CHANGELOG: Myrick Multimedia 2.0.8.4

The 2.0.8.4 update is mostly a design-focused round of changes and fixes for Myrick Multimedia’s continued “beta” version as I go through and determine best practices moving forward for the site.

Additionally, I’ve noted some new bugs to have to fix throughout the coming days for the 2.0.8.5-6 releases, which will probably be more internally-focused in the coming days as well but will be better documented this time around.

Bug fixes

I found two design bug fixes that required an update in the internal version of the Network Posts snippet for use on the Today Network theme.

A strange border was being added around every item in a list, which I tracked down to some code that I don’t think was intended to be added when AI provided the snippet code for me. I also found a padding issue that I also fixed during the process.

Earlier in the day, a bug was reported with Firefox/Edge desktop users on Polk Today where posts are being pushed oddly to a side together without any real explanation. It was also found to be an issue with Chrome. I’m guessing this is some sort of Google AdSense formatting problem initially, but rescaled the entire thing to get it back to some sense of normalcy. Expect this to be a temporary patch. I was able to fix the immediate issue with changing the scaling of the desktop post boxes, since the user reported back that whatever I did patched the issue on their end as well.

I suspect this will require more investigation, but more than likely the updates coming for the “gradient box design” heading into 2.1 will solve some of these issues. See more below.

Additional minor bugs fixed:

Login button on top menu for Todaynewswire.us pointed incorrectly (fixed)

A Today Sports Wire bug was found where live pages were made available that weren’t supposed to be live or public for member areas using Paid Membership Pro, checkout forms, and Geodirectory add listing pages. Though no harm was done with the pages being public-facing, I don’t consider this a major issue because these were pages created automatically upon installing and activating specific plugins not used on Today Sports Wire. Access to those pages on Today Sports Wire was suspended in order to patch the issue.

Today News Wire had an issue where both the toggle for dark mode and toggle for getting notifications was on top of each other in the left bottom corner. It was moved to the right with the latest patching rounds.

Paulding Today: depreciated games links on the front page for Sudoku, Word Search and SevenUp moved to Myrickmultimedia.com-based links (for now – still need to make games.myrickmultimedia.com – on the list…)

Today News Wire: Financial Box had a intermittent broken box for the stock reporting iframe widget pulling from a source I am moving away from in the future. Instead, I’ve moved to a new iframe completely. Additionally improved with a stock ticker widget (for current testing purposes only in this spot) and the addition of boxes for Haralson, Paulding and Polk business-related stories to go with the white-space featured item.

Bug Reports

A bug still persists in the Pick’em form display despite my updating the pickem-form code previously to remove the issue, and now it is locked specifically on showing Week 1.

I’ll be working to fix that on Wednesday for upcoming games during Week 2-3. Not sure what happened there with the time coding, but I imagine it has to do with some form of ChatGPT hallucination that messed up the code somewhere in the system.

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I’ve also found bugs in the scoreboard and topline shortcodes ChatGPT wrote up for me. I’ll be moving those over to a new GPT instance as “working versions” and figuring out how to filter the display and timing better so that scoreboards for final scores don’t immediately disappear at midnight of a new day.

A tracking clicks bug on Advanced Ads with the server software implementation is also created a bug in click tracking, which I thought would be fixed by switching to Analytics-based tracking. Maybe I missed a step or something, but I lost several days of impressions tracking due to the oversight of Analytics setup not working correctly when linking to Google. I’m not sure what happened, but it definitely went kaput in the process.

I switched back to the version provided by Advanced Ads, with the likelihood of having to reach out to the developer about the issue to see what I’m doing wrong potentially?

Design updates

A more thorough update to the design away from the rounded boxes version current to most 2.0 based sites will be moving to what I’m calling “gradient columns box” and is underway, starting with the Today News Wire front page.

The idea is to keep a general color palette in place that I started with the rounded box design, but remove a design that is causing as much problems with inserted Google AdSense placements as the previous versions had prior to it.

The hope is that no matter where Google decides is the best place to put an ad in my design, it’ll work out better than previous versions. (I certainly hope it will. -KtE)

I’ve begun working on the framework of the gradient box design using the “front top” box as a basis, with the likelihood of expanding upon the concept as I go along and making some alterations as needed. I will continue to fine tune the patterns for the Today News Wire front as a testbed for the rest of the sites moving forward.

I consolidated the Featured category item along with a national item, some latest postings mixed together, and the login box into a single, no two-version of the top boxes required black to light-gray gradient box for this, which I’m likely going to redo slightly to make it scale better for both desktop and mobile as I implement further iterations of the new design language. The idea is that it’ll look something like this:

The Financial Box (as noted above in the bug fix list) got updated with some of this new language as a white-space only box (but with additional content provisions) and the “Around the Area” news boxes for Haralson, Paulding and Polk were also moved to this design language with temporary functionality for the front page for testing purposes. Some updates will be required moving forward on this design. but in theory the colored boxes will be proceeded by a grouping of white space for additional city-related categories from each local Today site, with a handful of items featured from each city by category.

The rest of the boxes used for the Today News Wire front, plus those that are part of the TNW sidebar/below content area on desktop, plus the below content area featured on mobile devices, will be moving to this design language as well.

Additionally, the Kevin the Editor, Georgia and National boxes were updated for Polk, Paulding and Haralson Today front page use.

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In the coming days as I complete the Today News Wire test frame for the gradient boxes look and refine it for further use (and deciding content placement in color vs. whitespace) I’ll be shifting boxes used on TNW natively and made available site-by-site via network posts over to the gradient box design first, followed by local content afterward.

The only caveat so far I have found in this decision moving forward is that some design choices will undoubtedly work better with a single design layout idea, while others will require having to create two sets of boxes – one tailored for desktop, the other for mobile.

I anticipate this shift will take the better part of a few weeks before being fully implemented and rounded boxes design be retired from the 2.0 version of the site.

Though I enjoyed the whimsy of returning to a late 90s/early 2000s inspired idea for the design language, ultimately it just wasn’t working for the overall vision of what I’m hoping to achieve moving forward with the integrated site infrastructure and use of color across the design language of the network.

Should you as a user have thoughts or critiques about the design and wish to share, please send those into info@myrickmultimedia.com. I’d be happy to hear your concerns, or should you happen to like what I’m doing heaps of praise.

Signing off for this update round!

-KtE