Status Update: 1 June 2014
Hi all,
Just an update for the community regarding the following points:
With much jumping through hoops, the domain is now firmly in place for a minimum of 3 years. The test, of course, will be next year in March when I hope we can all miss the annual 'site down/domain lost' party. I am looking to move the entire site onto AWS (Amazon cloud servers), but that won't be happening till after the software update.
Software update
As I mentioned in my last post, this is the year skyehawke will be receiving upgrades. I had thought to roll these out in small pieces but in the five years that has gone by with piecemeal updates, the core code is a bit of a mess. Not to mention, of course, that the core code began life when I was in high school - to say that advances have been made would be an understatement.
So the first of the small upgrades, it's just the first one will be rather large as I replace the underlying framework and structure of the site. There will be testing first, of course - and although the archive will look different (everything will get a bit bigger - either my eyes aren't as good as they were or, as I suspect, low resolutions in computer monitors in the early 2000s meant that everything was super tiny) for the most part (with some exceptions, please see below) functionality will remain the same.
What does this mean? From the view point of users of the archive, the changes should seem cosmetic. Fonts will be bigger, colours will be different, the site based information pages will be updated (nothing that requires a change to the terms of use). The real changes in the first update will be mostly code based to allow for extended functionality.
Some new things will appear of course - an example of what to expect in the first release:
In some cases, such as for the news posts, there are better ways to communicate (i.e. twitter, tumblr, livejournal). In others (i.e. user ratings), the use of the functionality is so perfunctory as to render it useless (i.e. everybody rates a story five stars - it has no use as a filtering system and would probably be better replaced with something like AO3's kudos).
Given the low levels of community interaction in the past, I'm putting these topics forward now in the hopes that there'll be enough feedback by the time I need to make a decision of what to do. So do, please, state your opinion on things that are useless on the site (even if it works) or, alternatively, suggest alternatives.
cheers
TR
Just an update for the community regarding the following points:
- Domain registrars
- Software update to site
With much jumping through hoops, the domain is now firmly in place for a minimum of 3 years. The test, of course, will be next year in March when I hope we can all miss the annual 'site down/domain lost' party. I am looking to move the entire site onto AWS (Amazon cloud servers), but that won't be happening till after the software update.
Software update
As I mentioned in my last post, this is the year skyehawke will be receiving upgrades. I had thought to roll these out in small pieces but in the five years that has gone by with piecemeal updates, the core code is a bit of a mess. Not to mention, of course, that the core code began life when I was in high school - to say that advances have been made would be an understatement.
So the first of the small upgrades, it's just the first one will be rather large as I replace the underlying framework and structure of the site. There will be testing first, of course - and although the archive will look different (everything will get a bit bigger - either my eyes aren't as good as they were or, as I suspect, low resolutions in computer monitors in the early 2000s meant that everything was super tiny) for the most part (with some exceptions, please see below) functionality will remain the same.
What does this mean? From the view point of users of the archive, the changes should seem cosmetic. Fonts will be bigger, colours will be different, the site based information pages will be updated (nothing that requires a change to the terms of use). The real changes in the first update will be mostly code based to allow for extended functionality.
Some new things will appear of course - an example of what to expect in the first release:
- story links will now contain the story title, making it a bit more human readable (and searchable - though skyehawke as a rule does not allow search engines to crawl its pages)
- stories will have a 'full story' view which displays all the chapters at once
- story rating (i.e. PG), content warnings, genre (i.e. Humour), characters are all searchable (or rather you can navigate through all stories with the same rating, warning, genre, character etc). This is the incremental step required before authors can enter their own characters (i.e. tagging system)
- lists - the ability to not just have favourite stories and authors but to see them in a useful way and get meaningful updates (we're going to move away from emails - sorry guys, but in return I'm looking at APIs, RSS feeds and other ways that are more useful and less annoying to manage)
- a better mousetrap (for spammers that is - one that doesn't annoy the crap out of reviewers by making them get through a ridiculously large CAPTCHA)
In some cases, such as for the news posts, there are better ways to communicate (i.e. twitter, tumblr, livejournal). In others (i.e. user ratings), the use of the functionality is so perfunctory as to render it useless (i.e. everybody rates a story five stars - it has no use as a filtering system and would probably be better replaced with something like AO3's kudos).
Given the low levels of community interaction in the past, I'm putting these topics forward now in the hopes that there'll be enough feedback by the time I need to make a decision of what to do. So do, please, state your opinion on things that are useless on the site (even if it works) or, alternatively, suggest alternatives.
cheers
TR