Hello everybody,
As I’m sure you’ve noticed, we’ve had a whole host of problems recently. You’ve only seen what we have been dealing with on the front end, while the admin area became nearly useless. Andrew and Jaybird were having to do a lot of extra work to get around some of the bugs.
The short version of what happened is that WordPress updated and the Theme we had been using was completely incompatible with it. The first issue was with my custom fork of the theme, so we switched to the official release. But it turns out the official release was also incompatible. As was my emergency backup theme (which had the same problems because it was a product of the same developer).
So I had to make a more radical change, which you have presumably noticed. Rather than wait and hope that the developer of the previous themes will address the issues, we’re going to be sticking with the new one. As a building block, anyway, expect there to be some changes.
A lot of you were very generous last year donating money to the website and so I apologize if I was not able to live up to any expectations you may have had. Unfortunately, this all hit while I was preparing for and am presently on vacation visiting family. While I am down here the focus will be on stability, once I get back as time permits I will hopefully be able to work on improvements and restoring or replacing some functionality that got lost in the transition.
Dude, you’re doing great. Thank you for making us look good even though you should be thinking about lunch.Report
That exactly. Well done.Report
Let me add my voice to the choir — thanks much Will for carving out a chunk of your vacation for us!Report
You did great, my man. Site is up and running and content is accessible and y’all can shop for the right looknlater. Enjoy your family!Report
I have zero complaints, you’ve done an amazing job and, frankly, the site looks fantastic.Report
Echoing the appreciation thanks for keeping OT up and running.Report
“I’m just happy to be here. Hope I can help the ball club. I know. Write it down. I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.”Report
A side note that probably only interests me, but outside from our legendary comments stalker needing their two or three new gmail ids to be blocked every morning and the usual op-ed chatter, BY FAR the biggest complaint about OT in the years I’ve been doing the ME duties is folks complaining about the grey-on-grey font-formatting of the redesign. Seemed to be a specific group of folks with certain eye issues or whatever, but it was consistent and honest criticism that they had a hard time reading the site. Now, as a dedicated disciple of dark mode it didn’t bother me, but this new theme has solved that issue as well, and even I have to admit it pops nicely after years of darker.Report
After a relatively long absence, their pattern has changed somewhat. Working on recognizing it…Report
I have made myself a terrible person to have opinions about appearance things like gray-on-gray or vertical text spacing or whatever. I have a piece of JavaScript that runs in my browser that I have built (over several years now). With the exception of a couple of my regular sites (eg, my bank), that JavaScript goes through every page I download and does its best to confine the text to my small set of chosen fonts and sizes, vertical and horizontal spacing, appropriate fg/bg contrast, etc. From my perspective, the new theme has moved things around on the page, but the text itself is still formatted in the same basic style. I also make judicious use of ad (and other suspicious content) blocking. Someone was looking over my shoulder some time back while I jumped through a few sites. They remarked on how my view of the web was much simpler and more consistent than what they got on their computer.Report
As I’ve mentioned before, WordPress has managed to recreate all of the worst aspects of Windows 95 from a developer’s perspective. Those of us who are old enough remember installing Windows 95 updates and watching some subset of critical application software break. Install a new version of WordPress and watch assorted themes and/or plugins break. Will does really good work; I read Outside the Beltway regularly, and a few weeks ago they went completely offline for most of a week because a WordPress update broke other things so badly.Report