The last few weeks have been mainly dedicated to finishing and optimising the new code on the domain. Key among these updates is the settings page (http://www.imperialacademy.org/settings/default.asp) where users can change their details and other things. Also, I've made some changes to the database behind the site. This has resulted in a lot of administration code now working, so the staff list is up to date. Also, the competitions display has changed slightly. A competition can now have three conditions. It can be "Pending", "Approved" or "Denied". When viewing competition details, you can tell the status by the heading (Competition Details for Competition # ID (Status - Approved/Denied/Pending)). Also, the tables are different colours. Blue is for pending, green for approved and red for denied. There is also a search function on the competitions list. Currently it only allows searching of contact names, but will be expanded soon. Coding on the EH Ladder is also continuing.

CM Mike of Crusader squadron is the new XvT Mission Design Professor. Unfortunately, I lost the course notes, so he'll be rewriting the course. It should be up and running in the next couple of weeks. The Computer Basics course has changed URL to http://wraith.squadron.org/CBX/index.htm and has passed 50 graduates already. The IWATS Core is currently around 1913. Squadron Management 2 recently passed 450, while Graphics passed 200. The total graduate count is sitting around 5870, only about 130 more til 6,000. Some more courses have been migrated to the new online format too.

The Training Manual has gotten several updates recently, mostly relating to the Naval Corps. The Naval Corps information is now in their relavent sections (ranks, positions, etc). The FCHG listing has also been updated to reflect the new ranks. Also, the positions of FSE and Imperial Counsel have been added to the Advisors page. Lastly, I've been looking at different downloadable options for the training manual. The problem with the previous solution was it needed IE4 installed. I looked at making it a Acrobat (PDF) file, but this made the file very large (1.4MB) and isn't very condusive to the manual's layout (PDF is better suited for linear documents). So I've decided to simply zip the manual. It's 630K and available at http://www.imperialacademy.org/manual/manual.zip