Changelog: Myrick Multimedia 2.0.9.2

A new month, a new round of Changelog updates for the Myrick Multimedia infrastructure. This one took a bit more time than I would have liked, but so far I’m so happy with the results that I have been spittin’ plenty and hoping for the next round of plans for improvements to continue to go as smoothly as this transition has so far.

Here’s a quick look at the 2.0.9.2 update, and what became available as a result.

New Layouts for the sites

Over the past month, I’ve been a busy beaver as we hit the one-year milestone of the 2.0 launch of the Myrick Multimedia network. During that time, there’s been some ups-and-downs, some strikes and gutters when it comes to implementing my “vision” for how I’d like the site infrastructure to work. We’ve had server moves, upgrades and downgrades, implemented new software and I’ve done my level best to try and make everything accessible.

I’ve also added games in that time too, everything from word search to arcade basketball over the past months.

Some things also have gone wonky in that time frame too. For instance, I’ve had to shut down classifieds and events postings thanks to the software that runs that upgrading and breaking things it shouldn’t for some reason. (That was in early April.)

We’ve gone through several iterations over time, and I’ve announced upgrades along the way through these Changelog posts.

But we haven’t quite made it to 2.1 yet, which I’m hoping will come with the next edition of the site infrastructure.

FOR NOW, we’re still in the 2.0.9 series, even though I’ve undertaken a LOT of work during the past 30 days in getting the site infrastructure working.

You hopefully have noticed the improvements along the way too with a brand new design across the network (excluding games and the ad site for the moment.)

For those who haven’t seen yet, check out the new layout:

There are some minor things left to complete on the user-focused end of the design language. Overall, I’m happy with the results so far and look to iterate as we jump forward into 2.0.9.3 and beyond.

So while I’m now juggling a bit more on the backend side of the network, the good news is that I’m actually confident in a design scheme that I think can carry into the future and see further iteration compared to what went before, which was meant as a temporary solution to a longer term problem.

And ultimately that came down to a compromise. There are things that are industry standard I should be doing in the design, and some of that I hate so much my eyes want to bleed when I see it implemented on other sites. Instead, I took a deep breath and gave the AI some inspiration, and through some iteration over the past few weeks I’ve found something that isn’t making me feel the need to toss my keyboard through the screen in annoyance.

But as I have eluded to in the past, being a one-man band ain’t as easy as it looks. Sometimes trying to play all the instruments at once can end up jarring instead of a happy melody.

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While the “Hub” here at Myrick Multimedia – where subscriptions are created and access managed, plus the Sunshine T-shirts and Gear store, Video access, etc., live for day-to-day access – there’s still some meat ‘n’ taters work to do on other portions of the network in the re-design. I started with the news sites, then built the hub around those to maintain a similar design language throughout.

One area I didn’t do that? My own Kevin the Editor site.

I described in the free item I wrote that once upon a time for several years during my college days, I used to keep handwritten journals that I’d design as if they were a magazine or newspaper. I was a bit geeky in my desire to do that kind of design at the time, still enjoying the paper medium more than I do now.

It was actually the first of the themes I worked on and implemented. I think it looks awesome, and is about as close to those journals as I could get (for the immediate moment.)

Check it out:

New options for subscriptions

I’m always trying to be conscious of how much things cost these days. And let’s be honest: some of you only care about access to one of my sites, and nothing else.

I had previously introduced a subscription option for a single site Polk Today Monthly Only plan, which in some fairness I didn’t exactly do the best job of promoting. No one to blame but the guy in charge, right?

As part of the upgrade of the design, I decided that each site should have an option for single site only monthly subscriptions. Just want to read what’s up at Today News Wire, for instance? There’s a subscription for that now. Maybe you’re only interested in Paulding coverage? Grab a monthly for that, and nothing else.

That’s now available for every site, but limits the access JUST to items on those individual sites. You can’t buy a Paulding Today item and then go read sports, or watch video, for instance. Same with the other single site monthly-only plans.

So it’s an available option for those who want to read, but just want to limit their reading to one thing. Hopefully, it helps your bottom line. The new option also allowed me to find a long-term bug that I’m sure wasn’t making folks who purchased a single site monthly-only subscription happy. (See below.)

Bug Fixes

Through the redesign and previous user-submitted bug reports, I found an additional issue that apparently had been a longer term problem than I originally anticipated: the problem of sub–site gatekeeping for subscriptions on the network. This came up earlier in the week to really bite my tailbone, but again AI to the rescue on this one – even though it took longer to get to the solution than I expected.

Some SQL database work, and now the memberships should be aligned with access to what I currently have available on the site in the network as-is.

Myrick Multimedia Events

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I’d have to officially collect the number of technical bugs I’ve done during iterative changes on the redesigns, but one I’ll mention that I found wrapping up things for May Day – The Front Hero image (featured item at the top of the page of the front) or individual post featured images (the first image you see when coming to a story on one of the sites) was horribly broken. That got fixed in iterative work, along with way things link, the login pages, etc., on various sites.

Still to do

I started with redesigns on the main sites – what I consider the most critical areas that required updating. I hope more than anything that the user experience is much better than it was previously.

Now I’m in the middle of designing and getting the promised return of Events and Classifieds options that disappeared in April with a full replacement, custom made just for Myrick Multimedia. I do plan on providing some options for those who don’t want to be subscribers to be able to participate in uploading events and classifieds, but they will still cost to do so. I plan to have it completed by the next point update. This has taken a bit more time than I expected due to wanting to implement new designs and iterate on top of that for the events and classifieds, so all the parts of the site work well together.

Additionally, with some of the things that broke in April around issues happening at the time with the server (which by the way, turned out to be some of my fault on initial configuration, but was also caused by bots hitting the site like crazy,) I still need to work on re-introducing a chat feature of some kind so folks with issues can contact me directly and immediately. That’s a “put a pin in it and come back, Kevin” feature for sure.

Finally, a quick update on Sunshine Shits and Gear: I plan to put together a America 250 collection here in the coming days, so stay tuned for some new shirt and sticker designs heading into the summer months.

I look forward to a productive remainder of the spring months, and hope everyone enjoys the new site design. We are getting so close to the 2.1 version of the site, I can almost taste it!

-KtE