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This
project got started in April of 2001.
I had
tried printing from the Arreat Summit but the prints were not
good. The layout on the printed page made the documents
difficult to use. Alt-Tabbing out to the desktop was the only
option and was a real pain.
At that
time, I created some simple documents in Star Office. These
files were usable but not that great. The first documents were
the Horadric Cube and Crafted Items.
I used
those documents up until June of 2003.
In June
of 2003, I decided to create a document with the Rune Word
information from the 1.10 beta patch. Around that same time,
OpenOffice.org
released version 1.1.0 which had the built-in ability to
generate PDFs with a click of a toolbar button.
The Rune
Word document turned out to be quite good. I thought that other
people would like to use the document.
In July
of 2003, I decided to make the Rune Word PDF available to
others. I put the file on my web server and posted a link to the
file in the Beta Patch discussion forum on Blizzard's site.
It was
so funny to see the initial reactions from people. There were a
small number of people who made the assumption that I was
distributing trojans. This was almost enough to get me to stop
making the file available. After all, I am not profiting from
this.
I
started getting requests for a version of the Rune Word document
that did not have the first page of instructions. It was easy to
make the new version of the file. Now that there were two files,
I decided it was time to put up an actual web site instead of
just the raw files.
The
first page i created was rather ugly but was functional. There
were some problems with the web server which prevented some
people from downloading the files. In early November, 2003 I
upgraded the web server software which seems to have corrected
most of the download problems.
November
2003: In a reply from GF from Blizzard to an email I sent about
a typo on the Arreat Summit, he asked if I wanted him to post a
link to my site. I said “sure” :^)
Once the
link was posted in the Files section of the Arreat Summit, I
started to get a significant increase in the number of
downloads.
Between
the email feedback anf feedback from the forums, it became
obvious there was a demand for these types of PDF documents.
I dusted
off the old Horadric Cube and Crafted Item documents that I had
done in 2001. I cleaned them up, updated the info, and posted
the PDFs on my site.
The very
best part of this experience has been the great emails from all
over the world!
A huge
thank you to everyone who has taken the time to send me
feedback.
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