Revision Log

October 2, 2018

Wow—looks like we were offline for almost two months! And not for any good reason, just due to a misconfiguration. My bad! Sorry about that! Can't believe nobody notified me sooner....

June 15, 2018

Local mail delivery has been shut off on the main server (simba) for a few months now, and this has meant that the Postcards have not been sending out their validation emails to senders (nor would the notifications have been getting to the recipients if they had). So I decided it was time to finish up the revamped Django-backed Postcard system, which now sends an HTML email directly to the recipient rather than storing the card on the server for retrieval. No more audio files (for now—I might try to add them back in), but a much nicer user experience, providing that anyone actually uses this stuff anymore who isn't a robot.

November 17, 2016

Rebuilt the Guest Book and opened it up again for business for the first time since 2009. It's got a ReCAPTCHA on it now, so the spamming that was the reason for shutting it down in the first place should be a non-issue now. Or at least if it's still a problem, I have much better ways of dealing with it now than used to be the case.

October 31, 2016

Moved the Image Archive onto the new, modern Django back-end. The front-end interface still looks exactly the same as it ever did, though, right down to the horrible HTML structure that dates back to the late 90s. The same base /imgarchive URL continues to work, though the new one underneath is /multimedia/images/ (which will eventually be exposed properly). Even the select-and-zip-images function still works.

There is literally no reason for the Image Archive to be on a professional dynamic back-end, since after all it's not like the content ever changes or anything. It's just that I think it's funny.

Sooner or later the front-end will get a reworking too, but for now this is just about moving the content to its new home.

October 12, 2016

Built a new front page. This may or may not be the first step in a major redesign and reorganization of the site, but most likely it's going to just be a look-and-feel update that makes things a bit more modern and engaging in a world where broadband and mobile browsers are the norm instead of rare luxuries.

There's now a vertical sidebar at the right that lists all the media properties (movies, TV shows, etc), which ultimately should link to dedicated pages for each, but for now just gives us a nice visual way to browse them and see what content is available. Meanwhile the HTML structure of the main page has been gutted and rewritten for the first time in... geez, decades. Dynamic content going forward will be provided via Django and a real, proper back-end instead of hard-coded HTML and hacked-together Perl scripts.

The main impetus for this change was the announcement of the upcoming live-action Lion King movie by Jon Favreau; now that we're up to four films and two TV shows (what with The Lion Guard and all), plus of course the Broadway Musical, it seems crazy to keep pretending the original movie is the only thing anyone cares about anymore. Of course, there's a temptation to say that nobody cares about a site like this at all anymore, in a world where 1080p screenshots are easy to come by and any character or plot info can be had in crowdsourced form from much more involved fans at The Lion King Wikia. But much to my amazement, we're still sustaining thousands of visitors daily; and much in the same way that I rolled out the completely rewritten and revamped TLKFAA back in July, I feel as though fan interest in the Lion King world is never going to dip below a level where maintaining these sites is no longer worthwhile, let alone fade away completely.

That said, even if I do rebuild this site from the ground up, large parts of it will probably remain just the way they are, as ugly and unserious and convoluted and irrelevant as they might be. Lionking.org is a time capsule of an era in Internet history when even some nerd's college hobby, built on the back of a commercial property made up of hundreds of other people's hard paid work, could become a global phenomenon and attract widespread and lasting attention. If I tried to pretty it up to the point where it looked like a true "modern" site, with all that implies, it would have the side effect of burying all that quirky, embarrassing history and all the spontaneous fun that fueled the growth of the Lion King fandom all those years ago.

For now, enjoy, and as always, please send me any questions, comments, or bug reports!

September 9, 2012

Added the Japanese cast listing (thanks to Ammar).

August 5, 2012

Added the cast listings for the Zulu, Turkish, Croatian, Slovenian, and Romanian dubs (thanks to geheim geheim and Kecan).

February 1, 2010

Added the cast listing for the Urdu (Pakistani) dub to the International page; credit to CubbieSimba.

March 16, 2009

In response to visitor feedback that some of the characters' names aren't in fact accurate Swahili translations as has been claimed for all these years, I updated the FAQ and the character pages to indicate that the translations originally came from the Skybox trading cards and that their translations are of dubious quality.

August 3, 2008

Updated the link to the PDF working-copy script from AllMovieScripts.com (defunct) to the Internet Movie Script Database (IMSDb). Thanks to uvok lion for the catch!

April 6, 2008

Added "Tickets/Entradas" links to the included toolbar, as an experiment to see if it increases traffic to the ticket-buying gateways I've got links to.

March 18, 2008

Added the Finnish translation of the script, which was compiled by Oskari Grnroos.

March 6, 2008

Added The Lion King Pride Forum to the Interactive page.

October 30, 2007

Updated Criswell's "TLK Compleat Character List".

October 8, 2007

Added the Spanish language cast, thanks to CubbieSimba.

August 23, 2007

Added a link to the archive of foreign TLK comics hosted on PhotoBucket, pointed my way by Jeanette.

April 24, 2007

At the suggestion of Oskari Grnroos, added a new section for Foreign Language Voice Casts. It's a CSS-ified, JavaScripty page that really ought to be thought of as what the rest of the site should look like eventually, if I ever knuckle down and do the general-content overhaul it so badly needs, not just a veneer over the top-level navigation. But for now, the new section is linked from the Other Goodies page, at the bottom.

April 17, 2007

Fixed the Random Image script on the main page, making it use the perl modules for image examination rather than parsing the output of mogrify. Also reworked the Links page to use CSS, which should make maintenance a little less of a headache.

February 21, 2007

Updated some of the wallpaper images, courtesy of Criswell.

January 21, 2007

Fixed the Search function on the Characters page, which has been broken ever since the fanart.lionking.org redesign a year ago.

November 8, 2006

Rhythm of the Pride Lands was just added to the iTunes Store, so I added the appropriate link (as well as updating a few others that had gone stale).

September 25, 2006

Moved all the remaining movie files over to James Venning's site (see July 11). We're also on a new server, at ThePlanet, after WebHostPlus ate Managed.com and promptly decided to go belly-up, taking the lionking.org server with it.

August 22, 2006

Whoops! Turns out that during the redesign in December, I'd hard-coded the "Picture of the Day" for design purposes, but then forgot to update the script that rewrites the HTML pages every night to update that bit too. Thanks to Troy for catching that!

August 5, 2006

Made some revisions to the Simba's Pride script, pointed out by Conor.

July 11, 2006

James Venning of Vee Media has generously offered the use of his unmetered server to host some of the movie files from lionking.org. This symbiotic relationship will mean users can still download the media files at a good speed, and I won't have to worry about the data throughput putting me over my monthly allocation (or throttle downloads to prevent it). Currently only the AVC (.mp4) movies are being hosted at lionking.vee-media.com, but as those are the most popular and best quality-for-size balance, this should work out well.

June 27, 2006

For some reason, the guest book script had reverted back to the version prior to the changes made in January in response to the SiteAdvisor.com thing, and indeed prior to the anti-spam measures I'd put in a year or two ago. I'm guessing this has something to do with all the server swaps last month, but it's got me scratching my head nonetheless. Fixed it back up.

June 1, 2006

Changed the "Netscape" icon for th HTML version of the Script to an IE/document-styled icon, like in the modern world. Also removed the references to Netscape being the only browser that could do tables. Geez, that bit must have not been changed in ten years...

May 29, 2006

Added the TLK Compleat Character List (by Criswell) to the Characters page.

April 25, 2006

Did some maintenance on the Links page; dead links should be gone or updated now.

April 9, 2006

We had a day or two of downtime as the colocation provider swapped disks for us and the server was rebuilt, as the result of a failing disk. This was exacerbated by the fact that they gave me the wrong root password and then didn't respond to requests for help for over 12 hours, meaning that much incoming mail was received by the default-enabled Sendmail server and rejected because the usernames were unknown (the user database had not yet been migrated). All is restored now, though.

March 31, 2006

Added a link to the German translation of the TLK 1 1/2 script.

January 20, 2006

Added privacy-related warnings and a "display e-mail" checkbox/option to the guest book, in response to the discovery that SiteAdvisor.com had tested the guest book with a dummy address and had it screen-scraped and spammed. E-mail addresses are now hidden by default.

January 9, 2006

Added information about the re-released Simba's Pride soundtrack CD, which is the same thing as Return to Pride Rock minus the Lebo M. songs that were "inspired" by the movie.

January 6, 2006

Added three new (and exclusive!) concept art images, not found in the Art of the Lion King book (as far as I can tell), sent to me by Katherine R.

January 4, 2006

Added a few new model sheet/storyboard images, found on various sites here and there (namely magicalears.com and The Animation Artshop). Thanks to Kate and starskipper101, respectively!

Also added the Down/Maxwell Theory of Nala's Paternity to the FAQ, and added two movies ("The Morning Report" and "One by One") submitted by Rikoshay.

December 13, 2005

This only deserves a mention because it's so stupid: for ten years I had the "Friends" picture of Adult Simba, Timon, and Pumbaa (one of the original ten stills released by Disney in 1994) listed in the Miscellaneous Images section. Just now, though, Raaion pointed out that it's an actual screenshot. So I moved it into Act 2 where it belongs. I could have sworn I'd checked that and found it was only a promo image or something... boy do I feel silly.

November 25, 2005

Moved the newly redesigned Sounds and Music page into place. This pulls the "CD Tracks", "MIDI Files", and "Song Lyrics" sections together into a single unified listing of all the released albums and their collective track information. This doesn't entirely obviate the need for the MIDI Files section (there are a few MIDIs that don't fit into the new format), but it definitely is a relief to get rid of the CD Tracks page, which was always a hideous mess. (I'm not sure what to do about the Lyrics pageit still has its own top-level link, and it's probably best to just leave it that way, just to make it all the easier on visitors.) There's still some tweaking left to do to make it totally finished, but overall I like the new format. It makes it look like there's more stuff in the section, even though there are fewer pages to wade through.

