put a webring on it

Welcome To MGoBlog 3.0 Comment Count

Brian

SORRY, SORRY, TRYING TO REDESIGN IT

Fine, we'll not do the geocities site for the rest of time. I hope you're happy with a background that does not include animated gifs and zero Victors midis in your life, you philistines.

Anyway, this is the New Site. There will inevitably be some hiccups as with any large complicated activity. Please feel free to email or comment about them and we'll look into it. Here is a bolded alter-ego discussion about it.

Why did it take so long?

We missed an aggressive date in August and then I didn't want to upset the apple cart during football season. Then bandwidth got extremely low for us, the MGoBlog half of the equation, with a weird spate of folks being very ill at the same time hockey and basketball went to their respective Final/Frozen Fours. We didn't really pick the project back up until April.

I thought the August date was going to be a miss because this was a bear of a migration from Drupal 6 to Drupal 8 for a site with millions of comments and hundreds of thousands of nodes, poorly maintained by a web coding dilettante (that would be me) and using various Drupal 6 alpha modules that never transitioned to 7, let alone 8. Some functionality was lost. (RIP hellbanning.)

So what are the bells and whistles?

Step one was attempting to replicate current features and port the site to 8. There isn't a ton of new functionality. The main new feature is a responsive design that will work on phones and tablets in addition to PCs. This means we don't need to have specialized apps anymore. The new site is also a long term platform that we can build new stuff into; features on the old site stopped happening because I was perpetually hoping to have a new site in the near future. Now diabolical plans can transpire.

One new thing: comment threads are collapsible, so when that guy who fights with that other guy starts fighting with that guy you can just click the collapse button and move on with your life.

So there are no apps?

The apps were just a mobile-friendly way to view the site and are currently discontinued. If we have functionality we want to add that requires an app they might come back.

I have a problem with this!

Yeah, if you click on "read more" it doesn't take you to where you left off. That is a known issue. Voting is also missing from some article types. 

Where's the midi?

You'll have to ask HUEL… er, Human Element about that. Human Element develops websites, usually well and sometimes very very badly but on purpose.

Comments

FrankMurphy

June 5th, 2018 at 7:19 PM ^

In all seriousness, congratulations. I know what a huge undertaking this must have been and what a major milestone it is for the blog.

Are there plans to go to HTTPS? Seems like a no-brainer, and fairly easy in this day and age. 

Rasmus

June 5th, 2018 at 7:26 PM ^

I'm on a computer right now so not testing it, but the site itself should be a lot more mobile-friendly, so apps won't matter.

I'm up-voting everybody who posts in this thread. Woo-hoo!

Bando Calrissian

June 5th, 2018 at 7:52 PM ^

Thanks so much, you guys. Looking forward to implanting the new design into my skull.

One small thing I immediately noticed: The font for the "About," "Contact," etc. is slightly pixelated in a really weird way. Not sure if that's a formatting issue or what, but it looks kinda strange.

echoWhiskey

June 6th, 2018 at 2:53 PM ^

I think this is an issue with how they are downloading the Google Fonts.  Specifically, they are not pulling in the 700 weight version of Roboto Condensed, so the browser is just doing it without the exact font and it comes across slightly pixelated.  I don't have time to look through all of the font weights needed, but this would be the URL to reference to fix this particular issue:

//fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Roboto|Roboto+Slab|Roboto+Condensed:400,700 

BlueSCar

June 5th, 2018 at 8:12 PM ^

Great work on the redesign!  I changed my username a few weeks ago and not it's back to the old one.  How do I get my new one back?