Hello folks! You may notice over the coming week or two that the site will look a little different. I fixed two particular issues: one that may have irked you if you were looking down keyword tags, and one that annoyed Chuggy and I specifically.
1) If you looked down keyword tags, you may notice things look right for a bit, but some cards are missing until you reach the end to #30 of that keyword, and then suddenly there’s cards that are clearly newer that didn’t show up earlier. What gives?
Basically, cards are listed as Posts on WordPress, the software we use for this website. Posts do not have the ability to follow a particular order on WordPress by default. They are instead sorted by the date of publishing. This is because WordPress is a blogging / e-commerce software, folks. We are truly working miracles with this bodge of a lifetime.
That isn’t to say it hasn’t worked well, of course. I also have absolutely no plans to migrate from it since it works just fine. But, this post re-ordering business has annoyed me for the longest time. We used to use a plugin on the website that required me to manually alphabetize everything. I’ll tell you, you don’t know madness until you’re manually dragging and dropping cards into chunks of numbers you misread, the wrong section of Competitors, or just straight-up got the alphabetizing wrong.
Computers are better than us at this thing, so the server now does this job for me automatically without the stupid plugin. Cardboard Villain of 6 years ago is crying from her hours of wasted time on this prospect. At least the Cardboard Villain of next year is happy to say that she didn’t have to think twice about it.
2) The card listing pages will look different from now on. Now, no longer will you have to wait for Chuggy (and previously, myself) to update these card lists. If you were wondering where new releases were, they were probably on the website this entire time, just not put up on the lists because, like the post re-ordering shenanigans; our lists were manually done too!
Our madness knows no bounds. Alas, these lists will now automatically update when new cards are added to the site, so there’s no more waiting for them. Even better, the pages between competitor pages will be much, much cleaner from now on. This particularly helps the Tornado Competitors who have been split across a nightmare of pages.
This update will require a lot of manual changes, so this update will come out over the next couple weeks. You’ll notice some pages will look a little weird and some will look how you remember them.
More than anything, PLEASE REPORT BUGS! I do not promise these are final in how they work, and I anticipate issues to come up at some point with them. Whether it’s in our Discord or my Facebook messages, just reach out!
Finally, to touch base on what I wrote in April; all the updates to images and the like will take a bit longer. I’m aiming more for August to have that fully done and caught up with. I’m out spending time with Chugganomics and Pride at the moment after having had a lovely Origins (was wonderful getting to see many of you again!), so I don’t want to glue myself too much to the website. But I still intend to get this site back on track.
These updates I did may seem like a diversion from the plan, but they actually cut back so much time spent on doing tedious busy-work on the website that it has fired both Chuggy and I to get back to work on this. The amount of dread we had about doing those awful parts of the website cannot be overstated. They seriously hung over us as “well, even if we get the part where we put the cards up done, we still have all the stuff with putting it in the card lists and re-ordering the posts to do.” Not anymore, we don’t!
Now, I’ll be back to work at the site next week. Until then, see you next time!