Respawn

Following Eric "MindPhuck" Mooney's announcement that he was hanging up his nailgun and handing over the site to someone with more time, I have somehow finished up with it!

What you see here is the new site I designed over the last few months using the very powerful Drupal CMS. I'd been looking for something to try out the power of Drupal on for a while, and Quake.ie seemed like the perfect candidate. I am also a massive Quake fan as anyone who has ever visited my site at altFIRE.com knows already. It is an absolute privilege to take over this site from Eric.

After much discussion and emails back and forth between myself, Eric and our common hosting provider, Digiweb to arrange handover over of the domain and secure an archived copy of the old site, today it finally all comes together. By tomorrow morning (or maybe Thursday) all caches should be cleared and anyone visiting quake.ie will be presented with this new version of the site, designed to appeal to the console generation and with a hidden agenda of dragging the Irish Quake Community, kicking and screaming, into the current decade! I'll then fix up our link to Twitter and any other outstanding bits and pieces (Google caching, etc).

Unfortunately, due to the technological time span, there was simply no way to import all the old user accounts to the new site. The old site ran on a 10 year old Windows server using Active Server Pages and an old access database. The new site is hosted on Linux and uses PHP with MySQL 5 (and a completely different schema). So if you are a returning member, you will need to register for a new account (please use your old username so we can identify you!). Once registered, you can comment on news articles, submit your own news articles and keep a personal blog for all to read. We will also endeavour to help you out with any Quake related issue you might have. Need some webspace for a games project? Need a server for clan matches? No problem. We'll do our best to help.

Now, we're not naive by any means. We know that not too many people play Quake anymore, and the Irish scene is pretty much dead in the water. However, if we can introduce Quakeworld to just one or two gamers, or re-ignite the interest and restart just one clan on these shores, it will be worth the effort. We will be permanently hosting an Irish game server for anyone requiring low ping, casual games as well as hosting a professional ranked server where old school gamers can meet and have a complete 90's flashback whenever they want, while keeping themselves active on the international scoreboards.

So, that's all for now. Welcome to the new site, I hope you like it. Thanks to Eric for allowing me to take it over, and a big thank you to John McKenna at Digiweb for all his help transferring the domain. Tomorrow's his last day there after just over 10 years - this is one of the first domains he ever registered for a customer so it is very fitting that it is one of the last he deals with before departing!