The first Protoss missions are up, with more to come in the following days. Unfortunately, I'll be moving soon and it'll cut into my time for a few days, probably interrupting my progress. I'm trying to get the walkthrough done before the move, but I'm sure I won't be starting Brood War any time soon because of it.

Anyway, on to the real thing I wanted to post about today. A friend sent me the url for this site, it's a comic strip based on MMORPGs. It's pretty damn funny at times and is one long story. There are over 100 pages of this stuff, so you can easily spend a couple hours reading it. It's great for entertainment for those RPG fans among you. Check it out at The Noob Comic. This links to the first page of the strip. I didn't find it funny immediately, but it's great when you get into it. As of right now I'm only on page 34 out of 147, but I plan on reading the whole thing.

Work has gone pretty well on the Starcraft guide. The zerg campaign is now complete, with images as is now my standard. I'm looking forward to playing the Protoss next. I'll then go back and add pictures to the Terran campaign and call it done until I get around to doing Brood War. I think I'll take a break and knock out something else on my agenda first, however.

Next big project started: reworking the Starcraft walkthrough. I'm going to put pictures into all the terran missions and finish the guide! This will take some time, Starcraft is huge.

In the meantime, everything I've completed so far can be viewed here. I'm going to add missions as they're completed so the task doesn't seem so daunting.

Hey, doesn't the home page look better? This is yet another minor evolution for Carl's Guides. This isn't the final design I'm settling on, but it sets apart each news piece better for when I'm ready to further improve. I like the MS-DOS editor style-look, but it can be better, and will. The primary purpose is that each news bit stands out. Later I'll add the ability to comment, but only when I'm ready to start posting more gaming news. I'm going to do all the old news posts like this, but it's going to take a lot of time, so I'm going to do it as it's convenient for me.

On the search engine side of things, this Jagger update by Google is keeping my attention, much as that of every other Webmaster. One day I rank #1 for the simple term "Carl's Guides", the next I'm down deep in the result pages. The site isn't fully indexed by any engine but hopefully will be soon. What better way for my work to be found than the search engines?

I looked back at my Webmaster Resources site and thought it not as good as my current work. I plan to add it to this site eventually, as well as my movie reviews, star trek and blog sites. My site's name is rather neutral, I plan to become an 'entertainment' site with a focus in gaming. This will happen, and my site will grow ever larger. I can't afford multiple domains, so I'll just bunch it all together to make an entertainment mega-site. Ok, mega by my standards, possibly not when compared to some sites that exist, but my site will become a good resource for various areas of interest in the entertainment industry. Of course, every minor site will have its own subdomain from the Carl's Guides main page, to keep them out of the way of gamers, but these will be linked to create my own little network.

Firstly, every download is back in its place. I was lucky and had a few of them backed up on my hard drive.

I invite users to submit sites they use frequently, as well as webmasters who would like to have their gaming sites listed. It doesn't require a reciprocal link, so submit away!

Another thing I want to work on tonight is making site news look much better. I realize that the home page is very very bland and want to doctor it up a bit. I think just making the individual news bits stand out better would be a huge improvement. That way, when I finally do get around to posting gaming news on a regular basis, people might actually read it!

I just made a huge screwup. I was making a subdomain for the new directory I'm going to launch. I logged into the directory and ended up deleting my whole site. The subdomain was connected to the actual root of www.carlsguides.com for some damn reason. Now i have to redo the submission section, shop section and upload every file I was hosting. This is a terrible setback, but I hope to have things back to normal by tomorrow. All HTML-pages will work just like before but reconfiguring means the aforementioned sections will possibly not be functioning for the next 24 hours or so.

I'll update when everything is back to normal.

New look! Well, obviously, to anyone who's been here before. I know it's still not professional but it is the next step in making my site look more professional. This will draw better attention to other, neglected areas of the site. It's easily updatable by me to reflect new additions and changes so that people can see the latest work. Unfortunately my next big project may be a little while off, for, as I've said before, I'm almost out of games.

