The new site revealed!
So, since our community made the switch from TeamSpeak over to Discord, and have followed with such great improvements as Skye’s Fishsticks AI, our website and forums have fallen a little out of use. To justify any funds going to our site in the future, to give us some new resources to work with, as well as just to get rid of a lot of problematic, error-prone problems with our site, it was decided that the site needed a serious overhaul.
There are tons of details I could go into about how this was done, particularly for the tech-savvy of you out there, but suffice to say that a lot of useless stuff was jettisoned. There were several things in our old website that were ‘hard-coded’ into the website. These custom-made portions were cool when they were new, but they made it almost impossible for anyone (particularly those who aren’t coders) to change or edit. In more direct terms, these things couldn’t be edited or changed from the website’s built-in editor system, like most things. A person would literally have to go into php, css, or other coded files and make changes, and I don’t have to tell you, this is dangerous to a live site!
But wait, there’s more!
On top of getting rid of portions of the site that had, at best, become unusable, or, at worst, become miasmas of errors and issues; several useful and cool additions have been made to the now more stream-lined site.
The new site features a ton of new things ‘under the hood’ that the average user might not see right away, but these additions have turned our junky family car into a screaming supercar, under the hood.
We can now produce interactive content the likes of which we’ve never had the use of previously, or, if we had it, it didn’t run as flawlessly and easily as it does now.
In the days to come, you should notice several more interactive things going on around here. When I say interactive, yes, I mean, things where YOU control the outcome. They might be cool pieces of content that react to you, or they might be cool little games or lessons of some type, but keep your eyes open for these new and exciting additions!
As part of the push towards more content, a few of our leaders have stepped forward to bring you some great stuff! SkyeRangerDelta, Kesarahk, and ShaddaShk have all stepped forward to help promote new content, be it blogs, or artwork, videos, or more. Clarence can now post his ubiquitous Word of the Day posts on our site, and the system put in place for him was custom-designed to be really easy for him to use, and painless in operation. There will also be the occasional article from other great folks, such as Ongurth! (I’m looking at you, Winged Scribe!)
But wait, there’s even MOAR more!
As if all of that wasn’t cool enough, there are already some cool ways you can interactively help out! If you are at all interested in your own blog, maybe helping out as an Event Coordinator, or several other volunteer ‘jobs’ around the community, we now have a CC Volunteer Job Board where you can look at a listing of current jobs and apply for them!
We already had a lot of very cool content in our “Resources” section, including a CC Memorial Timeline and our Youtube Playlists page, but now we have a TON more cool stuff, some of it specifically requested! (You’re welcome! You know who you are!) I don’t want to spend too long here talking about it all, but be sure and check out our new Twitch page, where you can watch Bible Studies, and chat with the streamer anytime we’re live! You might be interested in our Link Library, where lots of really interesting and/or useful links are posted, and YOU can submit your own links, as well!
Yes, there are even more cool things, but you might also like our new Creative Gallery, which will be a curated list or cool artwork, screenshots, music, and other creative works by CC people! And yep, you can upload your own content there, too!
So, what about this blog, I thought it was going to be random?
Well yeah, it will be. I wanted to toss out a nice introductory post welcoming everyone to the new site, and just listing a few of the new ‘cool things to do’, but I can assure you that future posts by me will, in fact, cover all kinds of interesting things, and possibly be really random in more ways than one.
I really hope that our revamped website will see significantly more use than our old one, as we have lots of great ways to foster interactivity and growing, developing content that we didn’t have before. Many of the things in our ‘backend’ that were preventing our site from being all it could be have been removed, and an almost limitless system for content creation has been added. I’m really not kidding, One of my upcoming posts will show off some of our newer capabilities a little.
Until then, please look EVERYWHERE!
You are the ‘beta tester’. I need you to look around and let me know if you find errors, misspellings, design flaws, and more. There are places where the site (primarily designed for PC users) may not look the best on mobile, but still be passable. But you may find things that are impossible to use on mobile or tablets, and if so, feel free to report them! I’d like to know!
You are more than welcome to give a critique on things you like, or dislike. I’d love to know what people are putting to use, and what they are ignoring completely! So, you are welcome to CLICK ON EVERYTHING!
Thanks, if you’ve made it this far, and I hope you’ll check out future posts where I will begin showing some of the ways we can share all new content that absolutely rocks, but what’s more, is EASY to create without web design or coding knowledge!
Let’s find a way for everything we do here to bring All Glory To God!
NeoJ
