By now, you've noticed the site has changed appearance quite significantly. This is the result of a number of extraneous factors, which I will now share with you here. I have meant to make this post for a few days, but as many of you know, I've never been accused of having ADHD - I got carried away finding and fixing bugs, adding new features and perfecting the layout. Not to mention reorganizing our publishing schedule and changing the entire color scheme...and a thousand other things so mundane and banal I do not wish to recall them (or my compulsions to manipulate them).
Some of you may have noticed we started having problems with the blog late last week. The server that hosted the images we used for the old layout apparently went offline, the event which prompted all this to begin with. If you were one of the lucky few to encounter a blank white page with invisible elements, congratulations, you found the Negative Zone...and I'm sorry about that. Getting the blog up and running (and looking good doing it) became my top imperative.
I managed to find a similar template and put it in place...but IntenseDebate was having problems with it. Try as I might, I could not find the issue, and several hours into that debacle decided to run a test using my Disqus account. The ease with which everything was taken care of during that test made me change my mind on the spot - the Wargate now uses Disqus for handling comments. I highly recommend you head over and make an account, it's the easiest discussion system I've ever seen. It does insist on taking you to the post page to make comments, but we'll try to bring back the drop down menu so you don't have to scroll down after clicking to comment on some of the longer articles.
With IntenseDebate acting up, and since we didn't host the images for the template ourselves anyway (or build the template for the blog) I decided it was time for a complete change. Overhaul was overdue. However, to completely code a blog template that contained all the features we wanted and included an artistic backdrop would take more time than I'd like to spend on it, with everything going on with gaming lately! So, for now, we've went with customizing (corrupting) one of the templates provided by Blogger, so I can get back to the real business at hand - generating campaign material and coordinating the many related projects we've got going on.
So, now that all this is in place, what else is changing?
Well, the new template provided a number of neat opportunities. First, the bar at the top will house all the links to what used to be called States of Play. Since these are more visible now, we're doing away with the huge introductory text section that used to contain those links, freeing up a LOT of space. This is cool. We're going to add a number of pages there that will house galleries to pictorial articles like various models and terrain.
Also, the display area for pictures and such is much greater, as is the text size. That's important to old people like myself. It will probably only get bigger from now on, as the years turn to Alzheimer's.
Labels have now been split up into two different sections. Battle Index will serve to keep track of all our current games and features, while Battle Archives will contain material from old games we currently do not support on the schedule. In many cases, a lot of this old stuff will be reclassified as we comb through the Archives and reformat relevant entries, such as the aforementioned model articles.
Another big thing was optimization in the new template for mobile devices. The old template was from years back, and didn't include a lot of that code. Now, even this basic one had all of that information already built in, which should make accessing the articles much easier on our friends who carry those blasted cyberdecks...er, I mean cell phones.
The site will continue to mutate for the next few weeks, regrowing any features that were lost. In a few cases, new features will arise - the plan is in place, now we just have to comb through it all and put it on the right shelf. However, this is basically the design we'll be looking at for the foreseeable future as it provides a lot more wiggle room than the old one did. We're able to add website functionality that the old format prohibited, and that's a good thing.
Give us some feedback! What do you think of the new layout? Color scheme burn your eyes? Does your cyb -...uh, cell phone interact with the blog any better at all, or is mobile optimization a cruel hoax? Leave your comments below!