I'd also like to thank the first visitors to submit tips to the Generals guide. Your input is highly appreciated as, extra opinions and minds only serve to improve such a document.

Much like the last time my phone service was out for a few days, I managed to get a lot of work done. This is a massive site update! Well, for me anyway. The Command and Conquer Generals Walkthrough is now 100% complete. I had a dumb-struck moment when I was in the middle of the GLA campaign. I realized I'd written an exact sentence before. I'd completely forgotten about the incident that caused me to lose this walkthrough the first time I wrote it. Oh well, it's done now - and backed up, damnit!

The other big site addition is the new flash games section. There are eleven games currently, I picked ones I thought would be fairly entertaining. All of these are other people's work, but they allow other sites to use them - I just picked the best of what I found. Later, I hope to expand this section.

Work is coming along nicely on the new and improved Downloads section. Standard utilities will be uploaded as well as game patches, mods and free games. Another coming attraction will be flash games, but I haven't settled yet on how I want to present them.

I don't know why I thought the Generals walkthrough would be done in a week - it won't. It will probably be yet another one, but I'm working on it. I'm over halfway through the GLA campaign now.

The Generals walkthrough is now 1/3 done. I just finished China and uploaded the pages. It's not complete yet but if you want a peek go here. I'm going to pretty it up and complete the game. The china campaign has 25 pictures or so, most of which are not cosmetic but meant to help the player. I think my solution to the mission 7 scud storm will help many because when I first played I had a lot of trouble with that one. Now I go to play the GLA. The entire guide should be done in about a week. Yep, a week. I spend a lot of time on these things. That's why visitor submissions are greatly appreciated.

I've learned a lot from my Dawn of War walkthrough. It seems it's my most popular yet! I think what makes it better over just going to some other major site are the pictures. It's hard to describe how to get somewhere or where you should attack, but with pictures it becomes quite easy.

I just spent about 2 hours writing on one mission for my upcoming C&C generals walkthrough. I think it will pass the dawn of war walkthrough in popularity. Perhaps the best thing is how easily viewers will be able to update it. I've got forms now to submit tips, criticize and offer alternate strategies. Moving from free hosting to something with features is the best move I've ever made.

My site might actually turn out to be damned good. Throughout my time as a gamer I've gone to sites like gamefaqs which have primarily text-only guides. If people are willing to buy expensive books that have pictures, or read text-only guides and info about a game they must be happy to read mine.

Although the Dawn of War walkthrough is the first to feature screenshots to guide the viewer, I'll assure you that every guide I create from here on will have pictures if the game has a screenshot function.

The site has now evolved an entirely new section. You can now submit your reviews, gaming news, tips and walkthroughs for publishing on this site. Any article or tip submitted will be reviewed by me to determine its usefulness to the visitors of this site and, if accepted, will appear under the appropriate category at this, the main site.

Consider the new section a subdivision to help generate more content for the site. You should view the Readme document on the left colum after you've clicked through to the submission management system. There is a bit of legal info and other information I want you to be aware of before you submit anything. You can also become a registered user, which doesn't have any special perks just yet but helps me build trust among regular submitters.

Carl's Guides.com is now online! I got my domain for a year and I can now offer more service to my customers. For every game there will now be a patch (I'm on a 28.8 so it will take a few days) and if I've gotten to it, a guide! I think this is an excellent business practice. I won't allow hotlinking to patches on my site but other webmasters can feel free to link to the page before the download. We can coexist, that way. Finally, to wrap up site news: All games will have downloads within this week. If you like my services, link to my site. Another way you can help is, if you have no site of your own, make your next online games purchase from my site. Hosting costs money, and I can't presently afford a better hosting package so the number of games I can offer downloads for are limited by disk space and bandwidth. In my attempt to pump out more guides for the public I sacrifice other possible income. Use my search page to find the game you want to buy on Amazon, and I'll get a commission.

I wanted to plug a friend's site from dbsaga. You can visit it here. He's managed to integrate several stories into an interesting character bio. This is an example of how I will be conducting any future link trades with other webmasters.