Incidentally, the "WAV and RealAudio" page has also been redesigned, using scrolling divs to eliminate the old and cumbersome frames. I'm also on the verge of replacing the RealAudio files with MP3s, which is one of those things that I should have done ages ago. Platform independence and all that...

November 16, 2005

Lots of little tweaks and adjustments as the new design is slowly rolled out. I've got it applied to all the first-tier pages (the ones in the first row of the toolbar of text links), and will be doing the rest soon, as well as trying to figure out a better way to handle the ones with internal frames like the Sightings page. I've also redone the icon links so that you get the main sections (Image Archive, Sounds & Music, etc) if you just hover over the TLK iconyou don't have to click on it to reveal them. This is in response to hearing almost universally that people didn't realize there were items hidden there. I hope the new workflow is clearer.

November 15, 2005

Rolled out the new front-page design, which for the first time since about 1997 has done away with the big table block in the middle, and uses some CSS elements to try to stake a claim in the web design sensibilities of the 21st century. The rest of the pages will be changed over in the next few days, as I gauge reaction to the new layout.

October 21, 2005

Finally revamped the Sightings section, which was getting far too long and unwieldy. Now it's in a framed page like the Trivia questions in the Misc section, with three distinct pages driven by a real database back-end. It's also now got titles for each posting, so it'll be far easier for people to tell whether their sighting has already been posted before posting one of their own.

August 24, 2005

Added a new essay on the connections between TLK and Shakespeare's Richard III contributed by Megan the Phantom Girlie.

June 1, 2005

Thanks to efforts by Prowl and Chayse (respectively), added new versions of most of the movie files in AVC (H.264) and AVI (DivX) formats. Now they're available in better quality and smaller file sizes than ever before.

April 21, 2005

Feedback has consistently identified the Character Profiles page as the section of the site most in need of improvement; considering that all it's ever consisted of in the way of content is each character's profile information copied off the back of the appropriate Skybox trading card, some voicing and animator info, and a script filtering out all the images in the Image Archive featuring that character, I'm inclined to agree. So today I finally redid that section entirely, moving all the individual characters to a single unified page (sort of the reverse of most of my previous design impulses) and writing a lengthy biography for each one. I also added a link that does a search for a given character in the Fan-Art Archive, and took the opportunity to rework the Image Archive indexing script so all the code from when fanart.lionking.org was part of the same machine is now weeded out... and the script is now about half the size. It now incorporates the same functions as the old character-filtering SSI did.

...Oh, and before anyone asks: no, I'm not going to add the characters from Simba's Pride.

February 5, 2005

Moved lionking.org and all hosted domains to a new server at managed.com, where fanart.lionking.org has been residing for almost a year now. With the help of mod_bandwidth, this means my hosting costs can be reduced almost by half, and navigation response is a whole lot faster. (Downloads of large files, however, remains throttled to 8Kbps.)

October 5, 2004

Moved the Sequels links to the top of the News page.

September 17, 2004

Added Swedish translations of the scripts for TLK and SP, courtesy of Kiara Zukunft.

May 17, 2004

Switched the icon on the title page to point to the TLK 1.5 page instead of the TLK 2 page.

May 14, 2004

Added a bunch of TLK 1 1/2 stuff, including fleshing out the "sequels" page and adding info about the DVD and VHS releases to the Home Video page. Also, the script is transcribed and added to the Scripts page.

November 20, 2003

Updated the Home Video page with the correct info on the DVD and VHS re-releases. Better late than never, eh?

June 11, 2003

Completely rewrote the Guest Book system from the ground up. The perl code was essentially unchanged since when I first wrote it in 1995, so it was really hideous and inefficient; now it's still hideous and inefficient, but in a much nicer way. It's on a real database back-end now, like the Text/Fan-Fiction section and the Postcards, so I can moderate new postings and thereby stem the flood of troublemakers while impacting legitimate users only minimally. It's more work for me, but nowhere near as much more work as it would have been if I'd continued working with those old flat-files (we were up to 31 volumes-- yikes!). Now, too, it's auto-archiving and browseable without my having to flush it out every couple of months. Whew.

April 18, 2003

Completed the update of the TLK on Home Video page; it now lists information for the various "Special Edition" packages set to be released on October 7, and is reorganized to have the DVD section at the top, followed by VHS, laserdisc, and then VCD. The info on the DVDs is still speculative (and I don't have photos of my own to use as graphics-- that'll have to wait until I can buy them), but it'll probably serve until October, unless we hear significant news that disagrees with what we've all been hearing so far.

December 31, 2002

Finished the long-overdue overhauling of the Texts and Fan-Fiction section, in which all the chaotically listed stories are now organized into a nice formatted table. There's a real database back-end now, and all the stories are served dynamically, regardless of format; there's a framed viewer window which lets you navigate through parts of a story, and naturally the database means it's way easier now for me to add new stories and authors, and to track data like upload dates, e-mail addresses, profile information, and so on. Eventually I'll probably also put in summaries for all the stories, which you'll be able to read in a popup window or something. It's just a big cleanup, really, and it makes me feel a whole lot better.

December 16, 2002

Reworked the "full ZIP" option button on the Image Archive pages; now, instead of linking straight to a prepared ZIP file, it creates a copy of the standard one and gives it a temp filename as with the user-selectable ZIP method. The reason for this was to allow full ZIPs of fan-art gallery pages to have the descript.ion files included; rather than trying to keep that file updated for every artist every time I insert a new picture or the artist changes a title or anything, I've set it up now so it creates the descript.ion file when the user clicks the button and packs it into the existing ZIP. So it still saves time over having to ZIP up all the pictures in the gallery; but it also ensures that the descript.ion file is always up-to-date, because it's auto-generated at download time.

December 10, 2002

Redid the title image at the top of the TLK3 page, and reworked the links and so on, to fit the "TLK 1 1/2: Hakuna Matata" title.

April 26, 2002

Following suggestions from Christopher Shumway, the Fan-Art Archive now has a path navigator for artists' folders-- and there's also a user preference for maximum pop-up window size. You can open up a pop-up window and resize it to whatever size you want, then set that size as the largest a pop-up window will open.
I've also got several new admin scripts-- I can purge stale artists (artists with no pictures, if their last login was more than a certain time interval ago), and I can review artists with duplicate e-mail addresses and consolidate them.

April 19, 2002

Suddenly realized that the Postcard system was still on that old, ugly hack of a flat-file-based system, with its cron-job deletions and its filename checksums and the server-side-includes and the hey hey hey and the deletion at midnight glavin. So now it's on a real live database system, and it seems to be much, much happier. I don't blame it... I don't know what I was thinking.

April 9, 2002

We're back online in yet another new location. But this time, it's in California, right nearby, in the care of friends who are sympathetic to our cause with a government grant and a big borrowed pipe. The machine is new-built, too, with a HUGE amount of disk and a nice 2U rack-mount case. We're set to go now, for a while anyway...

February 19, 2002

Modified the image-zipping/download script so that now, in the Fan-Art site, it compiles a descript.ion file containing all the picture descriptions for the files that are being downloaded. This file can be read by ACDSee and other popular image viewing programs.

February 16, 2002

News Flash! Suspected lionking.org founder and maintainer Brian Tiemann found to be none other then The Great Cornholio. Co-admin Steven McClain was quoted as saying: Heh heh ... heh heh ... that was coooool. Heh heh ..
[img]images/cornholio.jpg[/img]

February 11, 2002

Added a link to the End Credits from the credits.html page-- an e-mail from someone who evidently worked on the film found it to be a slight that the "Credits" link led to a page of credits for the site rather than the movie. He's right... I don't know what I was thinking. C'mon, I was pretty stupid back then.

January 6, 2002

Updated various parts of the site with information about the 1/1/2003 release of TLK in IMAX theaters, and the subsequent October DVD release that is likely.

September 17, 2001

Yesterday, many artists at fanart.lionking.org uploaded special pieces of tribute art thanking me for keeping the site running and improving. They called it "Brian Tiemann Day". Wow... that's quite an honor, and I was very touched by it. I hope everybody knows now why I love this fandom.
By the way, I also reworked the "New Pictures" functionality so that it keeps track of individual pictures rather than just when the user last looked at an artist, so now per-folder counts work properly. I'll also be able to fix various pages so a picture is counted as "viewed" regardless of what page it appears on.

September 12, 2001

Found a way to put the folders to good use, so it's a good thing I got them done in time: a New York Disaster commemorative page. Artists can put pictures into specially named folders that they create, and those pictures are collected and displayed on a page linked from the main fanart.lionking.org site. Many artists have already submitted their work towards this cause, and now it can be displayed properly and in a timely way.

September 11, 2001

Ignoring (as best I could) the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. today, I added an extra feature to the Edit Pictures section: multiple selection for bulk deletions and folder moves. This will hopefully make life much easier for those who have lots and lots of pictures to toss around.

September 10, 2001

Finally got around to adding a new and long-awaited feature: folders. Now artists can set up a completely hierarchical folder system to organize their pictures. This was probably the largest single feature adddition since the launch of fanart.lionking.org almost a year ago; it involves changes to the majority of the display and editing scripts, and they all have to interact properly. No real bugs reported so far, though... just a need for a "bulk operation" function, which I'll work on next.

August 6, 2001

After fixing the last couple of bugs (the randomizer wasn't working properly-- turns out I have to generate a random integer to feed to MySQL's rand(), or else that one won't give me a random result :P) ...at any rate, there's now a "See a Random Picture" link on the main fanart.lionking.org page. Just like a "real" art archive!

July 31, 2001

There's a new Top Ten Pictures list at fanart.lionking.org, showing the site's users' most frequently "favorite" pictures. I fixed a stupid SQL bug in it today, so now it's even accurate. Yay!

July 11, 2001

These past few months have been fairly busy, so I haven't been able to keep this list updated. Fortunately, there haven't been many changes. Today I made the "Favorite Pictures" column headings into links that pop up the "Favorite Pictures" album for the user. I'm also finishing up the book I've been working on for the past several months, so I'll be able to start working on a few other features I've had in mind.

