So it's been a while since I've written _anything_ to do with the Complete Gamer project.

Main reason being I've been hella busy working with Gaz and Shnooter on the Eve Radio website and dealing with all the countless issues surrounding the latest alliance tournament and dealing with a lot of behind the scenes stuff that isn't really interesting to talk about.

One of those uninteresting things was badgering the right people to do the right things at the right time to allow us to manage the thousands of people butchering our bandwidth during AT7 and causing a massive strain on our new server, Orion.

Another of those things was taking a long hard look at the back end plug ins used on the site and working out which ones were absolutely essential and which ones were more trouble than they were worth.

So far, it's a 50/50 split between chucking out the good but too intensive and keeping the mundane but neccesary.

The good news is we've managed to minimise (to an extent) the load on Orion and tidied up some parts of the core website to allow faster load times and fewer unexpected errors. The work is by no means complete and for every 2 solutions we encounter a new problem but overall we are starting to win the war.

This is a result.

The upside of that is we can now get back to doing the creative stuff and start adding more meat to the Complete Gamers bare bones as well as touch up a few things on Eve Radio. 

Currently, I've got Shnooter upgrading ER's schedule display to work with Gaz's Schedulator V.2 so it will have the same sort of functionality and visual appeal that's running over on TGR. Once that's done (we estimate this will be live some time tomorrow) poor old Shnooter will have to get back to his primary job at this moment in time which is learning everything learnable about the Eve API and intergrating certain functionality into the ER and CG sites.

One of these things will be a slick items database you've probably seen all over Eve Online fansites the last few years. Another is intergrating certain API functions into the sites profile system.

While Shnooter is doing all that, I'm going to be expanding the Eve Online Mini Site (not that you've seen any of it yet) with the ability for users to add Corp and Alliance listings. While it sounds fairly ordinary on the surface, as our understanding of the api increases we should be able todo some pretty interesting stuff with it which should make it a valuable tool longer term.

Meanwhile, Gaz is doing something super secret which I hope to be able to talk about in the near future. 

Other than that, it's business as usual. By that I mean we're really busy with several of the regular DJ staff off to Fanfest this week to partake in all manner of geekery. We will hopefully be able to put on a show or two during this period and I know Jack Pott is out on the sniff, looking for important types to rub up against to try and get us some fascinating tid bits of information we can splurge all over the site.

Beyond Fanfest, our next biggest event of the year will probably be Decembers Christmas Comes Early campaign.

If you recall from last year, we gave away over 10 billion ISK, 10 60 day Game Time Cards and one lucky winner walked away with the grand prize of a complete Faction Battleship Model set.

While this year we're not going to be giving away tangible goods (We're all very poor as we are in a recession) we will be opening our virtual wallets and giving away over 30 Billion ISK during the 7 day CCE campaign.

The manner in which this is done will be both random and competitive and will - like last year - require participants to put in some effort in order to walk away with the big finale prize. 

Should be a good laugh at the very least. I just hope Shminty got the voice for it again.

Anyway, that's about it for now. I'll be back some time soon with more fascinating news from the Gaming Radio Network. Promise.