Late is better than never! Nominations for Exploding Deku Nut's 6th Annual Golden Item awards are now open! For those who are new to the event, the Golden Item Awards are a set of five awards given to various sites around the community. The award categories are Most Unique Site, Most Stunning Site, Most Aspiring Site, Most Lively Forums and Lifetime Achievement.

Any Zelda site is eligible for nomination. To nominate a site you think deserves to win, please visit the GIA main page  and fill out the form provided. Feel to nominate the same site for several awards and as many different sites as you wish. Please keep in mind that the Golden Item Awards are not a vote based award, which means spamming nominations will not benefit anyone. Nominations serve to bring my attention to a site I may miss in the judging. There is also no bias towards long established websites, as younger sites have just as much a chance to win.

Nominations will be held from February 15th, 2010 to March 14th, 2010. The winners will be announced on March 15th, 2010. As always, feel free to post this news on your respective websites and forums. Good luck to everyone who enters.

It's been a long time in coming, but Layout 11.0 - Eternal Antithesis is finally here! You'll notice a lot of content is missing and a few additions here and there. I will address everything in due time.

First off, this layout has been a long time in coming, primarily due to a change in my priorities. When I first created Exploding Deku Nut, I did it because I loved writing satire and Zelda humour. Layouts were something I enjoyed making as well; as you can see due to the fact we’re on version 11.0. But over the years, my attempts to make a "jack of all trades" Zelda site, I lost that focus and desire to work on EDN. Zelda content was never something I enjoyed writing and quite frankly what is the point when so many other sites can do it so much better.

I started EDN when I was junior high and I will be graduating university in a few months. Life happens, interests change, and I realized that if I didn’t make the site into something I enjoyed working on in my spare time, it was just going to shut down for good. Thus, to avoid this eventual fate, I set upon transforming EDN into something more align to its roots and my current interests, the result are before you.

So what changes have I made? For one, you'll notice the Zgames ring that housed links to all the game information is gone. I've removed this feature permanently as we'll no longer be featuring game content. I've also removed some other superfluous content here and there as well to streamline the site to its core essentials. The sections I will be focusing on are satire, Zelda humour, Accidentally Linked, Citrus Cam and Digital Zelda. My staff will be working on other sections that will be introduced at a later date.

The two major additions are Citrus Cam and Digital Zelda. Citrus Cam is my JTV broadcast that I've been conducting for over half a year now. I stream video games for both the console and PC, fairly frequently thought out the week. To watch these feeds you can use the embedded stream on the top right, or visit the JTV channel itself. When I’m not live, there are a view clips that can give you a view of the kind of broadcast I usually run.

Digital Zelda is a new project I've wanted to get off the ground for a while. Basically it’s a series of digital paintings portraying scenes both in game and fictional in the Zelda universe. Specifically I want to focus on games from the pre-Ocarina of Time era. The header for the site can be viewed as a mini-preview for this section. I will give more information on this when it launches. So that should over all the changes on the frontend, so here’s some information about the backend. Recently we switched over to our own server, which messed up the cutenews and CMS system I had been using. So all the news will be done through the CMS system, with Cutenews completely removed from the picture. There was some other database problems that you don’t need to know the details about. I just wanted you to know it happened, so that’s why the layout didn’t launch in November.

Speaking about the layout, I should mention a bit of my thinking behind it. The name ‘Eternal Antithesis’ plays on the themes of light and dark central to each Zelda game and the series in general. Primarily I portrayed this through the sunburst and illuminated castle against the backdrop of darkened clouds and mountains. The Twilight Realm style was used for the interface because it was a good “in between choice”. Plus it looked cool. I should mention that I consider Layout 11.0 to be the last layout I ever make for EDN. Not because I’m unable to anymore or lost the desire. It’s just that layouts take me much longer then they used to, time that could be used updating the site with content. So baring some bolt of inspiration, get used to seeing this thing for a while. Good thing I really like it.

Finally, current site news! As you know, February is coming up and that means the Golden Item Awards! I will open the nomination process on February 15th, which will give me time to get the site tided and to scout around. Also, I am accepting affliates again! If you applied before and I didn’t add you, it was because I was working on this thing, not because I didn’t like your site. So please, if you want to affiliate, please send me an email at darthcitrus@hotmail.com And that’s that. I hope that this change will be worth it and get the ball rolling again.

I'll be fixing up the rest of the site this week, so forgive the ramshackle method of posting news and comments at the moment. Hopefully this will look better at the end of the week. Until next time.

-Darth Citrus-