Also, we're now located at Paul's network in New York. No more Canada-- woo-hoo! The network right now is on a fairly wimpy 1Mbps DSL link, but we will be moving to a full T3 within a month or two, and then everything should be much better.

April 20, 2001

Added notes in each artist's "Edit Pictures" section to say who has which pictures in their "Favorite Pictures" albums. There's also a link to Cally's new discussion forum.

March 29, 2001

Added a "Favorite Pictures" album for each user. I have some interesting features planned for the near future which will use it-- stay tuned! I also did a bunch of minor compatibility bug fixes to the fanart.lionking.org layout, so opening new windows would happen more smoothly.

March 12, 2001

Hhhh... well, this wasn't anywhere near the Great Co-location Disaster of 2000, but disturbingly similar in feel. Our new co-location provider, the one who was so horrified at how UUnet had treated us, on Thursday decided that because they hadn't received payment for the month's hosting yet (due to an invoice they'd not sent out), they should simply unplug our network without so much as a warning. Paul took care of it on Saturday, but it wasn't until today (Monday) that anybody was on-site to plug us back in. So just what is it with these Canadian hosting companies, anyway?

March 4, 2001

Search engine! Yaay! Another check-box marked off for fanart.lionking.org.

February 11, 2001

Yet another feature for fanart.lionking.org: Art Trades/Requests. Now, any artist who has done requested work for another artist on the system can submit it to the recipient artist's page, where it will appear in a separate "Art Trades/Requests" listing gathering together all the art done by other artists for that recipient. It's just a new/cooler way of grouping together related art, and hopefully it will help contribute to the whole "community" thing. Especially if nobody abuses the feature. :)

February 8, 2001

Experimentally removed the "Microsoft Free Zone" stuff from the bottom of the main page. Not because of any change in server policy or anything, but because of the following quote from a piece of feedback e-mail:

i'm very impressed, wheew, this is a good stuff. but there's one thing, i think you should get rid of that anti-microsoft thing in your index page. not that i support them or anything, but come on, this is lion king, it's about friendship, love, unity, animation, and has nothing to do with political business.

An excellent point. On sober reflection it would seem that these side agendas over the past several years have been rather misplaced. There are better places where I can promote them.
Oh, and the images at fanart.lionking.org are now numbered. And I went back through this log file and added the year to every date. I guess I never realized the site would last longer than one or two years...

February 2, 2001

Added a new little tweak: now, when viewing one of your Favorite Artists, any new pictures (inserted since your last viewing of that artist) will appear with the title field background in a subtle cyan color. My non-colorblind friends tell me it works well...

February 1, 2001

Got the last few MySQL queries done, so now fanart.lionking.org is running wholly on the live database. No more flat files! Booh yah! And so begins a new era of giddy coding. I don't think this will ever end, do you?

January 31, 2001

Upgraded to FreeBSD 4.1-RELEASE, as well as MySQL 3.23.

January 27, 2001

I've been slowly integrating MySQL into the fanart.lionking.org features, and I'm almost done; I only have a few more issues to work out with various ordering options in the artist view pages. Today I moved the rating and voting systems into the user-profile database, meaning that I can now dispense with all the feeble attempts at ensuring voting fairness by restricting rating/voting to registered users only. It seems to be working well, and best of all I've been able to eliminate huge ugly swathes of perl code! Yay!

January 24, 2001

Developments in fanart.lionking.org-land... I've come late to the MySQL game, but I've finally taken the plunge and planned out a new set of features for the Fan-Art Archive. I'm gradually integrating them into the system; today I brought online the "Favorite Artists" list feature. This allows visitors to set up user profiles which allow them to create lists of their favorite artists; the system then keeps track of whether those artists have uploaded any new art since the visitor last looked at their collections. I've got a few more features planned, but for now they're mostly performance enhancements; the major visible feature is now in place, and working well (I think).

January 15, 2001

Added a new section for TLK Video Games. This has screenshots, descriptions/reviews, cheats/hints, and availability info.

December 3, 2000

Added a "merchandise" link back in, to www.moviegoods.com (who is the new owner of movie-memorabilia.net, which I used to have a link to). This new link is in the "Other Goodies" section.

November 24, 2000

Several weeks or months ago (we can't know when), one of the CPU fans died. Since then, the server has been increasingly unstable, freezing without warning every few weeks, then every few days. Yesterday (Thanksgiving, as it happens), the machine froze three times in 24 hours, and we investigated to find one of the CPUs and the motherboard suffering from heat damage. The system was taken down for the night and brought back up today after having new parts installed. All should be well now...

November 19, 2000

Due to increasing complaints about the conduct of its users, I've closed down the TLK Chat section. Since every time I tried a different chat system (that allowed moderators) I received tons of complaints, this seems to be the only solution. My apologies to everybody.

November 8, 2000

Added a mini-feature to the Fan-Art Archive: Now it sets a cookie to save your artist name, and then automatically selects it for you when you visit the site again. This should eliminate any potential complaints people might have about the login menu getting too big!

October 22, 2000

Changed the listings in the Fan-Art Archive slightly; now, every artist's section opens up on the most recent page, rather than page 1. (Of course, this only applies to artists with 100 or more pictures in their collections.) Hopefully this will help direct people to the newer pictures rather than the older ones, since I'm not willing to change it so it's listed in reverse chronological order. :)

October 10, 2000

Phase II of the Fan-Art Archive is now complete. This includes functionality for artists to rename pictures, replace them, or delete them. I've done a fair amount of smoke testing and put in various safeguards and recovery mechanisms, so I'm fairly sure it will work as expected. Here's hoping! Oh, and by the way, user reaction to Phase I has been very positive so far. :)

October 3, 2000

Added a small "profile" icon to each artist line on the section listings. Now people can pop up the profiles without opening each artist's section. Should help people sort out where their attention should go...

October 1, 2000

Today I opened the new Fan-Art Archive (http://fanart.lionking.org), which I think is feature-complete. :) Whether there are bugs in it remains to be seen, but I think I got a pretty good test pass. Now, in the new system, artists can have their own logins and profiles, change their names and info, and so on; there are also new features, like viewing the last n uploaded pictures, and a "Featured Artist of the Month". Now let's see how many bugs the users find... :)

September 24, 2000

Added an entry on the Home Video page for the Exclusive Deluxe Video Edition. (I found a copy on eBay!)

September 22, 2000

Got rid of the links to merchandise being sold at www.movie-memorabilia.net on the Image Archive page, since that site seems to have turned into a pile of miscellaneous links.

September 20, 2000

User feedback has switched us back to the ParaChat system once again. Ah well-- I guess I can see which way the wind's blowing.

September 19, 2000

Trying out yet another chat system, since ParaChat/Xoom has been giving everyone fits (although, notably, I haven't heard any comments one way or t'other since we came back from UUnet limbo). The new one is from liveuniverse.com, and it looks pretty snappy. Now to see what the users think...

September 7, 2000

Added about ten more MIDI files, thanks to Bagheera Temba.

September 6, 2000

The section of the FAQ devoted to injokes and references to TLK in other movies and shows was getting way too big; I moved it out of the FAQ into a new section, with its own icon, called "TLK Sightings". It's interactive-- anyone can post a sighting. This should make maintaining the list a no-brainer.
Ahh, it's good to be back...

September 1, 2000

Well, I could make this long, or I could make it brief. I'll make it brief.
Lionking.org is back online after eight weeks of being locked in a closet at UUnet Vancouver. The story behind why the machines were in a closet is a fairly complex one, but the short short version is that UUnet decided to overbill us rather drastically for our co-location service; when we contested the charge, they impounded the machines and would not release them even after we obtained a bailiff's order demanding that they do.
Once we raised the $20,000 necessary to pay off the bill, we were able to extract the machines and have moved them to a new location with AT (still in Vancouver). I am now in the process of setting up a backup/mirror network so that this won't ever happen again. (Yes, yes, I should have done this months ago-- no, years ago.)
At least now it's behind us. That's the real consolation, if there's any to be had.

July 4, 2000

Migrated over to the new, redone Video Clips page (/movies). This now has all the great high-quality MPEG and QuickTime movies grabbed by Paul Summers, but also streaming QuickTime (way higher compression). It's also now generated by a script, which may or may not be a useful idea. We'll see...

June 28, 2000

Added an image count to the Fan Artwork entry in the Image Archive listing. The machine is fast enough that it hardly causes a delay.
Also, it appears that the crashing problem is now fixed. On a hunch, Paul swapped out the NIC (which had caused one or two ghostly hardware watchdog entries to show up in the log) for a new 3Com one. It's been up ever since. Of course, my writing this will probably jinx it...

May 24, 2000

Upgraded to FreeBSD 4.0-STABLE.

May 23, 2000

Okay... the past few days have been rather rocky. First, on Thursday (5/18), the UUnet routers at the server's co-location node went haywire, and it wasn't until Saturday morning that they were repaired. Then, on Sunday morning (5/21), the server crashed and rebooted, and there was nobody available onsite to boot it up again, so we had downtime until today (Monday was a holiday in Canada). I'm now in the process of upgrading the server's OS in hopes that it will help stabilize things and prevent future outages. Sigh...
Anyway, I've now installed the new Image Archive menu page, which makes use of JavaScript to make a better section-picking Contents listing than we had before.

May 12, 2000

I copied over all the user files and as much of the system stuff as I could this morning; the transfer was done by about 11AM. Now we wait for all the name servers to sync up, so people don't have their mail strewn across both servers...

May 8, 2000

The new server (yes, another upgrade) came online today. Now comes the process of copying files and bringing the two machines into sync for the passing of the baton. At least this time it isn't part of a desperate firedrill...

May 5, 2000

Finally got rid of the defunct links to Music Boulevard from the Lyrics and CD Tracks pages. Also, I added information to the Home Video page about the DVD and VHS release of TLK in the upcoming "Platinum Collection".

April 25, 2000

Reorganized the site a little bit; now there's a "Sequels" section, which now has the "Simba's Pride" section inside it, as well as a new section on TLK3, which has just been announced. Be still my heart.

March 30, 2000

Added information on the VideoCD versions of TLK and SP to the Home Video page.

