MSROCAI

    Welcome to Mike Steele's Realm of Creation and Imagination!  (Don't criticize how awesome that sounds:  it was kick-ass when I was 14, and I am working on a somewhat sexier name.)  Anyhow, before you get any deeper into this mess, let me warn you that this little plot of cyberspace is going through a transition from a fanfiction-centric website to a website that encompasses many more of my interests.  Since that is the case, I can't really tell you what MSROCAI is about, nor can I tell you what sort of adventures you will find here.  Rest assured, though, that my awesome fanfics aren't going to be consigned to the Internet junkyard.  Most importantly, however, I am re-coding the site at the moment, so don't get all exploded if the links don't work, if the images don't pop up, or if loading this page prompts your browser to try to murder you.  Most importantly, your web browser needs to be amicable towards JavaScript for MSROCAI to be properly displayed.

Recent Updates
December 29, 2007 at 6:50PM EST
    After the last update, I expected to abandon this project for several more months (at least).  Well, I surprised myself!  Although this update may have less to do with me actually being motivated about getting this little restoration off the ground and more to do with me having three days off work without anyone in State College to entertain me, I still consider it victorious proof that I am awesome.  As I planned in the last update, I have rebuilt and uploaded the Website Information page.  The next update?  No clue...Penn State is playing in the Alamo Bowl in a little more than an hour, I am hoping to be in the Baltimore area tomorrow, I have work Monday and Tuesday, and I am tentatively going to Philadelphia on Wednesday.  As to what the next update will include, well, I don't have much of an answer for that either.  I have decided against reviving the About Mike and Links pages for now because both of those pages are entirely inaccurate--so I guess we can rule those out of the picture.  Wait, that means the next update actually has to be some sort of content update, now doesn't it?  Exciting!

December 19, 2007 at 9:45PM EST
    Two updates in one day?  Wow, I've gone and flabbergasted myself!  Seriously, this is utterly amazing.  Well, as I indicated earlier, I have brought the old updates back online.  Simply removing the <p> and </p> tags from each page wouldn't have taken that long, but since I really fiddled around with the CSS controls quite a lot, there was much more work to be done than I had originally anticipated.  Brining everything up to snuff only took a few hours however.  In addition to fixing the Updates Archive, I completely rebuilt (and uploaded) the Contact Mike and form submission Thank You pages.  As always, if you come across any problems, please let me know.  The next update will likely be the Site Information page, and after that I may post some new content before grinding out all the HTML modifications for the fanfics.

December 19, 2007 at 12:10PM EST
    Well, I only missed three years; I guess that isn't too terribly bad.  In short, a lot has happened in the intervening one-thousand-ish days since the last update, and with that settled, I shall forge ahead with this update.  Once again, I have decided to re-work the code for this website, although I do have a rather legitimate excuse this time:  Firefox, my web browser of choice since the last time I was actively working on MSROCAI, wasn't very fond of how I had things coded.  Specifically, Firefox was exaggerating the vertical spacing around certain parts of the layout to the point that everything looked just a bit goofy.  Not that this problem alone brought about my hiatus, but it was annoying enough that, until I finally solved it last night, I couldn't justify working on any part of this place.  (I'm a perfectionist, but you probably knew that from my frequent revisions of everything.)
    What was the problem?  Firefox apparently augments the space above and below paragraph tags, <p> and </p>, and since I use these little guys ubiquitously, there was certainly a little issue.  After I realized that this was the source of my problem through some random tinkering last night, I simply replaced <p> and </p> with <div> and </div>.  Of course, this "simple" fix means that I have to change the HTML for every page of this website, and doing so will take me quite some time.  I have already cleaned up the HTML in the JavaScript files that provide the layout for each page, but I haven't gotten around to anything else yet.  Well, I did tweak the Cascading Style Sheets that I use, but that's a cosmetic project that I had been working on for a while (if you use Internet Explorer, you may have noticed that I am no longer making your scrollbar exciting colors).
    Since I haven't fixed the HTML on any page other than this one, and since, quite frankly, the content on all of those other pages is grossly outdated, I have temporarily disabled the links in the navigation menu.  Honestly, I'm probably going to rebuild every page from the ground up, so don't expect this to be a fast process.  Almost every page is outdated, inaccurate, or too pathetic to resuscitate.  I have already rebuilt the Main Page (if you didn't notice); this little design, devoid of all the colorful garbage floating around the bottom, has actually been sitting on my computer for a couple of years, but, well, you know how I work.  Next, I will restore the archive of updates, but after that, I don't have a specific plan of action.
    This may be just another coding update, but I have a lot of new content to put up, most of which has absolutely nothing to do with fanfiction.  While I do still dabble in it to keep my writing skills as sharp as possible (and because Dragon War seemingly has become one of my personal wars), I have other interests that I would like to share with the world.

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