2008 = new look, new ideas, and new love. The latter is more of a hope than a guarantee really, but thumbs up for the new year and kudos to you for coming back to see us. Can you feel the love in the room? We heard great news late last month, when The Mirror printed a wonderfully factual piece about Mercy a.k.a. Jennifer Metcalfe leaving Hollyoaks to live with her footballer boyfriend and star in a ITV drama, James was quick to dismiss it as lies and at the same time revealed he was signed up to Hollyoaks until at least June 08, so we have him on screen as JP for at least another 7 months. You may now rejoice and show your joy with shouts and air punches. Go on! Everyone else has/will.

We have quite a bit of site news this month, some of it it really good, and unfortunately some is kinda awful. So lets get started.

* The form filling was a great use to us (more please!) and only after a few days we decided you guys needed and wanted a few navigational changes to the site, first was the Media page the comment we loved the most; "OMG it's like labyrinth but without the hotness of David Bowie". Into play comes one redesigned dark black page with links in the form of pictures guiding you around the site like a storybook of unrivaled brilliance (OK OK so we were quite impressed, we have a parents fondness, take pity on us please).

* We now also offer JP and JS related *grabs the red satin sheets and rips it away to reveal* DOWNLOADS.

* CSS navigation was a thumbs up. So look! Spunky nav bars which look like pictures but are actually based on text! Knuxs was very pleased: "What we had before used some scripting in order to allow for a image to replace what was already there, and although I'm no advanced user not a novice either, but couldn't understand it enough to make changes and thus wasn't happy using something on a site I didn't fully understand. It also meant a load of "excessive" markup could be removed = pages load faster".

* "I have quite a big one (screen) and the site is generally lost by the HUGE edges can you not do something to accommodate me". Er yes, OK when we first read this, sex sex sex on the brain was all we read, but smutty wit aside he did have a point. So everyone at JPMQ towers ate more than they should have the last month, and WOOMP we added a couple of inches around the middle, and have gone from a skinny cow shape to a more average looking stallion. Good for middle to high range computer screens. Um not so helpful for anyone still surfing around on a 800 x 600, basically if you still have a box rather than a flat screen chances are you might notice you can no longer see the whole site without scrolling from side to side a little. We decided because the center column on the site was still fine and the left side bar was mostly full of non essential info anyway, it wouldn't be too much of a problem. If anyone feels differently feedback would be the way to go, if we don't hear shouting it's staying as it it, (P. S. we did explore the option of a fluid layout but it didn't work!).

* Without JP on screen much the last few months its allowed us to do lots of little alterations to the actual content of the site, so you might feel like having a nose around and seeing what's been re written or added to etc.

Finally it's with great sadness we need to report TPenguin (Kevin McNeill) who some of you will no doubt be familiar with, seeing as he posted on quite a few message boards as well as our shoutbox, kindly let us create a page for him to display his wonderful story and music video (you can view both from his own link in the media area of the site). Unfortunately JPMQ learnt last week that TPenguin had died in the early hours on the morning of the 29th of December from a blood clot. He leaves behind his boyfriend of 13 years and a loving family.

We would like to do something to honor his memory, if you have any ideas or would like to take part in some way then we'd be very keen to talk to you.

Despite a potentially bad start to 2008, if you knew TPenguin, we hope that you enjoy January and we look forward to seeing you this time next month.

Labels: downloads, James Sutton, Jennifer Metcalfe, John Paul, Kevin McNeill