March 29, 2000

Added yet another Creeping Feature to the Fan-Art section: multiple pages. Now, whenever an artist reaches the 100-image mark, their section is split up into separate pages, one for each 100 images. This already applies to about ten artists...

March 23, 2000

Added a user-rating system to the Fan-Art section. Now you can rate any artist on a scale of 1 to 10 stars, and then sort the artist listings based on their accumulated scores. Let's see what kind of response we get from this...

March 16, 2000

Filled out the content for the new Home Video section.

March 15, 2000

Okay-- the new site overhaul is more or less complete. The headers and footers are in place on all the main pages, the toolbar frame is gone, and everything's working fairly smoothly. There are still a lot of minor pages lurking about that I need to bring into line with the new style, but phase one of the redesign is complete. :) Next I need to fill out the content for the new Home Video section...

February 18, 2000

Added three new MPEG movies to the QuickTime Movies Archive; renamed the section "Video Archive" in anticipation of the new site overhaul I'd like to do now that I've got a super-cool G4 Mac to use. :)

February 4, 2000

Added image dimensions to the stats in the Image Archive.

January 26, 2000

Used style sheets to remove the underlines from the description links in the Fan-Art Archive.

January 25, 2000

And once again, say it with me: Another Creeping Feature for the Fan-Art Archive. I reorganized each of the table rows to include more info toward the right-hand side, including the date/time the file was uploaded.

December 29, 1999

Added yet more functionality to the Fan-Art Archive (anybody else think that section is rapidly becoming the most significant part of the website?): You can now sort on any of the columns: name, number of images, or date last updated. I also now have a new uploading assistant script that should make things much more comfortable.

December 16, 1999

Today I split up the Fan-Art Archive into alphabetical sections. I guess I'd sort of meant to do it this way from the very beginning, back when I split the first Fan-Art page into three sections (oh man, was that messy). Now that there are almost 300 artists in the archive, it's become a necessity.

November 27, 1999

Replaced the Microsoft-derived "Other Goodies" icon with an open-source one. Also I removed the link to the Official TLK section on the Disney site; it seems it's fallen through the cracks with yet another reorganization of www.disney.com, and it's not worth chasing it down (if it even still exists).

October 17, 1999

2,000,000 hits today. Yayay!

September 4, 1999

Took the Forum offline today. Now to wait for the flames to roll in...

August 24, 1999

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.9.

August 20, 1999

Not a lot of action lately, eh? Well, anyway, the lionking.org box has now moved to its new home in Canada, near Vancouver. The move took about seven hours, plane trip and all. It went pretty smoothly, all things considered. Didn't stop me from getting flamed by irate forum addicts, though. Anyway, the box is now at a UUnet co-location node; it's on a 15-minute UPS, which is backed up by a 4-hour UPS, which is backed up by a 2-month UPS, which is backed up by a generator in the basement. I think we're cool for power now. :)

All kinds of thanks to Paul Summers for helping provide this new connectivity, and for making the move happen.

June 2, 1999

Added more pictures to the Clip Art section.

April 25, 1999

Altered the Movies Archive page slightly, so that now the thumbnails link to JavaScript popup windows, while the text links are for direct downloading.

April 22, 1999

Added image counts to the Image Archive main page; it's dynamically updated, too. :)

April 9, 1999

Went to JavaScript pop-up windows for the QuickTime movies, like in the Image Archive.

March 30, 1999

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.6.

March 19, 1999

A few minutes downtime this morning as I moved the server back into the Swamp lab for the duration of third term. Now if only the battle.net frosh can keep from kicking it and unplugging it until I can set up professional co-location service...

March 16, 1999

I did it... I finished my last exam today. I'm graduating. :)
Anyway, I did some more optimization today... rewrote the forum scripts to use p5-ImageSize rather than identify (from ImageMagick). This speeds up execution by a very good margin, and saves the server a lot of grunt-work.

March 8, 1999

Rewrote the members.cgi slightly so that it uses internal perl file handle calls rather than `cat` and `ls` and `grep`. Amazing how much faster it is...

February 25, 1999

Rebooted the system today to take care of a bad file descriptor. Sorry about that...

February 22, 1999

Now the listing of fan-artists has thumbnails too. If you're viewing the listing in hi-bandwidth mode, the script selects a random image from that artist's directory and displays it next to their name. Cool, huh?

February 19, 1999

Extended the image-archive script so that it now encompasses the Fan Art section as well. Now users can do the whole ZIPping business with the Fan Art too. :)

February 14, 1999

Reorganized the Clip Art section into the new dynamic system. Also I did something that I'd been experimenting with literally since Netscape 2.0 was released: the images in the Image Archive now open up in custom-sized JavaScript popup windows. I'm assuming that modern browsers are now in enough preponderance that nobody should have cause to complain...

February 4, 1999

Cleaned out all the old images out of /images, now that they're all filed under dynamic-generation directories. I also extended the new dynamic generator thingy to the Characters section. Whee!

January 30, 1999

Did a massive reorganization of the Image Archive. It now generates its tables of pictures dynamically, like the Fan-Art section (but with a slightly different method). The table is also a lot prettier now. The functionality won't be all that different for the user, but it makes it almost infinitely easier for me to add and remove images now.

January 23, 1999

Finally gave the Fan Art Archive its long-awaited renovation. Now it's all dynamically generated and organized by artist, each in his or her separate directory, so there's no more of this big-huge-long-table garbage to deal with. :)

January 13, 1999

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.4.

January 6, 1999

Upgraded to the Ultimate BB version 5.10. Server load immediately dropped from around 2 to about 0.1. Needless to say, life is good...

January 5, 1999

There's a new disk in lionking.org, a 9.1GB IBM one. Disk space is now doubled. Ahh, growing pains...

December 31, 1998

I've set up a RealMedia G2 server on www.lionking.org; now users can have streaming audio/video content.
I've also gone back to the old ParaChat for now, since the new one generated about fifteen complaints within two hours. :P

December 29, 1998

ParaChat seems to have come under new management (XOOM.com), and their mechanisms for supporting their chat services seem to have deteriorated. So I regenerated the chat stuff and things seem to be a bit better. We'll see...

December 1, 1998

Upgraded to FreeBSD 2.2.8. I anticipate that this will be an interim platform, since 3.0.1 will be released in January and that code branch will become tagged as -STABLE. I'll switch to 3.0.1 then, since it supports such things as long usernames.

November 20, 1998

Added little mouse-over effects to the pics in the Characters section.

November 11, 1998

There was a network outage today in my section of Blacker; after the server was unreachable for about four hours, I moved lionking.org into a nearby lab. The next day, the outage was corrected and I moved the server back.

November 7, 1998

Downtime for about 20 minutes, around 4AM. Heck if I can figure out what went wrong...

November 6, 1998

Rotated out the last Rumor Mill, and redirected it to the new Forum.

November 4, 1998

Time for a massive overhaul of the Image Archive-- the Fan Art has just been pouring in lately, and it all seems to come from people with names between G and P. :P So I split the second section in half. I also removed all old art that was copied from original Disney material.

November 2, 1998

I guess we're now immersed in the long process of integrating SP stuff into the rest of the site. So I've redone the Links section a bit, adding an "SP Sites" category to it; I guess next I have to add a SP section to the Image and Sound Archives. :P Blah...

November 1, 1998

Replaced the link to the Rumor Mill with the "TLK Discussion Forum", which is a message system based on the Ultimate BB package. I'll be redirecting the Rumor Mill permanently on Friday.

October 31, 1998

Added the Simba's Pride script to the Scripts section, after much helpful consultation from Marcus Aanerud.

October 27, 1998

Simba's Pride has been released!
And completely unrelated to that fact is that I've replaced the static members.html page with members.cgi, a script which generates the list of links to member pages dynamically.

October 23, 1998

Redid the TLKoB link icon. Oh, by the way, I did it in GIMP. I am now 100% Microsoft-free, even on the desktop. :)

October 9, 1998

A few minutes of downtime tonight. I accidentally rebooted the server while trying to reboot my desktop machine. :P Oh, and I also upgraded to Apache/1.3.3.

October 7, 1998

Added the server local time to the main page.

September 23, 1998

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.2.

September 21, 1998

Revamped the old Guest Book pages the same way as I did the Rumor Mill on the 14th. Also added SP and TLKoB icons to the toolbar.

September 19, 1998

Finished adding the lyrics and track information from the "Return to Pride Rock" CD. Genuinely disappointing.

September 17, 1998

Finally! I've been meaning to do something like this for years: I changed the image in the universal footer to something more appropriate (an animated GIF of a cheetah running). I was just waiting till I found just the right thing... :)

September 14, 1998

Reorganized all the old Rumor Mill pages into their own directory. Maybe I should do the same with the Guest Book stuff...

September 4, 1998

Another red-letter day! This morning at about 1AM, Aaron McGavock became visitor number 1,000,000 to www.lionking.org. This is something I've been waiting for for almost four years... it's been a fun trip, guys. Thanks. :)

September 3, 1998

Another random reboot, at 11:24AM. Still no indication why this may have happened. The best guess I have at this point is that someone reached under and hit the power button. And I had perfect uptime for the summer, too...

August 20, 1998

Not too many major changes happening these days. I've been adding incremental info to the Simba's Pride section as it comes in; each new preview has another QuickTime, another MPEG, and another set of images to show off. :)

July 22, 1998

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.1.

July 18, 1998

The machine rebooted for some reason this morning at 4:00AM. It was down until I woke up at 11 and phoned someone to fsck it. My theory is that someone reached under the table and hit the Reset button. What fun.

July 13, 1998

I'm going to start including fan-artists' e-mail addresses from now on in the Image Archive. I can't find many of them from previous posts, but starting now...

July 12, 1998

Well, the new server is in place, and doing just fine... now I can finally get down to treating life as normal again. :) The server was down intermittently several times on Saturday night as I rebooted and swapped machines. Thanks, everyone, for bearing with me.

July 4, 1998

Added a link to Rob Visser's screen saver.

