Website news
Hey people, here’s an update on things:
If you’re just tuning in, the site was hacked about a week ago, but it’s slowly coming under control. The security has since been semi-patched to hopefully last a few more days while the site revamp is underway. Since the site is slightly more secure than it was, I’ve gone and replaced the old posts. The new site will have completely different code and be able to support many features. It will have a Wordpress base, which will make posting and commenting easier (especially on my end), and I’ve been assured there are ample plugins and coding options to make the new site retain similar functionality as this one.
My apologies to everyone who’s emailed me about the site that I haven’t replied to yet. I received so many emails it’s a bit overwhelming. I’m not a born manager, so when I’m brainstorming about the best way to go about fixing a problem and receive a couple dozen offers by email, it can be tricky for me to determine who is reliable and competent and who potentially has brain damage. It’s like trying to hire someone for a job you don’t even know how to do yourself. I suspect that’s how many managers operate in the corporate world however.
Right now someone with a ton of experience is working on programming the backend for the site, with another on design, however I do want to incorporate more people as needed and have more people on “standby” in case we run into any problems. If you have a lot of of Wordpress or theme design experience, feel free to send me another email just so I don’t accidentally miss you in my sea of messages. In the future, I don’t want the site to stagnate for months on end like it has because any one person becomes too busy to work on it.
As for the new website, upon launch it will have the ability to browse all old posts and the ability to stay logged in. You will probably have to re-register your screennames (not yet), but all your old comments will be preserved. There are many features planned for down the line, but I don’t want to overextend things yet. There are a couple things I would like your feedback on. First it’s possible that once we reach a certain point, we could post the site as-is, in “beta” form so you could see development and changes on it as it happens. If this is something you might be interested in, let me know, otherwise, we’ll wait until it’s launch-ready. Also I wanted to ask how much interest there is for having an official forum here. I’ve tried this in the past, but to be blunt, I simply won’t have enough time to browse all the posts, so it will be there more for you to talk to each other about the videos or whatever rather than a direct line of communication (email is still the best method for that, if slow). If there’s still enough interest, we can look into what it would take to get a functional forum for the new site as well.
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In video news, the lead sound editor’s computer (Otto Beumelburg) has died on him and he cannot currently work on much. Otto saves me untold hours of time and does at least as good a job as I would with sound editing, so I’m going to just keep working on other areas until he’s able to get his computer fixed. Also while this will probably disappoint most of you, I’m choosing to continue working on Civil Protection over Freeman’s Mind, since I’m currently very driven to get the animation work completed on it. I promise you’ll get a bunch of FM episodes once I’m done with the episode however, you can expect at least a dozen or two more before the end of the year.
