2023-10-12 17:51:44 -07:00
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- title 'Pardon our dust!'
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- hide_title_header
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= image_tag 'pardon-our-dust/header.png', class: 'header-image',
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alt: 'Fyora directing a Yurble worker, as other faeries help rebuild Faerieland in the background'
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2023-11-06 11:54:56 -08:00
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%header.post-header
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%h1#title Pardon our dust!
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.posted-at Posted by Matchu on October 12, 2023
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2023-10-12 17:51:44 -07:00
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%main
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:markdown
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Hi, friends! There's a few interesting things happening right now, sorry for
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the mess! Here's what's up.
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## Welcome to the new-old site!
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After working on our new-ish [Impress 2020][impress-2020] site the past
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few years, we've decided it's not entirely the direction we want to go
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after all. But also not entirely *not*? We love the HTML5 support, we love
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how it looks on mobile, and we love some of the new trading features. But
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in hindsight, we don't think the tech we used is a good choice for the
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long-term, and we want to help Neopets customization stick around for
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decades to come.
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**So, we're merging the best parts of Impress 2020 into the original site!**
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We finally caught up on *many* years of technical upgrades, and cleaned up a
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*lot* of ancient rubble, so the original site can be a strong foundation for
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us again—and then we copied over Impress 2020's most important bits of UI, to
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keep things bright and breezy!
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Here's what you should notice already:
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- **New outfit editor:** The outfit editor is entirely replaced with Impress
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2020's modern editor, with support for HTML5 wearables and for mobile!
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- **Simplified login:** We used to have a weird second website for login and
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account management. That's all merged into the main site now!
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- **Improved item page:** We copied over Impress 2020's item previewer, so
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you'll be able to see animated items, and get better support for special
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colors like Maraquan and Baby!
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And behind the scenes, we've made this site's code a *lot* simpler and a
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lot more up-to-date, and dependent on fewer external services, so it should
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be a lot easier to maintain going forward.
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We're still missing some really important things because we're launching
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sooner than expected (like outfit saving), but we hope to fill in those
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gaps soon!
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## Wait, why the sudden update?
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One of our service providers recently made a change that's been a long time
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coming, but is unusually difficult to work around. In this case, it would
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require us to upgrade a *lot* of components of our system that, frankly,
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we're years behind on updating.
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But this new-old beta site? It's already running on the latest tech, and
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depends on a lot fewer external services to begin with. So, as a team with
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limited resources, it felt like a better idea to just skip forward to the
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beta version that already works, than to split the original site into
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*another* version of DTI and have *three* copies of the site we're
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maintaining 😅
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For the most part, I hope you mostly don't feel much of a difference, and
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that most of the changes feel good? But I also know we're shipping it out
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earlier than we planned and that's always a bit rough; and I know there are
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things about the new outfit editor that still aren't ideal for everyone,
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and I hope we can get those attended to once we have our stronger
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foundation.
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## And sorry about all this…
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Sorry for the delay on getting this fixed, there's been a lot of family
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things to attend to lately, I hope everyone's been doing okay in the
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meantime!!
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Earlier this year I put out a call for extra help, and I haven't really
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made good on that either, and I'm sorry for that too… soon after, I
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realized the help I asked for (continuing to invest in Impress 2020's
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missing features) didn't actually feel like the right path forward for the
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site long-term—and that the next step for us (unifying the sites) would
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kinda be the *worst* time to bring in someone new 😬
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It can be a challenging thing, to have a site going for more than ten years
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and to not always be in a phase of life to give it the attention it
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deserves… and to have the weight of your ten-years-younger self's decisions
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to carry around with it 😅 My hope is that, by cleaning up this decade-long
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complex sprawling thing, we can build a site that isn't quite so dependent
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on the ebb and flow of my own personal life… I don't think we're there yet,
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but I'll do my best to get us there!
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Sorry for the disruption, and I hope these new changes find you well, friends!
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—*Matchu*
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[impress-2020]: https://impress-2020.openneo.net/
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