It’s been nearly a year since I last made a blog entry, I think it was nearing the end of the last season’s playoffs. The past year has been very busy for me… between getting laid off, finding new work, doing a ton of work on UHS to get it out of beta, getting injured (‘m still feeling the effects of it) and trying to cope with my wife learning to drive.
With UHS out of beta and relatively stable I could again focus on the HockeySim.ca brand. The blog needed to come back as well as a new home page for users and visitors of UHS. The intent is to have the uhs.hockeysim.ca site be the main place people will go. The top-level domain of www.hockeysim.ca will continue to redirect to UHS.
The new home page of UHS will feature the most recent posts from the UHS General and Hockey Talk forums. Additionally, we’ve move the support form to be located right on this home page as well as a list of all known outstanding issues so it’ll be easier for users to see what’s out there and contact us for anything new. To round things out on the UHS front, I thought a list of the development wishlist would be nice to see.. If there’s something you want to see added and it’s not on that list, let us know.
The League Creation form will be replaced with an advertisement square and a box containing your league’s communication. If you subscribe to the ad-free premium service, the advertisement will be gone and the communication box will be bumped up to the top of the page. The regular GM and COM home pages are now found by clicking their respective links in the ToC menu to the left.
The HockeySim.ca forums are now the UHS Forums. I’ve gone and changed the theme again… although I did really like the red one it just didn’t fit with the UHS theme we currently have.
What’s next….? Well… I think we’ll be ramping up our advertisements more and targeting sponsors. I want to get UHS to the next level and these changes were done to help us get there.
With that said, I do need help. So far it’s pretty much a one-man show at the moment. I am looking for help with two areas in particular:
Blog Writers: I would like to get something published here once a day or as often as something interesting happens… be that in the NHL / Hockey World or even the Hockey Simulation world (ie. gaming). If you are interested in trying your hand at writing, please contact me immediately at uhs@hockeysim.ca.
UHS Support: There are times where I can be a bit “short” with people. I expect people to dig around in UHS and at least try to figure things out. I’ve created the Help buttons for a reason. Not all people are built the same way, so when I invariably get very simple questions that could have been answered by actually trying to use UHS or checking the help files or *whatever* it really does cheese me off to the point that I should not be responding until I’ve had the chance to collect my thoughts and respond appropriately.
I need people that are both UHS *experts* and can respond to even the simplest of questions in a timely and considerate manner.
Compensation: I would love to be able to pay you even a penny, but so far my world isn’t working that way. I have other forms of compensation at my disposal… such as significant discounts on UHS premium services. If that’s not enough, you will be “in the building” so-to-speak for when things get really interesting around here. It’s quite possible this will lead to other opportunities in the future.