June 30, 1998

Just an update on the disk madness. I've currently got a new server ready to replace www.lionking.org; it's got the 9.1GB Cheetah disk and a P-200/MMX, not to mention FreeBSD 2.2.6. On July 11, I will fly down to Caltech and switch the machines. Until then, let's just hope those disks hold together...

June 12, 1998

Ahh, nice restful Friday morning after finals are over. Right? Nope... this was the day of frantic knees-bent running about advancing behavior. Much disk swapping, gnashing of teeth, sprinting around campus between the mail room and my own room and the Blacker PC lab, and howls of despair. Just for future reference to look back on later.
The upshot, if any, is that lionking.org is running on the possibly flaky 5GB IDE disk on /home for the time being, at least until I can get back down to campus to install the new Cheetah.

June 5, 1998

Upgraded to Apache/1.3.0.

June 3, 1998

Revamped the MIDI files section. It needed it. Badly. Also fixed up the linkages within the Sound Files section, and renamed it the "Sound and Music Archive".

June 2, 1998

Changed the Boycott page to a Protest page, and put the Anti-MS button on the main page as a link to it. Maybe this will induce fewer flames.

June 1, 1998

Revamped the ex-MP3 section. Now it's a page of CD track information, with links to the lyrics of all the songs. That's about all the data I can possibly put online without doing actual recordings.

May 30, 1998

Flushed the Rumor Mill again. Yikes-- it was up to over 400K.

May 27, 1998

Upgraded to Apache/1.3b7.

May 13, 1998

Another hour of downtime tonight. Another disk blew-- this time the brand-new 5GB one. I can't believe this...

May 9, 1998

Got the second half of the scripts written. Now it's a simple process for me to insert a piece of fan-art. Sweet. :)

May 6, 1998

Added an auto-upload section so people can submit fan-art without having to do e-mail. Ideally, the upload will be automatic, and then after I check the file it'll be a one-step install process to insert the new pic into the fan-art gallery. So the first half's done now. :)

May 4, 1998

I was given notice by the RIAA that the MP3 files on the site are illegal and likely to get me sued to the tune of a million dollars or so; I'm not willing to gamble on how serious they are, so I've removed them. It was fun while it lasted.

April 27, 1998

Added a Simba's Pride section, in parallel with the one for the Broadway Musical. I'll continuously update this new section with new images and movies and things as they become available, along with whatever info rolls across the Rumor Mill.

April 21, 1998

Added a bunch of animated GIFs, courtesy of Beerit. Thanks! Also upgraded to Apache/1.3b6.

April 12, 1998

Added a note to the Movies page saying to ignore GetRight's rude little message about how this site doesn't support resuming. It does. Really. :P
Also I removed the Microsoft boycott. Not because anything has happened to change my mind; I'm just getting sick of people flaming me. I do respond personally and meticulously to every flame I get, and that's time-consuming.

March 25, 1998

Updated the FAQ with info about awards TLK has won.

March 13, 1998

Added a link to David Perrin's "Hakuna Matata" screen saver, since everybody in the world seems to want a screen saver...

March 1, 1998

Applied several patches to Apache, to fix some mod_rewrite issues.

February 19, 1998

Upgraded to Apache/1.3b5.

February 16, 1998

The new 5GB disk is installed, replacing the old 2GB drive on /home. This should solve the problems we've been having.

February 12, 1998

Another service outage this morning. The disk on /home is failing rapidly; I'll be buying a new disk to replace it this weekend.

February 4, 1998

The system was down for about four hours this morning due to a bad disk.

January 26, 1998

Added four new postcards, courtesy of Brenden T.

January 11, 1998

Relinked the "News" icon. Now it goes directly to the Rumor Mill page, which then has a link to the News page itself. Since the Rumor Mill is so much more active and popular, this should make more sense... :)

January 8, 1998

Whew... it's been a while since the last update, but this one's a doozy. I added MP3s and lyrics of the TLK Original Broadway Cast Recording to their respective sections; this should be helpful to people.
I've been getting a lot of heat for the Microsoft boycott; I don't plan to take it down as of yet, but I may have to before long. I don't like getting flamed.

December 17, 1997

I've instituted a boycott of Microsoft. To do this, I've set up a page so that anyone using MSIE between the hours of 2:00 and 3:00 will get the boycott page instead of whatever they were trying to access on the server (aside from user directories and postcards). SOMEthing has to be done...

December 4, 1997

Changed the browser plug button on the main page-- now it's advertising Opera rather than Netscape. Let's hope it makes a difference!

November 30, 1997

Added a "Concordance to TLK" section, thanks to Thomas Sweet's efforts; it's linked from the "Other Goodies" section. I also updated the look of that section a bit.

November 24, 1997

Set up a new Java chat (ParaChat). This looks to be a lot faster than the ChatPlanet one. Here's hoping...

November 22, 1997

Okay... I've been converted. My browser of choice is now Opera. Today and yesterday I've been fixing little things here and there that were inconsistent between Opera and the other browsers.

November 14, 1997

Changed the look of the Image Archive page a little bit.

November 9, 1997

This was fun. I found the server was suddenly not responding; I opened a fresh telnet and was greeted by "Linux 2.0.31; agrajag login:". Needless to say, I was somewhat disappointed by this. I found (in the next twelve seconds or so) that our network administrator had typoed and assigned lionking.org's IP address to another machine on the same network, so all my traffic was going over there. Bad! So I sprinted in bare feet over to Steele lab and got her to fix it. Downtime was about eight minutes.

November 8, 1997

Added some RealAudio versions of the sound files on the Musical page, plus a RealVideo clip of the "Circle of Life" sequence, courtesy of Paul Summers. Truly breathtaking!

November 5, 1997

Wrote up a "Server Policy" page, describing my philosophy on web server software development and why I'm running lionking.org the way I'm running it. Hopefully it will answer some people's questions.

October 31, 1997

Added another random number to the postcard format, to get rid of the problem that happens when two people happen to send postcards in the same second.

October 30, 1997

Upgraded to Apache/1.3b2 mod_perl/1.04, which is a major improvement over earlier versions of mod_perl-- now the whole server-side complement of perl modules are up and running. :) Yaay! I also switched DNS servers to the faster of the two on campus-- I don't know why I had it on the slower (backup) one. :)

October 23, 1997

Added the Timon & Pumbaa themes from Mark Trepanier's page, since his site will be going down soon.

October 20, 1997

Added a checksum to the postcard file naming scheme; this is to keep people from accidentally getting other people's cards through a mod_speling "correction".

October 18, 1997

Upgraded to Apache/1.3b2 mod_perl/1.02. And what a hideous upgrade it was! Cool, though. :)

October 11, 1997

Made a minor change to the "Pic of the Day" page... I gave it a black background. This is to minimize contrast on the dark pictures, so you aren't fighting to see the picture's dark contents against light-colored surroundings.

October 3, 1997

The hits have almost completely been diverted over to the new server by now (a week later). Things are running really smoothly! There are lots of little kernel tweaks in place for high performance, and I also just added a random TLK quote generator for the main page. Hee hee... :) Oh yeah, and I automated the "Pic of the Random Time Period" thing... now it randomly picks any image out of the Archive (excluding the fan-art) and displays its vital statistics, all automatically generated, in a new file each night. So now it's the "Pic of the Day". :)

September 27, 1997

I'm back at Caltech!
At about 12:45 this morning, I made the DNS change to begin diverting traffic from the www.pacific.net server down here to the new server. The DNS record update process is taking a while, so now we just lay back and wait... :)
(Later) I gave the icons on the main page a little facelift-- some nifty beveled edges. :)

September 16, 1997

Did a major reorganization of the Image Archive; I split the Fan Art section into three separate pages, each with about 40 entries. I also renumbered them all for the ZIP function, and renamed a whole bunch of files that didn't have the artist's name attached. I only made this change on the new site; just two more weeks till it's live!
Oh, and I also (finally) reorganized the "Other TLK Sites" page, after leaving it unchanged in its format basically since the beginning of the Archive.

September 10, 1997

Added a little instructional page with code for adding the linking button.
new.lionking.org is just about ready to go! We've got user pages and a help system (help.lionking.org), and majordomo is set up to host the TLK-L mailing list. Progress... :)

September 1, 1997

Added three new MPEG-3 files, and a button for people to use in links to the Archive. Also added a new disk to the new machine (new.lionking.org); it now has 4GB of space, half of which is for user directories and website hosting.

August 27, 1997

The new server, currently located at lionking.arclight.net, self-booted for the first time at 3:47AM this morning. FreeBSD is successfully installed on it; it is ready to begin its beta-testing phase.

August 25, 1997

The new www.lionking.org box is on its way... all the components are bought, but the motherboard is bad, so it'll have to wait a day while I say "Very funny" to the Fry's employees. It'll have FreeBSD running on it if I can get it to install happily.
In other news, I've added some animated GIFs to the Image Archive, courtesy of Myra Weber.

August 24, 1997

More movie mayhem. Rainier finally is back up and running, so I've sent requests for them back over to Rainier for the time being. As soon as the summer is over, the new www.lionking.org will be able to host all the files-- all 350MB of them-- on one box permanently. Woo-hoo! Currently the new machine consists of a box, a P-133, a SCSI controller, and a 2-GB hard drive; all that's left is a motherboard, a network card, and some RAM.

August 20, 1997

Various maintenance stuff. I changed the look of the footer for those pages that have counters; the counters are now displayed in little white-background tables. This helps to get rid of the proliferation of HR's I had all over the place. I've also moved the QuickTime movies back onto www.lionking.org itself, and facelifted the Movies Archive page a little bit more. Marcus Aanerud has been helping me eradicate the "JWS" movies, and his tireless work has greatly improved this website.

August 17, 1997

A few minor (but noticeable) facial features have been changed. I started using Verdana as the toolbar font, because it's a nice understated little typeface that looks cool there. Also changed a few fonts here and there in other pages.

August 12, 1997

Added a review of the TLK Musical, by Andy Heroff.

August 9, 1997

Finally coaxed MSIE into being able to manage the table format on the Movies Archive page. Sheesh...

