Bye-Bye Official Site

I've not been happy with EA for a while, but really the last straw for me was the switch to SecuROM. I don't understand why they went from a program that caused no problems to one widely reported to cause problems which was also released by a company with a poor track record in DRM, and I don't really care anymore. I've found a way to work around it for BV, and that'll be my last Sims purchase unless they change things.

That having been said, aside from my issues with EA in general, the official site is slow and clunky, as is the interface for the storybook creation, so I'm trying out Google's combination of services: the blog, here, for a replacement blog (duh), Google/Picasa web albums for stories, and my gmail addy (matches this site's addy) as well as the comments on the web albums will serve in lieu of the limited guestbook ability at the Sims 2 site. I will have to come up with a good way to handle having backups of story albums, but I've got a couple ideas for that, and my experimentation with the web interface for Picasa shows it should actually be easier to deal with in some ways than the storybook editor, and the downloadable organizer might make it easier still -- I haven't tested that yet, since I know I can do it all via the web interface.

As to when I'll get a chance to show this new method in action, well, that remains to be seen. I got way behind on recreating my custom content due to health issues, and I'd kinda like to get that in and working before I start either of my two pending projects. I can't really estimate how long that'll take -- I'm unlikely to work on it this week, so I would guess the earliest would be end of the month.

ETA Hrm, I just discovered a flaw with this method that I didn't catch before—you can't put any formatting, even line breaks, into captions. I've sent some feedback requesting this (it's also been requested in the features request group) so maybe they'll change that *crosses fingers* Otherwise it's going to be kinda hard.

To see a sample, though, you can look here.

I'm not sure what I will do if they don't add this feature. I haven't found any better sites for this sort of thing. I suppose it might be possible to find a way to break things up or caption such that it isn't an issue (using extra photos since the limit is 500 rather than the 100-120 you can usually convince the Sims site to take) but I'd much rather it was just possible to do it the easy way.