State Of The Site Comment Count

Brian

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Hey, so you may have noticed that things are slightly busted around here. The site's been in more or less the same state since I cobbled it together some seven years ago, with tweaks here and there and an ever-increasing amount of metal on the back end. This was fine; it's gotten increasingly less fine as time goes on. Let's bring in bolded alter-ego.

Why does your site look like Geocities still?

cumong man

Pets.com?

this was a bad idea

Does Marissa Meyer run this place or what?

Finding good developers turns out to be hard. Twice I've engaged professionals to do a thing, and neither time have the professionals actually managed to do the thing. A revamp of the comment section simply did not work; a planned site overhaul set to launch last summer obviously did not.

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I think this is about to change. A few weeks ago I met with a gentleman from Human Element, a local outfit. They're taking over the stalled site revamp. HUEL* has several things going for it. They are local, so keeping in contact is easy. They have 30 people, so they have become good enough at what they do to grow significantly. They're big enough that they've got experience in whatever CMS you would throw at them. Their wifi password is reassuringly nerdy.

For the first time in a while I'm optimistic this will get done and before football season.

*[Referring to them as HE was weirdly religious and quickly discarded. HUEL had much to recommend it.

Internally they go by HEI but you will agree that HUEL is superior morally and ethically.]

But I hate change.

Indeed you do. There will be some changes. The most obvious will be a magazine-style front page. This will require some extra clicking but with the amount of #content on the site, especially during football season, we feel it is required. Not that much else will change, at least at first. The site revamp is a necessary first step before moving forward.

But we can look forward to some new features?

The new design is responsive, which means it'll look good on tablets and phones. It'll be professionally designed, so you'll know that the navigation menu above has useful things that drop down. (Do you know that?) You'll be able to get to the second page of the board without clicking on the mgoboard link above. Points will be exchangeable for Venezuelan bolivars. The site should be much faster and less prone to going down when traffic spikes.

Going forward a continued relationship with HUEL should allow us to implement some larger changes, but let's eat one apple at a time.

What about the app(s)?

Those will also be revamped when the site re-launches. They have to get massively updated anyway since the APIs they ping will change so it'll be a refresh for both. Apologies for the situation with the MGoBlog HD app; I am an Android person and did not know that the standard app had so many problems. Unfortunately the HD app was never authorized and when we were looking for performance improvements before Signing Day it stood out as a big drag.

Please bear with us. That should be fixed when the site re-launches. Your patience will be rewarded. With bolivars, but rewarded all the same.

Comments

mGrowOld

February 21st, 2017 at 1:20 PM ^

There's always Draftegeddon to bitch about.

But seriously thanks for the update.  I still think that if money is a limiting variable you could kick-start this project and make "HAIL" fundraising closer to what we put together for the sick dog.  

People would contribute to this Brian.  I know I would.

yossarians tree

February 21st, 2017 at 3:56 PM ^

This could be done sooner rather than later. Pick a heavy traffic day say right before spring ball and dedicate the day to raising funds for the new site. Special features! Dancing girls! I'm sure we could raise quite a bit and then Brian would have a better idea of what he can budget for.

robbyt003

February 21st, 2017 at 1:09 PM ^

Hallelujah!  I don't really mind the current site layout, but the app and frequent crashes were getting irritating.  yeah yeah yeah it's a free site, you get what you pay for, yada yada yada.

Michigasling

February 21st, 2017 at 2:36 PM ^

I understand why people complain that our common addiction isn't always available when we most need it, but I love the layout. 

Too many other sites I need to use have switched to lots of white space and pale text floating there with too much space between lines, requiring constant cursoring and difficulty reading.  Is it that they're designed for phone-readers?  As someone who likes to see lots of text at a glance... On an actual computer... that's easy to read and kind to the eyes...

Please say that's not in the plan!

Ali G Bomaye

February 21st, 2017 at 1:37 PM ^

Right now, articles are listed on the front page blog-style, in order of posting. If you want to read any article other than the most recent one, you have to do a lot of scrolling. This was fine 10 years ago when the site was Brian writing an occasional post in between doing his actual job. It's less fine now that the site has a few full-time writers churning out a few pieces of #content per day.

Magazine-style layouts have a number of articles showing on the front page without any scrolling necessary. Usually they'll be roughly curated in order of importance, so a huge, in-depth article will have a bigger headline (and stay on the front page longer) than a quick one-off about a recruit visiting or something. SBNation is one example of a basic magazine-style layout.

I Like Burgers

February 21st, 2017 at 1:52 PM ^

I'm all for the magazine style setup.  The current look/style is actually limiting to the amount of content you can publish in a day because every new item you publish buries something else.  Publish three things before 2pm or so and there's a good chance a solid chunk of people miss the first post.

BIGBLUEWORLD

February 21st, 2017 at 1:11 PM ^

MGoBlog is a great source for University of Michigan sports information. This is my main news source for the athletic program.

I will be happy with whatever format Brian and the crew decide on. Let's keep the content strong and reliable as it is now.

One thing in need of repair: The annoying deluge of immature, potty mouth comments. They can make looking for real information, or even thoughtful opinions, very tedious.

MGoBlog, keep up the good work.

Thanks.

 

ish

February 21st, 2017 at 1:49 PM ^

indeed.  look at the scout message board, which itself is even tame.  400 snowflake threads.  three times an hour someone asks "does anyone have any new information relating to...?" as if everyone has such information but isn't willing to share it, i.e., the purpose of a message board.  at least this place is curated.

BlueMars24

February 21st, 2017 at 1:25 PM ^

While I agree you and personally use sites instead of apps often, that is a minority of users now. I'd bet a lot of people don't even know how to pin a bookmark to the home on different platforms. I know I've personally shown a lot of people how to do that. 

Ace

February 21st, 2017 at 1:25 PM ^

the server issues have largely been solved. (/knocks on wood.) We've done multiple upgrades, including a relatively recent one, as well as adding Cloudflare. The primary reason we got rid of the HD app is it was putting an enormous strain on the server, far more than it should've for the amount of traffic it was generating.

The NSD outage was a bit of really bad luck. Our database got corrupted (an issue totally unrelated to the server), and while it was something that could've been fixed pretty quickly, it happened to occur just as we'd arrived at the Bo Store to record the live podcast—we restored a backup from the previous day and reposted that day's posts when the podcast wrapped up. The server had actually been on a roll—I had no trouble posting Solomon's Hello post.