August 4, 1997

Made the QuickTime Movies Archive look more cool, with black table borders la CNN's Video Vault. MSIE can't grok it, but that's hard not to imagine.

August 2, 1997

Used mod_rewrite to restrict people linking to my images from off-site. This should help a GREAT deal. :)

July 31, 1997

Used absolute references in the postcards; now people can save them and they'll still work (provided I don't move any of the images... mwa ha ha!)

July 30, 1997

Designed and set up a logo for the Archive, and put it at the top of every page. It's about time I did something like that! It'll probably change a bit as time goes by...

July 29, 1997

Added a section for the Broadway Musical.

July 27, 1997

Fixed up the Image Archive; now it's an index.cgi which calls the appropriate image indexes as they are requested. This works around that problem in form redirection that lynx and MSIE 4.0b2 both complain about (admittedly, rightly so). Besides, now all the user sees is "/imgarchive/"... so much for the people linking to things like "misc-t.html" and so on. Or so I hope. :)

July 24, 1997

Upgraded to Apache 1.3a1, and added 14 new sound files from Christopher Capps. Also took advantage of the new RedirectMatch directive in Apache to transparently send .mov requests over to Rainier, where the QuickTimes are living for the summer.

July 23, 1997

Added the lyrics to the Rhythm of the Pride Lands songs to the Lyrics Archive.

July 21, 1997

Man oh man... I returned from San Diego ComiCon to find that my postcard system had self-detructed. I spent about ten hours rebuilding it from partially backed-up files and emacs auto-save sessions; I still have to put the sounds back in, but that's for tomorrow. I need sleep...
(The following day) I set the XBitHack on, so now the parsed files can be cached. This will probably be a Good Thing, since the included SSI data doesn't change a lot, certainly not more than once per session.

July 14, 1997

Added descriptions to each of the movie files.

July 12, 1997

Finally got some thumbnails and run-times listed in the Movie Files archive.

July 11, 1997

Added some cool animated GIFs in JavaScript to the toolbar. It's about time I put some little gratuitous but non-taxing JavaScript functions into the site. :)
Also I rewrote the "Welcome" page to be a little more cosmopolitan and helpful... or something. :)

July 9, 1997

Moved all the QuickTime movies to daniel.snowmeow.com, a temporary site until I am able to set up an independent server so I can stop hogging Pacific Internet's resources. By October, www.lionking.org should be running on a P6/166 dedicated server on a multiple T3; there will be some bandwidth limitations until then as I transfer the larger multimedia sections. Please bear with me! It'll be worth it! :)

July 6, 1997

Upgraded to Apache 1.2.1.

June 18, 1997

Reorganized the Fan Art archive. I consolidated each bunch of images to its artist, and alphabetized the artists.

June 16, 1997

Added a "notification of delivery" thing to the Postcards; now when the recipient views the card, it sends email to the sender to say so.

June 11, 1997

Replaced that stupid little fader applet ("Welcome to...") with an animated GIF. Now the site loads a lot faster and isn't dependent on Java.
Also, now that Apache 1.2 allows it, I opened an "includes" directory and put the included modules in there.

June 9, 1997

Did some tweaking with the no-frames page. The toolbar looked a little silly, so I gave it a facelift so it looks like the frames page now (for people with good browsers).
Also I went through the Sound Files Archive and reorganized it, like I've been meaning to do for a long time now-- I cleaned up the table grouping in the WAV/RA section, and split the whole Sounds Archive into subsections like the Image Archive has.

June 6, 1997

Reformatted Phil Pollard's Trivia list, giving it a frames interface, and added it to the Other Goodies list.

June 5, 1997

Upgraded to Apache 1.2.0 final.

June 3, 1997

Ah, growing pains. We moved all of Pacific Internet's virtual web servers from the 199.4.80 cloud to 199.4.96.* to make room for more; unfortunately, not all the nameservers in the world updated that very quickly, so while some people could access it again immediately, lots of people got a "Server down or not responding" message. Sorry, folks... one day should be the longest possible wait to expect.
Also I added color-coding to the Lyrics Archive.

May 29, 1997

I knew this would happen. :) Apache 1.2b11 was released today, so I installed that. 1.2 final is scheduled for release on June 5.

May 28, 1997

I decided to finally upgrade to Apache 1.2b10, since that fully enables the download-resuing feature that GetRight allows, and since I'm providing links to GetRight for things like the MP3 and movie files, I figured it would be a good idea.

May 26, 1997

More spring cleaning. I moved some rather redundant files (guest.html, rumor.html, and the like) to subroutines in the cgi-bin, and got rid of a few useless old files. The process for streamlining and modularity continues...

May 22, 1997

Changed the little pic of Timon on the main page to one I drew. At least it's a little more dynamic than the earlier one... and less blocky. :)

May 21, 1997

Changed the TLK Cast picture on the main page to a transparent GIF... maybe it'll help break up the blocky look.

May 9, 1997

Did a little more dusting of cobwebs; I pulled a few more of the files onto the main server and got rid of some external links. Also reorganized the Other Goodies hierarchy.

May 8, 1997

Now that I can use table background images, I did. Stuck one in the main page title block thingy.
Also added the site to the TLK Web Ring.

May 6, 1997

Okay-- yet another cleanup job has been hurdled. I moved all off-site links out of the toolbar, which should make it much easier to deal with. There is a new section called "TLK Interactive," which has links to all kinds of ways for fans to meet each other; also the Hans Zimmer Worship Page and the TLK game have been moved to the "Other Goodies" page.
Also I re-recorded all the MPEG3 files; they should be much higher quality now.

May 3, 1997

Okay-- this has got to bring closure in some way to something. I finally went through and cleaned up all the links to files on Rainier, and moved the Story images and all the Image Archive icons over to the main server-- now the whole thing is served from a central location, and the next time Rainier goes down, I'm fine!

April 28, 1997

Against my better judgment, I added a Java chat system from ChatPlanet. I paid the $49.95 for the private channel, to keep the weirdos from linking in from other channels. Hopefully this won't backfire on me...

April 26, 1997

Added ZIPped collections per character of the sound files.

April 25, 1997

Fixed the little form button things... now it's a bit more logical: the two buttons choose the two modes you're not currently in (out of frames, no-frames, and text-only). Is this thing approaching completion yet?

April 22, 1997

Added a major component to the Image Archive: batch downloading via ZIP. Now you can select any of the files you want, hit a button, and it zips them all up for you and downloads the zipfile. I added it to all the archive sections (an arduous process!); it should help usability, or something. :)

April 13, 1997

One last (hah!) tweak to the error messages: Now, if you get a 404 error from a directly typed address (i.e., you just typoed), it gives an actual 404 screen; however, if you are following a stale link (there are a lot of them), it will print a clone of the main page and set up up like you're at the beginning. Should be interesting...

April 8, 1997

Worked some more on the modular design of the site; now that the different formats of the main page are standardized, I am able to write certain blocks of HTML as single shared modules, like classes in C++, that can be used by each of the different main pages. If I make a change to any one module, all the formats using it get changed automatically. Neat, huh? :) There are modules for the main page window and for the toolbar, as well as for the footer CGI which prints a custom footer link depending on the mode you're in.

April 5, 1997

Added sounds to the Postcards.

April 3, 1997

Finally got around to fixing up the Scripts. Now the HTML script is updated to reflect the real WAV files, and I can get rid of those gross old AU files. I also cleaned up all the headers and got rid of all that stuff that nobody really wants to read. While I was at it, I redid the Word version and brought it up to date (finally).

April 1, 1997

Did a major CGI upgrade-- now the whole "Disable Frames" thing is finally fully functional! By this I mean that the footer is now sensitive to the mode you're in, and will direct you back to the correct referring page depending on whether you're using frames or not.

March 27, 1997

Reorganized a bunch of behind-the-scenes stuff: set up a /cgi-bin (finally), and wrote 404 and 403 pages with cutesy clip-art images. :) Now to find a good excuse to make the 403 one come up! ;)

March 25, 1997

Added four new postcards.

March 16, 1997

Majorly reorganized the Sound Files Archive. I spent a couple of days re-recording the MP3 files from the soundtrack CD and recording new ones from ROTPL; I've sacrificed stereo for audio clarity, and I think the result is a good thing. Comments?

March 11, 1997

Now why didn't I ever do this before? I finally added a Lyrics Archive, with all the lyrics to the movie songs and the Elton John versions, with links to audio files of the songs.

March 5, 1997

Fixed up the Characters pages; put them in their own directory. Just doing a bit of spring cleaning. :) Also I redid the Image Archive main page; now it has a forms-based interface which should simplify the process of choosing High or Low Bandwith versions of the archive pages.

February 25, 1997

Added multiple font support to the Postcards program, and fine-tuned some of the error handling.

February 13, 1997

With the help of Marcus Aanerud (Raccoon Prince), I was able finally to upgrade those Clip Art images by Photoshopping the same images output at a much higher resolution. They all look infinitely better now! Thanks, Racc! :)

February 2, 1997

At last! There's been a seriously large upgrade to the Sound Archive, thanks to a valiant effort put forth by Tom Rodriguez-- just another reason for me to be forever indebted to him. ;) Now the old gritty .au files are replaced with high-quality .wav and RealAudio formats; now one of the rather weak points of the site has been vastly strengthened. Enjoy!

January 10, 1997

The Archive's 2-year anniversary! Today I added two new things to the Goodies page: links to Lion King Merchandise and to the newly created TLK Code.

December 23, 1996

Reorganized the Scripts page (who the heck uses a non-HTML-3.0 browser these days?), and made the FAQ a bit more faqtual.

December 5, 1996

Added in the index of Clip Art images from the Lion King Print Studio. I wonder why I never did this before?

December 2, 1996

I fixed sendmail on pacific.net, so now I can post my e-mail address as btman@lionking.org. So I did.

November 25, 1996

Yaay! It is finally accomplished: I went ahead and expended the minimal effort needed to move the Text Files archive into its own directory, and so now there are four Archives with four distinct directories that can be addressed: images, sounds, text, and movies.

