Almost Back – Current Status and Plans

Update (28/08/2020)

I’ve had to work throughout COVID-19 and not had much chance to work on the website.  Things are getting a little better now so I’m hoping to spend more time on the blog – we’ve been doing this for nearly 25 years!  The next thing is to produce guide pages for the Witcher and Kings Avatar. also to try and catch up with the first impressions for some of the awesome series coming out this summer (ye, New Boys Season 2 – can’t wait!)

Update (23/11/2019)

We’ve finally got the forums working though we still have some work to do to get them looking good.  At least you can now post. It’s only been 6 months since we moved the site and re-vamped all the articles and moved to a new content management system (wordpress) and it’s been great!  But, the site is still very poorly in terms of speed and providing a cool service to the decent people of Sci Fi fandom. 

We we are going to be doing some re-vamping of the vamping erm… basically we will be rebuilding the servers and changing something called the stack.  In particular we are going to t change from using the old and bloaty (sound like me) Apache and move to something called ngineX. We gave ourselves a year to get the site back to the innovative place it was 20 years ago (when the internet thing was all still kinda new), so we still have quite a ways to go  🙂

• Next will be the server re-build to improve speed from 3 secs load time to .3 secs load time (also using CDN and Cache). So hopefully you wont get bored waiting for the page to load.
• Social login functions so you don’t have to mess about with re-registering
• Better integration with facebook and twitter and Tumblr to help cross fertilise ideas and news
• Complete the reviews of The Kings Avatar and produce a complete SG Guide.

Hopefully you will still stay with us.

 

Update (05/10/2019)

Most of the design work has now been completed.  Mike is still umming and ahhh’ing over the main header but we will just have to get wait.  The next big thing is to sort out the loading speed of the website and create a day and night theme. 

The page loads are woefully slow for mobiles and this will wind people up.  It may be that we will need to look at alternative themes. In terms of blog posts, the big news in the next few weeks will be the continuing Kings Avatar work – there is an animated series coming out in November and the live action reviews will be made into a fully fledged SadGeezers Guide.  The Witcher will get the full review treatment and so will The Expanse (due out in December). 

The big ones are:

• ‘The Boys’ (already out on Netflix).
• ‘The Witcher’ Coming out on Netflix,
• ‘The Mandalorian’ coming from Disney in November/December, ‘
• His Dark Materials’ (HBO & the BBC),
• Carnival Row (already out on Amazon) and others. 

 

In fact I have a list of around a hundred shows produced since 2017 and want to review the better ones as recommendations.  I won’t bother with the ones I didn’t like although I might do a catch all post of those later in the year – a summary of what not to watch  🙂 Anime is great this autumn and I’ll be reviewing the best of those although it will probably only be about sive series since the thirty five released each season is a bit much to keep up with  🙂

Update (12/08/2019)

Quite a bit of disruption with the site for the next two weeks.  We have had a lot of problems with Server 504 errors.  We’re very sorry about this.  We have narrowed the issue down to some dodgy WordPress modules. 

We’ve disabled all but the most important and are gradually bringing some of them back up so that we can isolate the offending module. A new graphics header is being tried out.  You may like it or you may not. – We aren’t sure yet either  🙂  But, we thought we would give the firstdraft a try and see how it fits with the overall look and feel (which is also being changed). Still not decided on the logo yet but this will probably be the winner – same colours for dark and light background.

 

Update (12/07/2019)

Mike has started the graphics and these are some of the first logo’s:

 

 

 

 

Mike is currently working in the Portal idea. He is looking to update the old graphic to something a little more dynamic. Background (May 2019)

The website has a small support site at: Sci Fi Review Guides and Resources

The huge tasks of migrating the databases from the old site at that awful server on Siteground to the new servers is progressing slightly ahead of schedule.

We’re almost complete. Tidying up some of the pages and fix the CSS so that the look and feel is back to the way it was. Also we have re-engaged Mike the artist to re-do some of the graphics (though it looks like he is busy and this is likely to take a while). We hope to have the site fully up and running and outputting reviews regularly by the end of August. Major/big stuff has already completed so you can already access most of the old content (see below), we just need to fix up some bells and whistles before we can start pooring out the new stuff.

So, as of 2nd July, what has happened:

Latest Comments and Current status:

1. Moved all SadGeezer Domains to new servers
2. Configured new servers and set up elastic IP
3. Migrated old Drupal databases (users, posts etc.) and fixed the errors! Unfortunately we lost a LOAD of users when the database became corrupt while it was on Siteground (and subsequent backups!) this means that some of our awesome reviews are nameless!!! I’ve had to piece together their identities – if you have reviews on this site, please check that you have been credited and let me know if there are errors.
4. Reformatted all old review posts (100% complete, but there are almost a thousand of these!)
5. Reformatted all old Page posts (99% complete) – I actually discovered some of my old Jokes pages which I put up before the site was Sadgeezer.com. I think I’ll re-add them just as a distraction in case you are getting bored with sci fi reviews 🙂
6. Moved all 35,000 forum posts (complete). We aren’t actively posting in SadBOARD yet as the forums need a little TLC before they will look nice again.

Things yet to do (we are on with it though, honest!)

1. Re-uplaod the graphics – we don’t have any yet so the site looks a little plain. Once Mike pulls his finger out, we should have a new header graphic (hopefully a portal window like the last one but this time, HTML5 animated!! omg!!
2. Update theme (We are doing this gradually as the content is brought back online). It’s basically about making sure that the reviews are accessible and easy to view. So the search engine will be re-vamped etc. It’s more technical than visible, (the search engine is bloody rubbish at the moment though)
3. Set up side block content & menus – Sort of playing with this to see what looks best. It should keep things interesting for a while 🙂
4. Anti Spam and security improvements = always need to be doing that, we only moved a couple of months ago and we’ve had over 2000+ DDOS attacks and blocked 2500 spam bots 🙁
5. Start reviewing stuff!!! We need to do this soon, it seems to have been years so we will be starting reviews again to help us get back in the swing so to speak. By the time the site has been re-spidered and all is up and running again, we should be churning out pretty decent content on a daily basis.

Completed – sort of – continuously updating

We are also gearing up our review content for Anime and Games. Once Newkate gets some courage regarding telling you about the games she is playing at the moment, we should be able to recommend some really good ones soon. (I’m playing Season 17 of Diablo for instance and also Elite Dangerous – Newkate is playing lots more! stuff)

Next (i.e. this week, I’ll be contacting the moderators and contributors of the old site and hopefully getting them back involved so that we can continue generating sci fi review and recommendation content in our usual way – from a position of love (of the shows and of course other sci fi fans! 🙂 )

We also have a BIG burn to find a mechanism of helping you get your hands on more of the cool sci fi stuff out there that is really accessible but not widely known about – for instance, wadda-bout the awesome Russian, high production value, stupendously well acted and gripping show that has the silliest premise but is amazing to watch – The Sniffer?! (seriously, it’s a great show!) – Then if you liked that, you might like ….. etc.

As always, we’re happy to hear your ideas – tell us at sadgeezer at gmail dot com

Lots of exciting stuff to come, please, please, please, stay tuned 🙂