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Watch this space: Massive revisions to FT.org coming in a few months.

Submitted by kmeisthax on Sun, 10/13/2013 - 10:10 in Rants

My apologies for not updating the site as frequently as I wanted to. Some things changed in my life but I'm fairly settled now. I've got a bunch of stuff planned in the future; mostly regarding future site updates. My host (NearlyFreeSpeech) recently added a new site runtime with no per-request memory limits. For those who aren't me, I've been having to hold back on particularly ambitious site functionality because the modules required for that functionality would put me over my request limit. That's going to change in the "24PHP5.4" runtime. However, the current site is crashing profusely whenever I turn it on - so instead I'm going to be running a separate testing domain on the new runtime with a fresher Drupal and modules install where I will stage changes.

Eventually I'll migrate everything over and I'll finally be able to use a modern Drupal install without having to agnoize over memory_limit. This will also come with a refresh of the Fantranslation.org visual identity and site design - the existing design was from a time when CSS3 gradients and drop shadows were super-amazing, but flat design is the new hotness now apparantly. (At least, where I work, all our clients want dark, flat-designed websites.) Also, the site works poorly on mobile devices as I based the existing theme on the CSS I used for my original static site, which was my first attempt at a responsively designed website. When I moved to Drupal, I now had sidebars, and no idea about what to do with them, so they kind of just push the rest of the site off to the right, creating horizontal scroll and generally making the experience depressingly bad.

I also have some more vague hidden plans for other future projects which may or may not pan out. I've been working on a collaborative storytelling web application on my off time for a little while now. I may or may not continue working on it, but if it does ever get completed I want to make it an open community for writing everything from your biggest magnum opus to casual instant message roleplay. I also want to eventually release some creative writing projects I've had which aren't horrendously awful.