Site status summary: Pre-launch alpha testing.
Heya folks, if you’re seeing this, well, THBBTH BECAUSE I DIDN’T ANNOUNCE THIS YET! Since you’re here, I guess you’re a little impatient, so I’ll update this post as I go with things for this site for the next few days, until pushing out a big progress report update this Friday.
- “Hereforthelols” automatically redirects to lolcollective now.
- All software and plugins are up and running, theoretically. No doubt I’ll discover some hiccups in the next few days.
- Content delivery should be boosted through Cloudflare and Jetpack, theoretically making everything much faster to everyone, especially folks outside of North America.
- Disqus account is registered and linked to the site in both directions, and per-post comments have been enabled.
- If a post is submitted without setting a featured image (for thumbnails), it will now auto-add one.
- The front page now redirects people directly to the most recent post! However, it feels like it adds about 1/4 of a second’s delay to loading the first page, so if anyone has a slicker way of doing this, please let me know. Current method is: Create homepage redirect function, get latest post, get that post’s permalink, redirect to permalink, all contained in a plugin file. I feel like maybe it could be done better? Maybe not? Who knows.
Next major goals, all of which involve deep code diving:
- Investigate if Disqus can be linked to the site logins directly (I know our former leader said it wasn’t possible… it appears to now be so. I’m hopeful, because this would kill two birds with one stone as I can then upgrade people’s privileges to contribute, moderate, or admin, through one menu.)
Get rid of the awful start page and take people straight to the most recent post. Why this isn’t a simple option in the theme pack eludes me.- Rewrite the layout to be a little less… ugh. The stuff that’s all like knockoff-facebook-y has GOT to go. (Note: this is 50% done now.)
After I get that done, I’ll consider us ready for soft launch / beta testing to the folks of the social networks we’ve all migrated to. At that point I’ll add 50-100 starter images to give the site a bit of an archive, and will toss it out to all of you to help build while I figure out what we need to go from soft launch to public launch. One of my highest priorities for post-launch improvement will be optimising the site code. There is no reason why the source code for a single page should be close to 40 pages of printout – NOT including inherited code like the CSS and so on!