Progress Update: Sunday AM 

Site Migration Notice and Apologia

Site Migration: Notice and Apologia

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So here’s the thing. For quite a while now, I’ve been getting very polite notes and hints from friends and visitors to the site that Metabods was not, when it came right down to it, tablet- and mobile-friendly. The frequency and directness of these nudges stepped up a notch after I did the site redesign in 2015. It’s been somewhat frustrating for me as I haven’t been able to get a really solid handle on the nature of the problem, since the site loaded acceptably enough on my own iPhone in Safari.

Nonetheless I’ve grown increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that my website has had a black mark against it among those viewing on tablet and mobile platforms. In this day and age that’s tantamount to saying you have a broken website.

One of the things that made migration daunting was that I was certain it was a bad idea to try to maul and manhandle the existing site, which is built on very complicated wiki code that I extensively modified over six years, into some brute semblance of mobile friendliness. The complexity of the site and code guaranteed that such half measures would fail, because something would be included somewhere along the way that would trip up cross-platform users. Even using the existing database and accessing the raw content via SQL was a dubious prospect, because the raw content was laced with wiki code and additional additives and by-products that could taint the process.

What was necessary, therefore, was to recreate and rebuild the site on a widely used cross-platform framework, and set up the new site so that it was absolutely as simple and clean as possible in order to allow access by as many different users and platforms as possible.

My plan was to work on setting up the new framework, which turned out to be the Bootstrap software recommended by one of our regulars, while still keeping a version of the old wiki/SQL site available in parallel until the migration was complete. Unfortunately, something I did in moving directories and files around in order to set up the new site somehow fatally crippled the wiki. I spent all of Friday trying to get it accessible again, so that the content would still be publicly available during the transition, but persistent troubleshooting and reinstalling, accompanied by even more persistent swearing, was of no avail.

Which brings us to where we’re at: I’m migrating the content to the new framework steadily but not fast enough to magically have the site fully up and running this weekend, which had been the original idea. I intend to keep at it, and have the full site up as soon as I can, but we’re at just shy of a thousand stories, and while I’ve set up a lot of automation to help me it’s still not instantaneous. (Also, it may surprise you to know I have a real life, though I plan on taking some time away from it to complete this project with the maximum possible alacrity, especially as this is, to quote Aragorn, a cleft stick of my own cutting.)

All this is by way of apology that there’s a huge, echoing void where all the content is supposed to be. I still have it, it’s all packed away on my laptop, and I’m getting it up, if you’ll pardon the expression, as fast as I can. Please be patient, and watch the News page for regular updates on the migration. —BRK


Posted: 2 April 2016  • 

 

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