November 19, 1996

Okay, okay, I give... I have finally gone ahead and changed the guest book to add to the top. :) Ahhhh... this is nicer....

November 8, 1996

Responding to a user's suggestion, I added a new section: [url=postcard]TLK Postcards[/url]. As at many of the movie/comic/whatever sites out on the net, you can pick an image, write a message, and send it to anyone who has email!

November 6, 1996

Updated the News page to reflect the new info about the upcoming TLK Musical. Also made some cosmetic changes to others.shtml.

October 28, 1996

Added three TLK Win95 desktop themes; they're in the Goodies page and the Image Archive.

October 2, 1996

Shrunk down the "Featured in" images; they don't need to be as big as they were before.

September 16, 1996

Finally I got rid of tlk-index.shtml and all references to it. Yaay! I moved the few non-redundant links on it to a new file, goodies.html, and put that in in place of tlk-index; I also moved the Welcome message to a new location, in the Java banner. Finally all traces of the original layout of the Archive are gone!

September 12, 1996

Reorganized the Sounds and Movies archives a little bit-- gave each one its own directory with an index page, so I'm still minimizing the number of .shtml extensions the user has to see. Also I've got a bunch of new studio-track recordings to add to the archive. :)

September 10, 1996

A red-letter day! :) I've got www.lionking.org up and configured, and I've server-pushed the old site to the new one. Since it's a totally different machine, there may be some bugs to work out, but on the surface it seems to be running smoothly. So, let's cross our paws...

August 26, 1996

Hmm... looks like the Internet Movie Database got themselves a domain name, and forgot to warn me. :) Ah well... the links are updated and fixed.

August 20, 1996

Flushed the guest book. Now pondering whether to change it to add to the top, like every other guest book in the known Universe...

August 12, 1996

I finally got off my duff and redid the non-frames page completely, arranging it so it is as much like the frames page as possible and has all the same elements available to it. Considering that at this point not only does 40% of the net still use non-frames browsers, there is a constituency who does not like frames at all; this should make them happy. :)

July 22, 1996

Added some TLK icons for the Mac, created by GilDGreat@aol.com. My Mac HD now has Mufasa's Ghost as an icon. :)

June 12, 1996

Finally I reorganized the Text Files Archive from the format in which I'd stubbornly first envisioned it, making the Fan Fiction the most prominent part. I also rewrote the header, and removed the blocks to certain files I'd put in because of the CDA, which is now (we are to assume) history. :)

June 9, 1996

I changed the Image Archive's look a little bit by taking advantage of Netscape 3.0's table BGCOLOR tag; I made the text field backgrounds a solid color so they read better.

May 30, 1996

UGCS updated its web server to Apache 1.0.5, and set it to roam free on the 15 new SGIs. This meant I had to rework a couple of perl scripts, but now it's running a LOT faster and better.

May 28, 1996

I'm currently in the middle of salvaging my movie files archive. The two servers I was linking to for the files decided to go down more or less simultaneously, so I was left without any movie files. Fortunately, thanks to several kind-hearted individuals who helped out by mailing me some movies and pointing me to other archives where they had been downloaded, I'm now back up and running, more or less. I've gotten all the original Disney movie files back, which were really the meat of the archive, being nice high-quality files. A profuse thank-you to those who helped out! =)

May 5, 1996

Changed the look of the main page around a little bit-- just some refinement and cleanup, to try to get the organization a little better-looking. There's a little Java text-fader in the header now for those who can view it, and the "Enhanced for Netscape" banner is gone from the page now-- if you can see the frames, you're using Netscape already. :)

April 24, 1996

Fixed the MIDI files. I put them on rainier, where a .htaccess makes sure the server is sending them as downloadable files, not text/plain. That way I can list them on the Sound Files page without zipping them.

April 22, 1996

Reorganized access to the TLK video game by putting both the PC and SNES/Genesis versions on links from the icon toolbar. Now there's only one thing that isn't directly accessible from the toolbar-- the MAD parody. :)

April 15, 1996

Made a few minor adjustments; I put in a push from /lionking/ to /lionking/tlk.shtml, because that will compensate for the server's strange habit of reloading the top page whenever you return to this site from another. Also I added background music.

April 5, 1996

Nothing drastic has really gone on in about a month; this is just a marker to point out that I've just been fine-tuning things lately: a font size here, a wording there. I'm still alive...

March 8, 1996

Bobby Peck HTMLized the TLK FAQ and mailed it to me. It makes me wonder how long ago I should have done it myself... but nevertheless, thank-yous to him!

February 29, 1996

Having noticed that Brian hadn't installed a search engine for the Archive, I decided to set one up as a Leap Day gift for him. I found and hacked a search script, installed and customized it, and (only then) told him about it. Reaction: suitably satisfying. You can now [url=/cgi-bin/search]search for a word or phrase[/url] and have it pop up in a nice, concise list.

- JS

February 28, 1996

There were several complaints that the scrolling JavaScript banner was too taxing on many users' system resources. Accordingly, I found and hacked a new script that takes parameters from form input and allows for start/stop of the text updating. So now there's a pause button for the banner. :)

February 23, 1996

Added a News section and a page with info on Simba's Pride and the "Timon and Pumbaa" TV series. This is based on info from the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Opportunities Expo in Universal City, CA, which I attended and at which I saw a panel of Simba's Pride concept art and story material.

February 21, 1996

Well, the footer frame thing was a bad idea, according to the feedback. Ah well... that's what feedback is for. :)

February 20, 1996

Redid all the footers; now there is a static banner with the SFEP logo and copyright info at the bottom, and each individual page has a redesigned dual-logo footer and no SFEP block. This might make things a little lacking for pre-2.0 users, but it's not horrible.

February 18, 1996

Added another bunch of images, courtesy of Rob from Jan. 20th. And the page is back to its normal format and color.

February 9, 1996

The Archive's main page has been black for one day now, in protest of the Communications Decency Act. It will return to normal in one more day. There is now scrolling JavaScript text along the bottom bar in Netscape 2.0, acting as a news update banner. So something good came of the passage of the bill, I guess.
I also just finished fixing up the scripts which write out the incoming browser types and remote hosts, and it's now available from the main page.

January 20, 1996

Added a bunch more images (about 15), spread through the various Acts. Mostly shots of Simba and Nala, these are LD grabs Photoshopped by ROBofLVL@aol.com.

January 10, 1996

Added links to all the actors' pages on the Internet Movie Database from the various Character pages.
Ooh, the Archive is one year old!

January 7, 1996

I took out all the numbers on the images. They were kinda pointless, and now only make it more difficult to add more images. But with them gone, I can throw in as many as I want relatively quickly. :)

January 5, 1996

Well, Rainier, Blacker's new linux box, is up, and so is my account on it. So, naturally, I threw thumbnail icons of the entire image archive onto it and redesigned the archive yet again. This should prove useful. :) Enjoy!

January 3, 1996

In an inexplicable fit of activity today, I renovated the page entirely for Netscape 2.0, reformatting the entire Archive's layout so people with a frames-capable browser would have much greater ease of use, while those who haven't tried them yet won't notice anything different at all. Now the 2.0-enhanced Archive has a vertical icon-based toolbar along the left, allowing the user to jump to any page from any other, as well as providing much greater visibility for a lot of the less prominent or popular parts of the Archive. Have fun!

December 23, 1995

Added links to Chris Heiden's image and sound archives, both of which are definitely worth having. The sound archive is full of good recordings of the songs, and the image archive is a graphical mirror of the FTP site at demon.co.uk, and gives that resource a whole new level of accessibility.

December 2, 1995

I suddenly decided, for some reason, to add character profiles to the Archive. So I scanned in the Skybox character cards and typed in the text from them, and then added a by-character index of the images, plus info on voicing and animation for each one. Enjoy!

November 26, 1995

Changed tlk-index.shtml by putting all the Archives in a table format. This way, I could incorporate the QT Movies in a more flattering manner-- putting them on a level with the other three Archives. :)

November 22, 1995

Updated the Scripts page, organizing the four available versions into positions with clearly equivalent status and appropriate icons. Finally that page looks better.

November 14, 1995

The scripts were updated today, owing to the fact that Lebo M. sent me a transcription/translation of the opening lyrics to "Circle of Life." I incorporated them into all versions of the script. ...And there was much rejoicing. (Yaaaay.) =)

November 8, 1995

A user's suggestion prompted me to split up the Image Archive into several sub-pages out of kindness to people loading the page from a modem connection. I agree, the tabling is kinda slow... so this should help things out a bit.

November 6, 1995

Image O' the Time Period changed.

October 30, 1995

I fixed up the Guest Book a little. Namely, I cut out the old entries up until a few days ago and put them in their own HTML file. This is really going to help matters, considering how large the book is by now. Thanks to Dr. Joseph Creighton for the idea. :)

October 19, 1995

My server does cool things, I just found out. =) I can just tell it "imgarchive" and it will go ahead and serve up imgarchive.shtml. It doesn't need an extension. So I went nuts and changed all the links so they point to the extensionless filenames. This makes things look more organized, or at least I like to think so...

October 17, 1995

For all of you who wondered what was up with the Image O' The Random Time Period, the truth is that nobody remembered to change it. It finally has been changed, and a notation has been added to the Image Archive page showing the date of last change, so you don't have to keep clicking on the link to see if it's changed yet.

- JS

October 15, 1995

Okay, I'm a fool. I managed to make a symlink to index.shtml, and then tried to replace the symlink filename by copying another file to it. Of course, this replaced index.shtml with the new file. Clever. :(
So I rewrote index.html from memory. Ah well... this prodded me to redesign the layout slightly, to try to break up the everything-centered look. I think it looks a bit better now.

October 5, 1995

Made a few minor changes: Revised the Copyright page to make it clearer (not to mention clarifying that my HTML is not up for random public-domain thievery, as some people seem to think it is), changed the look of the Fan Fiction section on the Text Files Archive, and... er... something else I can't quite remember. :)

September 29, 1995

I changed the headers of the various Archive pages to be more uniform, and changed the look of the tlk-index.shtml page slightly (now the TLK Cast inline is aligned to the left instead of being centered).

