News

Now on the site, in the FF6 Fanfiction Section is the newest complete fanfiction by Zephir, who is currently working on two others that can be found in the Site Submissions section.

As with his last piece, Ikiiri does not centre around a main character from the game. Instead, Zephir has created a whole new species to grace the world of FF6. This is a sad, yet satisfying, tale of a young female named Ikiiri, who is trying to make sense of the world around her.

In other fanfiction news, the results of the Gogo Fanfiction Contest are in, and will be posted in the near future.

Just as a word of warning, our host will be conducting some maintenance to our server tomorrow. You may see some times where you are unable to access the site, or some things on the site may be pretty badly broken when you reach them. These changes will require a change to our DNS setup, which will account for most issues in accessing the site.

Our hope is that the intermittent connection issues with the site will be resolved by these changes. Thank you!

And the forums sped up remarkably to reach 30,000 posts. The 30,000th post was made by i90east when he started the Mystery Treasure & Flying Star topic. Happy trails to all!

Pseudo bets were made on when the forums were reach 30,000 back when they reached 20,000 posts. Everyone was way off. February 21st was way earlier than anyone predicted — the earliest prediction made was March 12.

Anyway, congratulations, CoN. This will probably be the last news post made about post landmarks until 50,000 and/or 100,000, as they're not really news.

Today marks the release of Phoenix Mozilla Firebird Firefox 0.8 (anyone else confused yet?) It has a new name, clearly, as well as a new icon and new branding stuff all over the place. We're assured that this name change is final, just like the Firebird one was. Let's hope some more open-source weirdos don't turn up to stymie this one with their complete lack of acceptance of two different software projects having the same name; especially since, after the initial shock and horror, the name is growing on me, and the new icons and logos are pretty neat.

But none of you care one little bit about all that, I'll wager. What might you care about? Well, when I announced the release of 0.7, one of the common questions was how to install Java and Flash. Here's the good news: version 0.8 for Windows comes with an installer, which means that, with any luck, both Flash and Java will recognise Firefox once it's been installed, and their installers/control panels will happily let you install them into the browser with no extra fuss. Another common problem has been downloading certain files from misconfigured Web sites, receiving a page of garbled text in the browser instead; this should now be resolved for the most part. Also included is a new download manager, which keeps all your downloads in a single window, and a new extension installer based on it. For Mac OS X users, the browser now also uses a more native-looking theme.

A bonus feature for me, and probably other Web developer types, is the inclusion of Document Object Model Inspector as an option in the installer. Previously it was necessary to compile it in yourself, with some modifications to the source code to make it work properly, or to find an unofficial build containing it.

I'm sure there's more exciting stuff in there I've forgotten about, as well, so head on down to the Mozilla Firefox product page today and grab a copy for yourself. I'll remind you of what I told you last time: it's a "technology preview", so don't expect it to be perfect, though in my and a great many others' experience, it's a lot safer and more stable than Microsoft's dated, insecure and generally lacking Internet Explorer. Still, if you're very concerned about using beta software, you might prefer the recently released Mozilla 1.6. Almost slipping under the radar with the excitement surrounding Firefox, its companion mail client, the non-renamed (as of yet, at least) Mozilla Thunderbird 0.5 was also released today, and is definitely worth picking up if you want a e-mail client in the Firefox style.

All are great products, and Mozilla browsers are strongly recommended for viewing CoN (hence my excuse for writing these non-Squenix-ish software release articles, you see), though I'm sure you can tell which our favourite is by the tone of this article. For more reasons to switch (probably), check the old news article about Firebird 0.7's release.

Josh and I have recently completed updating the CoN's fanart gallery, this time adding twenty new images total, with some from every game covered. We'd like to thank Narratorway, Kame, Rujuken, Figaro, Bluemonika, Gabe, Blackfauve, SilverMaduin, and Sethron, the artists of these awesome images. Please take the time to view the new fanart and also vote on them.

Have a great time viewing and voting!

Another great short fic by SpacemanSpiff is now available for your reading pleasure in the FF4 section. Feel free to comment in this thread, or in the appropriate Site Submissions thread.

Please visit our FF4 fanfiction section to read "A Call to Darkness".