Layout history

This is the history of the Gabriel Knight Pages. The project is ambitious - it could not even be otherwise, given that the author is perfectionist and ambitious himself - and is beginning to have a respectable history: it is going to celebrate its fifth birthday.

3rd April 2008: Extended the resource locator and added some GKpedia articles. Enhancements to the Music page.
28th March 2008: Radical restyling to the guestbook. It now matches the site's look, and has been embedded in a page of its own.
26th March 2008: New Music page, with information about the game music and the official and unofficial sound track recordings. New additions to the Interview Archive, too; updates to the Timelines.

2007

27th November 2007: Exclusive addition to the interview archive: the English version of the interview Petr Ticháček conducted with Jane for Czech portal BonusWeb is now available for everyone to read. Thanks to the author for having digged it up!
22nd November 2007: Brand new GK3 troubleshooting page.
29th October 2007: Massive additions to the Interview archive. The newly added interviews are courtesy of Ron, who shared his personal GK interview archive, and date from the pre-GK3 era to the current days.
24th October 2007: Welcome to the Gabriel Knight Pages - v.3!
After years of growth the site has been redesigned from scratch - everything is brand new, beginning with the name, shortened to Gabriel Knight Pages. The use of javascript has been almost entirely dropped, all the layout is done using CSS and the user interface has been heavily tweaked with. The result are clean, fast-loading, accessible, resolution, user and search engine friendly pages; all the content has been reorganised into new sections and can be located with unprecedent ease. There's also a completely new feature: each page can be easily bookmarked with De.li.cious, Digg, Facebook, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or printed for future reference.
And as for content, check out the new Interview archive, the new additions to the Fan Fiction archive, and the GKpedia!
17th May 2007: Added New Orleans Gallery #3. Started developing a new layout version for the site - v3, with more effective browsing, more consistent design and cleaner code.
17th April 2007: Finally fixed the galleries. Many thanks to Gabnic for having checked them up and having provided me the slideshow code: I have already thought of a possible use for it. I am still not happy with the GK World section, but have no time to redesign it. Updates made to the links section.
2nd April 2007: Major additions to the fan fiction archive: Masque de la Terreur by Travis Lester, Life by Rebel_at_Heart, and finished uploading A Cold Mountain by Daniel Pears.
15th March 2007: Added Chem's My Favourite Things GK version to the Fan Fiction Archive, corrected the dates in the GK3 walkthrough. I have some problems with the gallery scripts, and despite having got some new versions I am not in the right mood to mess with code.
3rd March 2007: Yeah, it's been quiet here lately. I had only made some news updates - my real life needed absolute priority and I have had no time to work here at all. Reorganised the GK World section, in order to ensure a more effective navigation and resource visibility/accessibility.

2006

7th December 2006: finally! Thanks to the precious and patient help of Gabnic I have finally been able to implement javascript galleries, with considerable savings of bandwidth, time and mental sanity. Get ready for a gallery flooding.
25th September 2006: continuing the extension of the Fan Fiction Archive. New entries are To Put Into Words and Missin' New Orleans by jRev, Southend and ShadowChancer by MistThing, End Times by AGM.
15th September 2006: thanks to Sophia from the Gabriel Knight boards for having figured out the lyrics of the Engelhart opera; thanks also to Krss for having provided me the full version of Myeerah's fan fiction named The Barren Tree, which can now join the list of the complete works available in the fan fiction archive. The GK2 section is finally active, even if still poor in content.
6th September 2006: Added The Gray Path by Krss and reworked some of the CSS style sheets. Starting to lay out some content for the GK2 section!
29th August 2006: Added Turn of Faith and Broken Promises, two fan fictions by Claudia Martins. Broken Promises has never seen the light before!
26th August 2006: The homepage gets a new look. Abandoning the nice but heavy light blue frames for 60x60px square thumbnails, which work also as alternative links. The new look should be more effective content-wise as it reduces the size of unnecessary images, increasing the room for text. I might decide to implement this look in all the main pages.
26th June 2006: More CSS. Added some links to the Weblinks page.
16th May 2006: Content re-organisation for the GK3 Documents section: I am introducing experimentally the use of CSS. The Rennes-le-Château mystery is now better covered; it is also easier to find the single documents thanks to the introduction of specific anchors within the pages.
24th March 2006: The Fan Fiction Archive is finally up and running. Its final goal is collecting all the fan fiction appeared on the Gabriel Knight boards in the WebX era and thus becoming the third chapter of the GK Fan Fiction archives. Presently it contains only a small part of the material that is going to be archived here. The home page has been made more accessible and indexable by removing the interfacing welcome page.
27th February 2006: All the new graphics from now on are being done in Adobe Photoshop CS2 - its first application has been the new version of the blue Schattenjäger talisman logo. The News page is up and running; I am beginning some general code polishing and site content reorganization.
1st January 2006: Finally switched to Macromedia Studio MX for site upkeeping. Fixed some visualization bugs, made some minor look adjustments and created a basis for the upcoming Fan Fiction Archive; all the pages have been updated to 1024x768 screen resolution.