September 28, 1995

I rescanned many of the "G" rated images, this time using a different resolution path. This eliminated most of the moir banding that was a problem before, as well as dramatically cutting down on the file sizes.

September 24, 1995

I added WIDTH and HEIGHT tags to several image-intensive pages. Now since the image dimensions are hard-wired into the HTML code, the text can load first while the images show up later, finishing the layout a lot sooner. This should help people on slow connections.

September 16, 1995

Well, Walt Disney Pictures has at last gotten itself a nicely organized, attractive, efficient web site-- I looked into it for info on the Timon & Pumbaa TV series and found four nice new JPEGs from the movie. I added them to the Archive: they're #s 85, 91, and 109. (The fourth was one I already had.)
Also, I added intrapage Contents lists to the various Archive pages, thanks to a suggestion from Jason Knight.

September 10, 1995

I (Jennifer) telnetted over to ugcs and updated all of the pages by revising the SuperFroopy ElectroProducts footer. You can now link to the SFEP home page by clicking on the company name. I also (finally) updated the Image O' The Random Time Period, after no one remembered to for three months. (!)

- JS

September 9, 1995

I found the Walt Disney Records home page and linked to their TLK soundtrack page, which is very cool. I also linked to an ftp source for the TLK PC game (the demo version :).

September 1, 1995

I added several images from Toms Rodriguez' collection of pencil art, hoping he gets a scanner so I can grab more. This called attention to a misname on one of my own images-- Father.jpg has been renamed to [url=images/SlowDown.jpg]SlowDown.jpg[/url].
In addition, Jennifer changed the Feedback Form so that its background matches the one on the rest of the pages, so not to be outdone I took her "SuperFroopy ElectroProducts, Ltd." logo and footer and installed it on all the rest of the pages. =)

August 27, 1995

I replaced the old .au player on the Sounds Archive (wplny.zip) with WHAM (Waveform Hold And Modify), which should be an improvement-- it can save in .wav format so Windows users can handle the files.

August 26, 1995

With the help of Spaz, I finally realized why the hit-counter I'd installed was not working. I added the counter to about seven pages and changed the names of those files to *.shtml, an extension which the UGCS server recognizes as one for which it allows server-side includes. This should present no problems (I hope).

August 18, 1995

I created little icons in Photoshop and added them to the bottom of each page as "Go Back" links to the Main Menu and the Index page.

August 12, 1995

Since the UGCS server now supports individual-user cgi directories, I wrote a Guest Book script and added that to the page. This should be interesting. =)

July 30, 1995

Faber has been dead for about two months; it finally came back up today, so I took the opportunity to grab all the files off it and put them on pacific.net. Now at least they're accessible. Faber now plays no part in the TLK Page.

July 22, 1995

Fixed the last few links (as well as the Hans Zimmer Worship Page).

July 20, 1995

Realizing that the URL http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~btman/html/lionking.html was stupid and unwieldy, I moved my directory structure around so 'lionking' was a directory with its own index.html file. I left the old pages in place with META HTTP calls to push Netscape users directly to the new site. The move was painless, except I forgot to fix the textual links on the main menu, under the imagemap... and I also managed to delete two or three inline GIF images from the others.html page, which I then had to recreate in Photoshop.

July 1, 1995

Well, I'm back. I have a job Webcoding for Pacific Internet, and so I have access to my files at UGCS and can take care of things over the summer. So I took down the 4-leaf clover. =)

June 17, 1995

I'm leaving tomorrow for the Boston FDCMuckMeet, to meet BigSimba and Jennifer and others, and then to go home to possible non-net-access. I scanned a 4-leaf clover and put it on the Main Menu to give the page good luck over the summer...

June 5, 1995

Heeeeeellllp! I've created a monster!

June 1, 1995

Matt Robinson learned HTML by writing up the FULL movie credits and sending them to me to add into the page, which I was all too happy to do.

May 30, 1995

Added a Credits page to acknowledge all those people who helped contribute to the page over the months.

May 26, 1995

I gave tlk-index.html a whole new look, changing the title block to a centered table with the TLK logo as a large transparent GIF-- now it looks a lot more "Official," which is why I put "UNOFFICIAL" very prominently in the block. =) I also centered all the titles and made the Archives look a lot better by putting the three major ones (Images, Sounds, and Text Files) in a line, all with equal priority. Now it matches the Main Menu better.
I also put in different inline images, including two at the bottom which I especially like-- Timon (me) looking up at the page with satisfaction, and Nala (Jennifer) peering at it like "Hmm... it's still not right..." =)
The old file is still there for comparison, at old-index.html.

May 24, 1995

Jennifer wrote a Feedback page and linked it to a mail gateway, then had me link it in from the main menu and the Index page. Replies immediately started flowing in...

May 21, 1995

The owner of the counter mailed me telling me the page was getting too many hits to continue using his counter, so I discontinued it. =(

May 18, 1995

I moved the Scripts and Other Sites to their own pages. The counter is doing well-- I'm getting about 160 hits per day. However, I've caught the Hellfrosh whiling away a happy afternoon reloading and reloading the Image Archive page to rock the count... they had it up to about 300 (from 100) when I stopped them >:(

May 17, 1995

Since The Nook seemed to be a reasonable server (shyeah, right), I put some QuickTime movies on it. These came from Jeffrey Speegle, and took the better part of a day to download (his server is slow). Oh well...

May 15, 1995

Jesse Rosenstock, a fellow Caltech frosh living in Blacker Hovse with me, sent me fakemail purportedly from eisner@disney.com warning me to take the page down or Disney would take legal action against me and Caltech. I did a 'chmod -r *' on the directory to be safe and went up to 'kill -9' him, then came back down and re-enabled the page. I'll never learn...

May 14, 1995

I copied the link to an off-site graphical counter from Josh Templin's page and added it to about seven of the most popular pages.

May 10, 1995

I went through the Image Archive and converted it all to HTML 3.0 tables. Now, if only I can be sure everbody will be using Netscape...

May 8, 1995

I moved Jennifer's Main Menu page and the imagemap to my own site for the sake of continuity.

May 4, 1995

Jennifer wrote a Main Menu page, which frankly looks great, and configured a clickable imagemap to include in it. I immediately added it, since it gave so much more organization to the page. Now the main menu is lionking.html, and what used to be the main page is now the Index Page (tlk-index.html). It still contains interesting things like the MAD Magazine spoof-- things the Main Menu doesn't have the room for.

May 3, 1995

I got mail from The Washington Times congratulating me-- my page had been showcased and reviewed in their paper on May 1st. The editor sent me the article, so I included it in the page. Now if only it won't attract the lawyers...

April 30, 1995

You know, dill pickles go great with smokehouse almonds.

April 26, 1995

Ditch Day at Caltech. If you managed to see what happened to the page today, well, this is the date it happened. If you missed it... good.

April 23, 1995

I changed the Other Sites page rather precipitously by making inline images for all the links to all the 'character' pages, like Rafiki and Scar and Nala and ... well, Timon. =)

April 19, 1995

Jennifer actually took the time to go through my HTML script and convert it ALL to HTML 3.0 tables, making it look infinitely better. I added it to the Scripts section in the page.

April 16, 1995

Increasingly paranoid, I stopped advertising the page's URL on rec.arts.disney and alt.fan.lion-king. Of course this won't help if Disney has one single lawyer who Web-surfs...

April 15, 1995

I noticed that Christian von Toerne's TLK Central Archive page has been taken down, out of fear of retribution by Disney. I began to worry and threw Copyright information all over the page, hoping that somehow it'd be enough.

April 4, 1995

I grabbed all the beautiful 24-bit JPEGs from the TLK Screen Scenes package and added them to the Image Archive. It looks like I've now got plenty of images-- 135 or so.

March 14, 1995

My order of both full sets of the Skybox TLK cards arrived today-- and there was much rejoicing (yaaay). I began to scan some of my favorites and add them to the Image Archive.

March 1, 1995

I added a Text Files page, which includes reviews (many sent to me by Kevin Bissessar), essays, and original fan-fiction.

February 27, 1995

I gave Timon a page to call his own: [url=misc/timon.shtml]timon.html[/url].

February 23, 1995

I did some reorganization; now the image archive is on a separate page, which makes the main page a lot easier to deal with.

February 19, 1995

I changed the page to HTML 3.0 format by adding a custom JPEG image as a backdrop and making use of the FONT tag. Jennifer gave me valuable advice on how to manipulate the colors on the page to appear easy to read.

February 16, 1995

I scanned some highlights from MAD Magazine's spoof of TLK and added them on a separate page. Hee hee hee...

February 12, 1995

I found a large .au file archive, and since the maintainer ("Russ") said he was going to have to take the page down soon anyway, I grabbed all the files and created [url=sounds]sounds.html[/url].
Unfortunately, however, the sound files took up 5 megs, so I had to stick them on Faber, a PC in my alley in Blacker Hovse. Faber had just had a Web server installed, httpd 1.4a, which tends to die every now and then and require a reload. But since I live right next door to Faber, I can maintain it myself...

January 23, 1995

The image files keep pouring in. I now have about 60. It's starting to get a little unwieldy, but at least I can say that I think I have the biggest image archive around. =)

January 15, 1995

A contact in France sent me about ten new images for my archive. At this point I was desperate for images, and the fact that these were all screen grabs and barely worth keeping failed to impinge itself upon my brain.

January 14, 1995

I discovered Netscape 1.0N and switched to it from Mosaic, and changed all the images to JPEGs to save on space.

January 10, 1995

In Math 1b lecture, I decided to write a home page, and then proceeded to outline what I'd have on it. It would have two branches: one for general stuff about me, and the other for The Lion King. I consulted Bryan Carson for help on how to get one going, pulled down the Beginner's Guide to HTML from Mosaic, and got going. The result was my home page (without any backgrounds or other HTML 3.0 stuff), the General Info page, and a TLK page that contained a title, the ten Buena Vista images, my script, some links to other sites, some inline images, and nothing more. The URL is http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~btman/html/lionking.html.