Been away for a while, – working on the new sadgeezer.com

Sorry I haven’t been around lately (and sorry for the fucking awful server problems we’ve been having). My current ISP is taking the piss and I’m desperately l;ookjing for a way of transferring the site to a new host (see sadgeezer.org).

UPDATE: SadGeezer.com will move to the new site in December. The reason why things are taking so long is that I’m also transferring all the legacy stuff (web-pages, reviews, posts users etc.) to a new CMS (Content Management System). PostNuke (the current system) is not secure enough and takes too long to load.

Mike (SadCAST fame) is also designing a new front end – this will seriously knock yer head off!! It’s flash based and includes sound and lots of cool navigation aids but will keep he same colours and basic theme.

The biggest problem I’ve had in moving everything is trying to come up with a way to make the site more navigable. There is SOOOOO much stuff here that nobody ever sees because it is too difficult to find (ie. LEXX convention write-ups, pics of the stars and other lexxians etc., reviews of Farscape, Red Dwarf pics, purity tests). So I’ve decided to learn a lesson from Gmail and put all the different types of content into a single database and make it easier to find with a better search interface.

The image galleries will be up full time (not limited to bandwidth) and each user will have their own Blog and ‘look and feel to the site – ie. you will be able to customise the way the site looks to suite your own needs).

All standard stuff you may think, but you should remember that this is a totally independent website – other sites this big are either sponsored or have affiliates/business partners – so it’s taking some time to complete.

[b]High Level Functional Design[/b] as started (this is what I’ve been doing for the last four months – re-learning how the system works and trying to come up with a new, better way of doing things). This is due to be completed by Oct 12th

[b]Functional Design[/b] will be completed by Oct 31st – A firm budget estimate and High Level Plan will be included.

[b]Coding[/b] will start in the first week of November.

[b]Testing[/b] will begin in the second week of November (see SadGeezer.org – although this site is up, it’s just being used to test the content management system).

[b]Functional Business Testing[/b] (including System Integration Tests) will begin first week in December (full transfer of all data from sadgeezer.com to the test site at sadgeezer.org).

[b]User Acceptance Testing[/b] will begin second week in December – That’s you guys! Hopefully you can tell me what works for you and what doesn’t.

[b]Go live[/b] will take place during the Christmas Break.

There will be some Maintenance work on databases in January as things are tweaked (server cache etc.) but this shouldn’t cause any disruption.

Again, sorry for the delays, hopefully you will be impressed with the new site soon.