Towards the beginning of December, I began work on redesigning and updating the JetsonHacks website. While I am not an optimist, I “knew” that I could get the update done in three weeks. With the holidays in mind, I was confident that I could use extra time during the break if things ran over.
The way it’s suppose to go
This is the third iteration of the website over the last 9 years. Fortunately, I do this just often enough that I tend to forget most of the crucial tasks for for things to go smoothly. What you’re supposed to do:
- Make a backup of the website, store it locally
- Create a staging area from the existing website
- Because this is a WordPress site, tell WP JetPack to go into ‘Safe Mode’ on the new staging site
- On the staging site, build the most beautiful website the world has ever seen
- Make more backups
- Copy the staging site to the real website
- Congratulate yourself on a job well done
I messed up the third step. Everything after that was what we call a ‘Charlie Foxtrot’
Choosing the Right Theme and Look
This website runs a ‘Theme’ over a database. The Theme styles the database content and displays it on any given webpage. The Theme that I was using on the website had gone crufty over the years. This was not the user experience I want for the valuable JetsonHacks community.
As far as I can tell, most of the new, bright and shiny website designs don’t cater to an article-style website like JetsonHacks. Most are “beautiful” landing pages with smiling, happy people and bold and striking colors. Not that those are bad things in and of themselves …
However, there’s well over 400 articles on JetsonHacks. Adding a shiny new landing page ain’t cutting it. Like all good little programmers, I told myself “This is a chance to learn how people now design and build websites”. They can’t scare me away by needing a little bit of technical wrangling to get the website I want! This is a variation of “As a well known scientist, it would be quite surprising if a girl blinded me with science!”.
Pixel Wrangling and Monsters
After about a week I found myself cowering in the corner from the monster that I let loose. There were website guts all over the floor. Turns out that this level of development is pretty much like pushing jello up a hill. Push here, break that. Push there, break this. In retrospect, this is not surprising because the tools aim to build “beautiful” websites with images of happy people and bold colors. Managing a Content Management System (CMS) like this website is a different ball game entirely.
This made me appreciate and admire engadget.com with its stark black and white theme all the more.
So I pixel wrangled, and pixel wrangled some more. I found most of the niggles, and humanely put them out of their misery. The big day was finally here! Three weeks late, but at least it got done. On January 17, I began transferring the new design over.
Launch Day: Revealing the New JetsonHacks Website
It almost worked. This is the stuff of recurring nightmares. I always have the feeling that no matter what I do, I’m going to lose 9 years of website with the wrong push of a button. Even with the backups, restore points and so forth. Of course, I pushed the wrong button …
Going into this, my use of profanity was a little out of practice. Miraculously I was able to get the website back up and running after only a few scary hours. I’m proud to say that my profanity use is now better than it has ever been. The only thing that appears to be completely “broke, broke” on the website is the page view history. Everything has a price, I guess.
I am a guy with a computer science degree. I always resent having to use it on someone’s “easy to use” product. On a paid product, should I really need to read issues on Github and come up with my own workarounds for advertised features that don’t work? How in the world do people without a technical background ever get this nonsense to run smoothly?
Introducing the Blog Section
A new feature on the JetsonHacks website is this Blog section. This section is for more informal communication with you. Think about it as a Behind The Scenes (BTS) look at what is going on here. The plan is to publish here regularly.
Some of the blog entries will go to social media announcements, like this one. Most will just post straight to the website. Going forward, you will be able to find all of the JetsonHacks blog posts here.
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