Changes, they’re a comin’
If you’re visiting Abandoned Towers for the first time this won’t be obvious and perhaps not if you’re a previous visitor. For all intents and purposes Abandoned Towers is now under new management. Personally I represent the technical side of that change.
So what does this really mean, well in the short term, not too much. We are reviewing everything that was previously part of Abandoned Towers and trimming where appropriate. In other places we are relabelling, reorganizing and simplifying. However, we’re doing this while the site is live, and we’re doing it on the live version of the site (not exactly an industry best practice). So you may experience periodic brief outages, or other strange behaviour throughout the site. Just means that we’re working on the site.
To give you an idea of the scope of what we’re dealing with (we expect that this may take several months):
- 40 static pages
- 435+ posts/stories/pieces of content
- 5 discrete blogs
- public and private areas of the site
- ~6GB of total content (including backups and duplication) which represents the organic growth and structure of what has become Abandoned Towers Magazine
- 81,162 files
- 7,818 folders
In short it’s not a small task that we’re undertaking here, and we want to do a good job of it, not just a quick job. So we definitely appreciate your patience and support while we’re working on it. If you have suggestions, please do feel free to leave them in the comments.
As the one making most of the technical changes and therefore likely to be the one responsible for any weird behaviour you may encounter, I am taking it upon myself to also start blogging about the progress of the transition so that you, the visitor, can have an idea of what’s going on, why, and maybe even when it might be finished.
You may notice that the top of many of the content pages now feature a line like this: “Note: This page is currently being reviewed for content and accuracy, as of 19 Oct 2011.” These notes are primarily for the management team while we update and review content, but they also serve as an indication of how current and accurate the information on the page is. The intent is for it to be obvious whether or not content is current and accurate, and at the moment there is much content which is not. We’re working on it.
Other things which will be part of the ongoing process:
- rebuilding the Abandoned Towers reader community
- recruiting new and contacting existing and former Abandoned Towers volunteers
- creating and communicating the long term vision of Abandoned Towers
- accepting new submissions (already started)
- reviewing new submissions
I fear that what I’ve represented above is only the seagull standing on top of the iceberg… regardless, we’re moving forward, and in the short term while we’re still significantly transitioning I will be your guide to what’s going on. I hope that it’s helpful (if not interesting), and that you come back to check on our progress from time to time.
You may have already noticed some of the small but significant changes that we’ve been making: the menus are in alphabetical order! and links are a different colour from the text.
Thankfully the following Bridget Fonda quote from Point of No Return, the English remake of La Femme Nikita which spawned a Canadian television series (of the same name) staring Australian Peta Wilson and has once again spawned a television series filmed in Canada (Nikita) doesn’t apply to me and usability.
I never did mind the little things.
- Maggie
Thanks for visiting, and reading, we look forward to serving you better in the near future.
David
P.S. These posts likely will be removed once the transition is complete, but who knows maybe I’ll be entertaining enough that they’ll be worth keeping. I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you, but it could happen.