Good morning!
The first two threads this morning were a good reminder that the current site continues to be a source of frustration at times and that it’s been 2 weeks since the last update.
So here’s another Site Update / Ask Me Anything combo thread.
For anyone who missed the last one, or for anyone who would like a refresher, these two paragraphs from last week will likely be useful:
“The site rebuild project continues apace. The new Balloon Juice site is in place and pretty much fully functional on the Development site. And by that I mean that the design is done and the coding is pretty much complete. I’d say we are down to details there, like the auto publishing of new posts to John’s twitter, and working on bug fixes.”
“Even as we complete that, we are now in the phase [GoLive] of combining the new design/programming with 18 years of balloon juice posts, a zillion images, the 5 million comments, and the entire contents of the WordPress database, merging it with the newly developed site. That takes time. To avoid surprises when we go live, we are doing this merging and the database conversion on the actual infrastructure where the new site will reside when it’s live.”
Last week we started our second test run of the GoLive server – which I call GoLive v2 – and I was quite pleased with how well it went. The build of GoLive v3 should be complete sometime tomorrow or Tuesday.
Until last week, the only access to the new site was with a WordPress login. As of last Monday, I have finally been able to test the site without a login, so it’s been great to get in that way and be able to determine what worked when logged in but doesn’t work the way most everyone accesses the blog.
I was very pleased to find that nearly everything that worked when logged in also worked when not logged in. The one exception was the new On the Road submission form – which I love, by the way! The developers are of course working on changes to resolve that issue.
So I’d say we are a lot closer (to rollout) this week than we were last week, but what I wrote last week still applies here:
“At this stage of the game – in this second phase where we’re converting the database and merging all the data – it’s not possible to accurately predict how long all of that will take, because you never know exactly what you are going to run into. I wish I could tell you that testing will start within a certain timeframe, but that prediction would be worthless. Could testing start in a week? It’s within the realm of possibility. Could testing start in 3 weeks? Quite possibly.”
So – Ask Me Anything – and in the meantime, I will share details in the comments that I think might be of interest. If you prefer to ask questions by email, you can send email to my nym at balloon-juice.com.