Isla Aukate
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Big Website Update!
#1
Hello everyone! We have a major announcement: We've completely overhauled the website, and have just finished the migration! Some benefits include chapters for the comics, easier to use back end for Fox and me, and a revised look for both the main site and the forums bringing them to a more cohesive whole. RSS is a little broken at the moment (it serves up all 1600+ pages right now) but we have that too!

As with any new system, there's bound to be some rough spots. We hope to get them smoothed over as soon as they're pointed out to us. I've already noticed a few things that could use work and am getting ready to get in to fix them, so if you come across anything yourself be sure to let us know!

On my current to-do list is fixing the RSS to not dump the whole comic on users, getting a few pages back into the right chapters, and a couple of back-end fixes on the main site. There are also a few little graphical things I need to tweak.
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
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#2
This is waaaaaaay above my skill level. Props to you Socks! and Props to Fox as well for all the work both of you have done.
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#3
Congratulations on the overhaul. It looks great, thank you for your efforts.
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#4
Looking good, and looking forward to the RSS updates so we automagically get the latest page again! Big Grin
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#5
Good work Socks. I like the new look, and it is indeed way more coherent together.

Couple things that could need changing, since you're asking for feedback:
- Maybe you could make the comic links on the main page send us automatically to the last page, like before? It was quite convenient to be able to go right to the last page in one click.
- I think it'd be better if you made the size of the various windows as a percentage of screen width rather than a fixed size. That way it would adapt to the size of the screen of whomever is browsing the site, which would be especially nice for those of us with wide flat screens.

Thanks.
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#6
I like it! The chapters especially are a godsend to me! Good work!

The only thing I'd say something about is that thread links on the main pages would look more orderly if they were graphically more separated from each other... Maybe with a line, or alternating slightly different tones of purple? 
Also, I'm with Tamara on the size, I have a lot of free space on the sides that could be used to make text less compressed. 

But the overhaul is really a pleasant surprise! Thanks for the effort you put in your work!  Smile
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#7
Hey! Thank you everyone for all the suggestions!

Fox does want me to make the links on the front page go straight to the latest comic instead of the archives. This will require a little bit of work, mostly to give a consistent "latest page" link, as well as some archive and comic webpage redesign to make it easier to use.

Regarding the page size on larger monitors, that was actually something Fox asked for pretty much as soon as the site went live. It mostly looks fine for the main site which is where we did most of the design, but the forums don't look *quite* so great with the fixed width. Once I've had a chance to figure out the layout for flexible pages I'll be putting that up live.

I am going to be making other design tweaks based on feedback (I've already made one teeny one, making the font 11pt instead of 10pt to make it a bit easier to read at higher resolutions and on mobile, though the forum layout is just a touch broken there at the moment).

We've also had some problems with the comic pages going up a few hours early. It's not a huge problem, but it's definitely indicative of a bug in my code (it's supposed to go up at midnight eastern, but right now it's going up at 8PM eastern. I suspect it's using GMT midnight instead for some reason).

Finally, I've had reports of SSL being broken on XP. Unfortunately all our SSL is done by Cloudflare so we can't enable the old (broken) encryption we'd need to support it, and it'd be a bit of a pain to rewrite all the links to support either/or for plain http links (I know it's possible, but XP accounts for such a small number of visitors that my time needs to be focused on the bigger issues).
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
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#8
I believe I've managed to fix a few things today! Turns out I forgot to add the timezone to the website's settings, so it was defaulting to GMT. At least it wasn't a problem with the code like I was afraid of! In addition, I've fixed the issue with 5 pages from each chapter being put in the wrong chapter. This was an import mistake, which shouldn't happen again since I won't be bulk importing already published pages again. Fortunately the system made it really easy to fix! I also fixed a couple of admin page goofs, though that was more for fox and me.

At this point it's just making the archives and comic navigation a bit nicer, as well as design and layout tweaks.
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
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#9
Good!

I'm curious, by the way, how does a website look from a coding point of view?
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#10
There are still things that could be improved, but I can make changes to various parts of the website without worrying about if adding feature A to the comic system will break the forum integration, or if updating *that* will cause the site to fail to load.
I am an administrator from a technical viewpoint only. I just keep the forums up to date and free from spam, and have no authority regarding the roleplay universe; please contact Foxenawolf for RP issues :3
However, if you're having technical troubles, feel free to shoot me a PM!
Reply




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