permission to do this.  Hope you enjoy.

Thanks,
Jonathan

continue reading this entry »

That’s right folks. This morning been all about getting the servers in check and running smoothly for the final season of Battlestar Galactica. As I speak this is what is going on right now and what has been completed.

• Battlestar Forum – Upgraded to 3.8.0.
• Battlestar Blog – Upgraded to 2.7.0.
• Battlestar Wiki – Currently uploading and upgraded to version 1.13.3

The wiki is what is taking the longest. If you are at the wiki right now trying to edit or post something, you will notice my sign while I do it so I can work without wondering what is going on. There are other things that will be going on soon and as Joe has already pointed out some things have already been done.

The forum and the blog will get their 3.0 makeover before Jan. 16 with new designs and new “perks” before the start of the season. The wiki itself has already gotten those, minus the fact that I need to create the heads for the light skin versions. The blog (the one your reading right now) will get the biggest design change. So stay tuned for that. If you notice any problems, after the upgrading is complete please post in the areas designated for that site so we can keep track of all the changes and problems.

That’s about it. Take are and have a happy 4.5 season!

As you might have noticed, we’ve disabled any “Monobook”-based skins, namely BsgBook and BsgMonobook. For those who don’t know, the Monobook skin is essentially the same skin that Wikipedia uses by default. Given the pitfalls of having those skins during our unique aesthetic changes, and given the weaknesses of those skins in general, we’ve decided to get rid of them.

In place of a lighter skin, we are developing the “Battlestar Light” skin, which uses manilla and light brown colors. Right now, it is mostly functional, barring changes that need to be done to the header and the like.

You can see how the skin looks by clicking here. And, if you’re logged in, you can change that skin by going to Special:Preferences, clicking the Skin tab, selecting “Battlestar_Fluid” and hitting the “Save” button.

Right now, the Battlestar Light skin only has a fixed width format, and therefore isn’t designed for either widescreens or for a “fluid” look. However, given that the skin is based off of Shane’s wonderful modifications of the “Gumax” skin by Paul Gu, implementing those features should not be a major issue once final cosmetic changes have been implemented.

You will also note that we’ve began “Galactiguising” message boxes and infoboxes with a “cut corners” motif. That’ll take a bit of work, but we should have that finished by the end of tonight (on the East Coast).

Have a Happy Frakkin’ New Year!

Just received an e-mail from ACS’s technical support saying that the error that prevented their userbase from accessing the WIki has been fixed.

As for others from other ISPs that may be affected, please know that we’re working with the affected ISPs as much as we are able.

Good hunting!

Our own DrWho42 has created a Battelstar Wiki fan page on Facebook. Check it out here!

So… apparently the Wiki Frakr is barred from being linked on MySpace. Consequently, any attempt to link to it from your MySpace profiles, posts, or bulletins will not work.

We can’t control it, but we can let you guys know about it. So tell Tom and his buddies to go frak themselves.

Now that Sci-Fi Wire has issued their low-key press release-slash-news blurb about the Battlestar auction*, I’d like to take the opportunity to formally announce Battlestar Wiki’s (and my own) involvement with it.

If you check out the Battlestar Props website, particularly the “About” section, you’ll see a familiar name there. Yes, that’s me. It’s not a Cylon copy.**

Anyway, I’ve been very, very silent about this for about a month and a half now, mainly because I had my personal doubts as to whether or not this was going to come to pass, and the fact that NBC Universal are the people behind it… Not to mention the fact that I have my own boss, PropWorx CEO Alec Peters. Afterall, everybody’s gotta serve somebody.

In any event, I’ll have much, much more to blog about—via the Battlestar Props website—when I get up to Vancouver. (Yes, I get to go to Vancouver. More on that later.) The Battlestar Props site will be

The slew of behind-the-scenes information I—and, by extension, all of you—will have access to will be tremendous, and will go up on the Wiki. A small, but influential core of volunteers have already been working on getting things prepped for all the information that’ll go online on the Battlestar Wiki, the new Props wiki (still under construction), and the Battlestar Props website. Of course, new volunteers are welcome, and you’ll likely get something out of it (DVD boxset or something like that, hell, maybe a prop, who knows), although all the volunteers are working pro bono. There might be some fame, maybe a splinter, but I’m not in it for the fame. I’m in it because I’m a fan who passionately loves—and hates, at the same time!—the show, and having funded and helped to build the Wiki, we’ve reached a plateau that very, very few fan sites will ever reach.

