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