Where have I been?

I’ve been away from the updates I *was* working on for months. When I last posted (in February), my mother had just recently had a stroke. A few weeks after that, they stopped her chemotherapy (for ovarian cancer) because it just wasn’t working. I went down to visit with her one last time in late June, and she died just after midnight on August 5. I still don’t know what to do with myself.

Moving to Joomla

I’ve put the move to a Joomla-driven site on hold. Part of it is a control issue, as in I feel I don’t have the kind of fine control I need/want when using a content management system like Joomla. I will likely eventually finish the conversion, more as an exercise than anything else, but for the foreseeable future, the site will be static HTML pages. So, my plans for the immediate future of the site are to just (for the love of God!) finish the original redesign so that I can start thinking about adding content. (There’s a ton of that that I just haven’t gotten around to adding.)

So, please stick with me. If you’ve e-mailed me and haven’t gotten a response, please try again. I’ve had a memory like a sieve over the last year or so and probably just forgot to reply to you. It’s nothing personal so please feel free to bug me about it.

Family troubles have been keeping me away. My mother was diagnosed with her third bout of cancer late last year, and about a week and a half ago suffered a stroke. So my brain has been everywhere but here for months.

Still, I do plan on finishing the new redesign. I’m moving the site to a Joomla platform (it’s about 5% done so far) to make it easier to maintain and hopefully easier for other people to help out if they want. (That’s the beauty of a content management system.)

Stick with me — it’s coming, it’s just coming slowly.

It’s going. Slowly, but it’s going. I’d estimate that it’s about 40% done right now, but that clearly means I won’t be unveiling it this long weekend. The problem is that I keep getting sidetracked by things I want to change as I’m trying to port the information over from the old format to the new — it adds a considerable amount to the time it’s taking. So I’m resetting the countdown clock until November 1, 2009, giving me 2 more months to finish the work.

Please bear with me.

1. New site design (throughout the entire site, with all existing pages either converted or removed if no longer in use), using Joomla. Existing pages will be converted and cleaned up (possibly even rewritten). Pages that are no longer in use (such as the webrings page) will be removed.
2. All regular cast biography pages will be completed and/or updated.
3. Crew information and guests will be as complete as possible (given that I don’t currently have access to all of the episodes).
4. The Channel Ten show section will be completed.
5. Additional content will be added to the Supply Room and Exam Cubicle sections.

What will updating the site not include (at least not by August 2, 2009)?

1. Being realistic, it’s probably not going to include any additional episode guides. I know that 70 days sounds like a long time, but it really isn’t. Once the new CMS is implemented, though, it will be much easier to add that information and so episodes will be updated as I can get to them, maybe one or two every week or two starting in mid-August.
2. It also may not include all of the articles and photos that I have on hand. I’m going to try to get them all in on time, but if they aren’t all ready by the deadline, the stragglers will come in the days and weeks following the August 2 deadline.

What would you like to see on the site?

Besides it actually being updated regularly, I mean. And all the missing bits and pieces (like cast bios and the like) being finally filled in. Is there anything that isn’t currently on the site and not on the “to do” list for the site that you’d like to see here?

For example, I had been considering restarting the forum again. Does anyone want that? Jodi’s Yahoo mailing list is nice (though I admit I don’t venture there very often) but there’s something to be said for an actual forum, one that isn’t hidden behind a locked door.

What else would you like to see here? Now’s the time to tell me, so leave a comment (or drop me an email) and let me know what’s on your wishlist.

Such has been my history with redesigning this site. Long before I ever complete a redesign, I either get bored with the new look, tired of the sheer amount of work involved, or sidetracked by other things.

So, here we are. This site redesign has been taking so freaking long that I’ve changed my plans. (Several times, in fact, but you really only care about the latest decision because that’s the one that I’m actually going with.)

After leaping in head first to help redesign a rodeo site using Joomla earlier this year, I’ve decided to convert the Hospital to Joomla as well. Once I’ve got the design tweaking nailed down, converting the actual content will be much faster than with the current design/redesign because I won’t have to worry about the infrastructure, just the content.