For me, having never dreamed something like this was ever possible, I find myself continually astonished and deeply humbled at all those who have aided us in our mission to chronicle the series.

Now, before I go off ramblin’ like an prideful father, I’m going back to the tylium mines of Carillon while I still have energy left in me to work through the night.

Updates as I get them! Good night and good luck, and thank you for your belief in us!

* The announcement was supposed to come out Friday. Or at least, that’s what we were told.
** As I am the Final Cylon (hey, I’m not in that infamous, vastly overrated “Last Supper” picture!), I do not have copies of myself available. Sorry. I’ve always been a Cylon, and have been from the start. [cue Watchtower music]

We have completed the move to our new, roomier servers. Everything is working, and most everyone should be able to access the wiki and our other websites. However, it may take as much as 48 hours (on the outside) for the new DNS entires to fully propagate.

If there are any issues, feel free to post them as a response to this blog.

Just to keep everyone appraised of the situation, we’ve determined that there’s some error that is preventing the fwrite() functions of Apache from working on our “Apollo” server, despite recompiles of Apache, PHP and its various libraries and services.

Therefore, poised with the fact that this cannot be corrected without a clean reload of the operating system (as well as an OS upgrade from RedHat 4 to RedHat 5), we’ve decided to take the opportunity to procure a new server to replace the old one. (We will still have the old server until everything is transferred to the new server, so as to make things easier for both our visitors and the maintenance staff behind-the-scenes.

This will be an in-house process, and as such there should be very little downtime. Right now, The Planet (our data host) is working on configuring the new server to our specifications. Once this is done, we’ll begin work on putting the finishing touches on it and transferring data files form the old server.

By the way, nothing on our database server will be affected in this process, as that server (”Athena”) will not be touched.

In the meantime, there is talk about retiring the “Apollo” name and renaming it on the Battlestar Forum here. If you want to help us determine whether or not we should keep the “Apollo” name, contribute to that thread.

In any event, we expect that everything will be finalized by Thursday or Friday. The only major problem that may occur is repopulating the DNS to direct the domain names (battlestarwiki.org, battlestarforum.com, et al.) to the new server instead of the old one.

If, for some reason, the servers go down, please check out our “Case Orange” blog at http://bswiki.woo-yay.net

For those of you questioning why things are slow—for instance, why you’re receiving delayed updates and (for you new users) registration information—here’s why.

We have been visited by between 20k-30k people on both Saturday and Sunday. At least the Wiki has. The Forum has definitely increased in activity, and our IRC chat on Friday night (which started at 9 P.M. ET, went well into 2 AM ET on Saturday morning!).

Just to give you an idea of how this compares, the weekend of the Season 4 premiere (”[[He That Believeth In Me]]”) saw 20k unique visitors come to the Battlestar Wiki. Now, the mid-season finale, “[[Revelations]]”, actually saw an increase in on those numbers. The difference, according to Quantcast (which directly measures visits), being about 1 to 2 thousand additional viewers.

The chart below, which you can see for yourself here, is reproduced below since I don’t want to be embarrassed a year from now when the chart gets updated and the old data pushed aside. The peaks, as you can imagine, correlate to when the episode was aired in the USA. (As you can see, the trough was Memorial Day weekend.)

Now remember when I said “30k”? Well, having recently loaded Google Analytics code into the Wiki’s template (the gizmo that generates the look of the website, otherwise known as the “front end”), they claim we have received 30k visitors. A difference of 10k from Quantcast.

I can’t compare HTBIM to Revelations traffic here, since the Google Analytics code was loaded just a week and a half ago, but here’s the chart from the “Revelations” weekend. (The popup denotes the Saturday following “Revelations”.)