The Site is Being Upgraded

I am upgrading the site. The upgrading is being phased in. Expect changes. Expect some wonkiness, particularly with regards to appearance. I am focusing on the engine, and will be attending to lay out issues that are not critical after the engine is all up and working.

Getting this done requires focus, inspiration and motivation, so I am going to post about what I am doing because talking about it keeps me motivated and inspired, but when I talk about it to Al and The Spawn they just go, "That's nice" and roll their eyes a little.

The short story is I have a copy of the Fort with an upgraded core running with a responsive layout, which means it resizes itself for tablets and phone. I am excited about this. Watching it transform as I make my browser window bigger and smaller is pretty cool. The main menu changes to a drop down when you get to phone size, which is also cool. But now I have to get back to the boring part of migrating tables to make all the bits of the site work.



Long Story:

A good deal of the work required is slow and tedious. I've been staring at my screen for two days now, and my fingers, wrists, eyes and back hurt.

In layman's terms what needs to be done is a lot like updating your OS to a new version, then updating all your apps to new versions compatible with your new OS. In theory this should be an easy process. In reality, it rarely goes smoothly, and when everything is finally updated, you discover that half your files can't be read by the new version of your apps so you have to convert those as well. And sometimes, things go so badly that you transform your computer/phone/tablet into a brick. We don't want that happening to the Fort, so the first step is to make a copy of the site, move it to a sandbox region and test the entire process and the results there. That's like when you get a new computer and have to set it up and then copy everything on the old one over to the new one. In theory that should be easy too, but sometimes what happens is the damn thing runs for hours and then hangs.

Anyway, setting up the test site is the most tedious and dreaded bit of the process for me. I had to babysit the process for hours. All in all that took about 8 hours, which actually isn't bad, since it is the equivalent of migrating an entire site to a new server, and we have all seen our favorite sites down for 2 days or more when they do that.

After getting the test site set up, I tested an intermediate upgrade (got everything to the highest build before migrating to the new version). This required finding and cleaning up garbage in the database left over from the import from Blogger. When I finally got that all working, I repeated the process here. This means the article layout looks a little different than it did before. The comment counter image at the top of the articles just shows zero even though there are comments, and the hit counter isn't displaying everywhere it should. I am not going to fix this now, since this is only an intermediate point of the upgrade process.

After that, I got the new layout functioning, since the old one doesn't work with the new core. Now I starting to do the equivalent of upgrading all my apps to versions compatible with the a new OS. This requires migrating a bunch of tables which is always a pain in the ass.

I have all the critical bits functioning on the test site (articles, forums, comments and PM).

I was really tired when I was updating the PM system, so on first attempt all Ken and Barney's love notes to each other appeared in my in box. j/k. PM was totally FUBAR. All messages where just a series of numbers. Moment of panic. Figured out that the series of numbers was a time stamp, and I had lost a column. Had to fallback, drop tables, migrate tables, insert column, then reinstall.

Hopefully won't do that again. Bah, who am I kidding. I will definitely do something like that again. Can't help it. I like to do the work that requires focus after everyone is asleep so I don't get interrupted mid-thought, but things always take longer than expected and next thing I know 11pm becomes 3am and I am bleary eyed and I screwing up. Also, I take notes when working on the test site, but the notes made at 2am never make sense to me the next day. I'm all like, "WTH does that mean?"

So now I am at the point of making it all look pretty. This is where I make the had "form vs function" decisions.

The new engine also allows for a more flexible taxonomy and permissions. I'm trying to use it to pull down the walls between articles and blogs, hook up new game listings with reviews, streamline submissions.

SuperflyTNT wrote: Please, have "sticky" posts always at the top of the forums so they don't disappear

The stickies are always at the top of the forum in which they reside. The default Trash Talk page is the active topics. You have to click on INDEX in the menu to get to the individual forums.

craniac wrote: Do you prefer cash donations or should everyone chip in and buy you a game(s)?

I don't receive any compensation from the Fort, nor do any of the writers or staff. We all use our own money to deal with the site's cash flow issues. This upgrade is going to cost around $400 in software purchases, which creates one of those cash flow issues. Anyway monetary, donations to the Fort are always greatly appreciated.

P.S. Now I lost my train of thought. Take a little break and I forget what I'm doing. Oh, yeah, the logo resizing issue, and the cache issue.