About the Codex of Universes

The Concept

This website was inspired by a series of fantasy novels by Steven Erikson. His "Malazan Book of the Fallen" series is extremely complicated, and I found it very hard to understand it all. Talking with other friends who read the books, we found that we all remember different pieces of information. Piecing all our knowledge together would perhaps make it possible to understand this epic, baffling saga, so the idea for this website was born. The Codex could be a place where we could categorize and catalogue all kinds of information in a free-form fashion, and allow others to participate freely.

The interface is intended to be as simple and painless as possible. Information is shared at a small granularity, and each nugget of information is independently voted on for relevance, accuracy, and value. Information can be broad, or finely detailed. Share a general statement about what happened in a chapter, or document what one character ate for dinner at a forgettable moment of the story.

The Technical Details

Trivia about how this site was created:

Codex of Universes is programmed using Ruby on Rails.

Development was started on an Alienware Windows XP system. The development environment used was RadRails, which is an Eclipse-based IDE.

Current development is done on a white MacBook using TextMate.

All image creation and editting was done using The Gimp.

Some icons shamelessly borrowed from Mark James' Silk Icon Set.

To contact the site owner, please fill in the contact form by clicking on this link.