The next night I decided to deal with Dudemeister. I requested that he submitted a''resume' or manifesto, so that voters could judge him on his merits... OOPS... here we go again. Visitors to the site would want to be able to actually read these 'Declarations of Intent' without having to trawl through miles of forum postings. So, Page One of the Manifestos was born including, of course, nice little links to the candidates homepages so that interested researchers could see a fuller picture of the candidates. I had barely set that up when someone suggested that people did quite like to be able to 'see' who they were voting for! Very true... but would the candidates, now numbering four, play the game and send me pictures? Not all researchers like their true selves posted up for all to gawp at!

Surprise! They all emailed me likenesses. h2g2 had no provision for direct posting of pictures, so I spent that evening making them a
reasonable size, placing them on my own web site and linking them
into the Rogues Gallery page. Many previews later (I spent hours working on a table for them) the page was looking good. I will say here that I had printed out all the instructions for html formatting,and was spending any spare time I had at work reading them, so that I could improve my speed. I was even starting to put tags in my mind into everyday conversations!

So... there goes another nights sleep!

The next few nights were spent the same way. Check for new
candidates, retrieve their resumes (thank goodness for 'copy and
paste'!), persuade them to submit some sort of picture, go to my site
to transfer them up to the web, back to h2g2, back to edit the
pages... three more nights gone and another four more pages created
to prevent the original ones becoming too big.

I was just starting to relax! Nominations had slowed and I felt that I had everything under control. I even found time to go back into the resumes and highlight appropriate phrases. Maybe I would
actually have time to sleep tonight! How wrong I was.

'We want scandal, dirt, rumours!'

The cry was raised, inside information was required... just as in
the 'real world' the candidates were prepared to do almost anything
to curry votes... and the voters had a right to know!

The Virtual Mayor of London Election Archive

Shazz