At the risk of sounding like I have many other times before, I don’t envision this taking very long (I realize that “very long” is a relative term. For example, the current redesign has been underway since 2004. That’s a very long “very long”. This will be much shorter.) The design tweaking for the Joomla version should take no more than a month or so to complete. The content conversion should take another month or two. (Keep in mind that I won’t be working on the site full-time.)

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the site at this domain (it was officially opened on August 2, 1999) so my plan is to get this all completed by August 2, 2009. That’s over two months away (70.5 days, to be exact) so it should be doable.

I’ll keep you posted.

I remember now why I’ve been away from updating the site for so long. I have a reeeeaaaallllyyy hard time not trying to update the sections as I update them. Each time I open a section up, I remember what I was in the middle of doing there and what I had/have planned for it. The fight to not update takes almost as much time and energy as just doing it. So, despite the fact that I’ve been slaving over hot Web pages for the last several days, I don’t actually have many full sections completed and uploadable. But the updated site as a whole is further along the road to completion and that’s really the important thing.

Blog: I can’t for the life of me remember the login details for the old blog so I’ve installed a new one, this one. Had to manually add the old posts in here as I can’t even manage to get access into the old mySQL database to export the old data. Haven’t had a chance to update all of the links on the various pages so I’ve just put in a 301 redirect on the old URL. This blog just has a slightly tweaked standard template — I’ll worry about really customizing a template for it when everything else is done.

Forum: Well, it’s been offline for years. So much for temporary. I’d installed a new forum (phpBB) at a different location but forgot about completely without doing anything with it. When I went to look at it, imagine my surprise — it was absolutely filled with porn spam. I mean FILLED. Someone was having a field day there. I’ve deleted all that and turned off that forum. And the other one is still offline. I’m toying with the idea of turning it back on but, really, at this point in time I don’t have the time or the energy to sustain it.

Site Updates: Now there’s the kicker. I’m going to do my level best to get most of the redesign finished in the next month or so. Can’t guarantee the episode pages will be done but the rest should be doable. After that, I’ll look at actually updating things. I converted most of the What’s New pages over to the new format. (It’s not as easy a job as it sounds.) I’ve also updated the DVD information so that it is up-to-date, such as it is. MRA Entertainment has apparently been rebranded as destraMusic and their pages for the last known set of DVDs (series 5, part 2) is minimal, to say the least. Yet, ezyDVD says they have it in stock. I’m sure there’s more information on the ACP mailing list but I haven’t been there lately. Will have to add it to my list of “things to do”.

I could have at least posted to say that the forum is temporarily offline. That would have been the decent thing to do, wouldn’t it. We were getting SQL errors and so I decided to upgrade the software in an effort to clear those up. Unfortunately that brought it’s own issues with it. I haven’t had time to look at it so unfortunately the forums will be offline for a few weeks (or possibly months) yet. Sorry about that.

The new job is going well but most of my energy is going towards that these days. I’m also taking some classes that are stealing any spare energy I have. I haven’t forgotten about this site, though. I have reams of stuff to add but I need to get that redesign completed first. Work will ease up in November/December (and hopefully my contract will be renewed by then) so I should be able to get stuck back into things by then.

I’ve been thinking especially about the pending Magnolia Vale section (no, I haven’t forgotten about you, Bonnie ). It’s going to be a fan section and is intended, if you’ll recall, to contain fan fiction, artwork, silliness, and other things like that. I’ve been thinking about how to best set it up and have been considering the possibility of setting it up in a blog format with a number of people having rights to post there. Not sure if there’s an interest there or not. And I’m being hampered right now by the fact that I injured my right hand in a freak dumpster accident (don’t ask) along with the fact that I’m taking some courses and am just trying to get through my work day without killing someone.

Anyway, I might start a poll to see if anyone has any interest in that type of thing (a communal blog type thing).

[click the image to see a larger -- full-ish sized -- version of it]

Some details of it might change before I unveil the whole site but that’s pretty much what it’s going to look like. It’s less, um, colourful than before (the whole site is pretty much the new, natural tones instead of the old separate colour scheme for each section) but the pages fill the screen and there will be added information in many sections, to make use of that new space.