2005

11th August 2005: Added a Guestbook link to the navigation panel, reorganized the homepage for more logical disposition and more pleasant feel, added a Did You Know? javascript panel which shows random trivias about the Gabriel Knight Series on the homepage, added the "Contest for new GK community header" gallery and cast the basis for a GK news page. Routine look fixing.
26th July 2005: Minor general and Internet Explorer bug fixing, Added some links to the Weblinks page, conversion of the GK3 walkthrough to 1024x768; added the date of the days to the GK3 walkthrough headers.
2nd July 2005: Look editings to the new navigation panel, fixed some Internet Explorer visualization bugs. Added a second New Orleans Photo Gallery, courtesy of Alleysrats from the VU Gabriel Knight Community.
28th June 2005: Switched to Quanta Plus for site upkeeping: it involves more work but I can have a better control of everything. Added the Purification Dream. Relevant homepage editings and some content organization changes. Starting the work to adjust the site to a 1024x768 screen resolution: the homepage and some other pages are now full screen; a new navigation panel has been created to enhance the site accessibility.
20th June 2005: Added a new wallpaper to the GK1 Downloads section. Added also the Gunter Ritter page, featuring his letters extracted from the game and from the graphic novel, in the GK1 Documents section. New links added to the Weblinks page.
25th April 2005: The GK1 Downloads Section is now up and running! It features original GK1 wallpapers and some links to sources featuring GK1 items. Fixed some minor visualization bugs and the errors which prevented from viewing the full GK1 Characters page and the last two pages of the GK1 walkthrough.
9th April 2005: Minor bug fixing, added some links to the Weblinks section and a New Orleans Photo Gallery, courtesy of JulesThe from the VU Gabriel Knight Community.
4th April 2005: Added links to Project Gabriel Knight 2000, added "What's New" frame in homepage, New Orleans Gallery, edited Acknowledgements page and fixed some visualization bugs.
13th March 2005: Goodbye forever Angelfire! The new web host is Bravenet: I'm keeping the Angelfire address as gateway, but the site is physically located at http://gabrielknight.bravehost.com. A much easier address to remember.
28th February 2005: Major look and structure editing, added Date displaying and JAVE linking. New: Jane Jensen's biography, full-point GK1 walkthrough, GK1 Poetry and new GK3 documents section. Also, I've done an agreement for cross linking with JustAdventure.com: The Crazy Owl Gabriel Knight Pages are accessible from the GK pages of the JAVE!

2004

21st September 2004: A fresh new look for the site: it's the first time the current layout is uploaded, with the brand new blue logo and the new title: The Crazy Owl Gabriel Knight Pages. Web designing has been made using the Gimp for the graphics and Mozilla Composer for the code. The brand new website features now a GK1 section, a rich GK3 section and an Extras section dedicated to game designers.

2003

10th December 2003: Started working on the new layout and contents and made some advertising for it on the site. The regeneration date is scheduled for 21st september 2004.
16th June 2003: The Crazy Owl Gabriel Knight 3 Walkthrough is online. This is when my GK website sees the light for the first time. The whole project is wide and will grow through time: I want my fansite to be one of the most complete GK sites on the Net. The graphic design (made with Microsoft Word!) is simple, but not poor (I actually quite liked it and will always miss its dark red-white contrast and the use of Verdana as default font).

Last update: April 1, 2008

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