AwesomeDude in 2023

[dude]

Some announcements about where AwesomeDude is heading in the New Year.

·      Stories and Authors

AwesomeDude plans to welcome new authors and novels, novellas and short stories in the New Year. We will, however, strive to maintain the quality of the fiction for which we have become well known. 

If you are a writer never before posted on AD, we invite you to send us your stories for consideration to submissions@awesomedude.com. Guidelines for submissions are viewable from a link on the AwesomeDude main page labeled “Submissions.” 

We’ll also be contacting many of our current AD Authors to urge them to submit new stories as well.

·      Site Appearance Upgrades

AwesomeDude.com will turn nineteen on April 3^rd of this year.  When I started the site in 2004, my coding skills were minimal at best.  About ten years ago we were fortunate enough to have Alien Son join the team with his considerable coding skills as Design Editor and the site took a real upswing appearance-wise.  All new stories posted now are easily readable on tablets and smartphones as well as in computer browsers.  However, despite efforts to go back and recode stories posted before 2013, the sheer volume of stories for the two of us was daunting.

 Just before the end of 2022 we were fortunate again to acquire the assistance of Rurabaga, one of our long-time AD Forum members who is skilled in coding and who volunteered to go back over those early stories and do makeovers on their appearance.  We thank him and everyone who has joined in this ongoing effort to upgrade the entire AwesomeDude site.  This is a major project for us in 2023!

·      Allow Auto-Registrations to AD Forums

For the past few years we have limited joining the AD Forums to those who registered with a follow-up email to me for my manual approval.  Instructions to that effect were periodically posted in the Forums.  The reason for this was high numbers of attack by Russian-bloc spammers which took a lot of time and attention to police.  Improvements in the Forums platform software have made such attacks more difficult to achieve and somewhat easier to control. 

So, beginning about the middle of January we will be accepting automatic self-registrations.  The exact day we enable this will be announced in this (Dude’s Desk) Forum along with more details.  We want to bring in as many readers as possible to be part of this AwesomeDude Community.

On a personal note, I want to express my appreciation to Alien Son for stepping in and picking up the slack during my recuperation from my accident in September of last year.  I have just recently regained my ability to use my computer and am writing this from my bedside table in my medical facility. 

[Pedro]

Mike

Thank you for the update.

I’m glad to hear that you are on the mend and feeling up to getting back into running the site.

 My thanks also to  Alien Son for keeping things going while you were out of action.

Best wishes

 

[Oliver]

Great news Mike, and good to hear the upcoming plans.

Above all, I'm happy to see you're doing better and better every month. With also my special thanks to the people that help you out, especially Alien Son.
I know what it is to have a story-site without the knowledge to set it up an maintain it. Good digital friends are worth a lot. Luckily, I've got my own "Alien Son". 

And there is your call for new writers again. Thought a lot about it. For years. I like really this site and it's quality a lot, I would be a great honour to be published here. It is still tempting to take the jump but that would mean to translate one of my stories, full of Dutch-isms, into English. And deailing with the challenge to translate the Dutch way of expression into English without losing the "feel" and atmosphere of the story.

Maybe I should just take the jump.
Only I'm afraid that jump would require an elevator or an other strong enhancer of some kind. 🙂 
 

 

[Cole Parker]

Nothing gained if nothing tried!

Go for it!

[TomC]

If someone has a few extra minutes some day, you might consider doing some pruning on the Links page.  There is a lot of dead wood right now.

--Tom