End to Content Drought Promised
After a long drought of updates for prospective fan game developers to ingest, administrators of the Sonic Fan Games HQ uploaded dozens of new materials yesterday.
From sprites and backgrounds to tutorials, yesterday’s upload is promised to be the first in a steady stream of continuous updates for the veteran Sonic fan site and community hub. Before yesterday’s update, the last appreciable update came more than six months ago. Before that, one happened in November of last year.
Those days are no more, according to Rael0505, one of the many SFGHQ administrators. His penning of an update alone represents a sort of changing of the guard, as Smidge204, who took over as principal administrator once original founder Rlan left, had been the only one capable of front page updates up until this point.
Rael notes in his update that the effort was one he volunteered to do:
You guys have probably been wondering why it’s been so long since we’ve had an update with content from the Submission zone uploaded. Up until SAGE 08′s end, Smidge was the only one with the ability to make site updates, but he’s been too busy with “real life” to do everything himself. A little over a month ago I volunteered to help out. He coded a new file uploader for me, and put me in charge of making sure it works as I upload everything people submitted in the past year.
The most important thing about this update is that now, having most of the big task out of the way, I will be able to make updates more frequently. There won’t be huge droughts between updates anymore – with this new uploader Smidge coded, I’ll be able to make a quick update every time someone contributes something. The main site will be much more active from now on!
A sound and engine update to the site is promised shortly.
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Just thought I’d pen in a few details since they might be relevant and interesting to some people. The history is a bit spotted but I’m writing this from memory on-the-fly so forgive me if I miss anything. Of course this is not a full history of SFGHQ, but just a quick overview of the main site’s evolution as it pertains to updating content.
In the very beginning, only Rlan could update the site. This was done 100% manually – FTP the files tot he site and edit the HTML pages to link to them.
At some point before I took over, then SFGHQ-regular Tyba1t began working on some kind of database solution. (I only know this because some of the backups I have of the old site contain fragments of PHP code. To be honest I never really looked into it and to my knowledge it was never implemented to any depth)
One of the first major revamps of the site I did was to revamp the site using a self-coded PHP/MySQL system. (There were a few manifestations of this system but they don’t pertain to the updates themselves.) It was a major pain in the ass since everyone was used to Rlan doing everything and trying to get help adding over a thousand items into the new database was very difficult. A large portion of the site remained manual-update only, though, owing largely to the restrictions EmulationZone hosting had. For example, I was the only one to post news because that still required manually editing the HTML files. Emuzone had a news script that multiple users could access, but that went belly-up one day so I had to make do with what I was given.
During that time, we still had three or four people *technically* capable of doing updates – all of the programming for the new SFGHQ website was done on an Win32/Apache server I threw together and had running in my closet for about two years. This server was publicly accessible (with password) and select individuals had FTP accounts and access to a set of scripts I wrote to maintain the database. I would periodically update the real SFGHQ server with new data from the maintenance server.
Last year I bought my own hosting and moved the site to it’s current location. With a new server I had full control over everything, so I rewrote the site yet again using the current AJAX system (something I’m rather proud of, BTW). The opening was rushed when Emuzone went offline for awhile, but overall I think it was a smooth transition and a well-received event.
Some time later, the old maintenance scripts were hacked to run with the new site (something I’m NOT very proud of, BTW…) and things have been touch and go since. I rushed the front end so I could have the new site mostly functional and open as a sort of Christmas present for the community.
With the site running and almost no bugs reported, I kind of left it to sit. With no new material coming in all the unfinished behind-the-scenes stuff was quickly forgotten and started to rot. I’ll admit that efforts to really finish what I started were half-hearted for the past year. SAGE08 got SFGHQ members ilascott and Slingerland bitching at me enough that I finally completed the news update scripts (which were sort of prototyped by ssbfalcon but I ended up completely rewriting them anyway). I’m happy to say that the news script is simple, elegant and most of all fully functioning
Now it’s Rael5050′s turn to get me fixing the back end stuff. Due to his requests I have added a kludgy file upload script to bypass the one-FTP-per-domain restriction (last august actually) and I did some work last night fixing the maintenance script for the sounds section (did I mention those maint. scripts are shit? I honestly don’t know why they work and I wrote them myself!)
Anyway, it was the magic combination of being able to upload new files AND post news items AND edit the database that allowed someone other than me to do site updates. This is a position I’ve been trying to get into since I took over SFGHQ but was either restricted by the host (Emuzone) or just too lethargic to actually accomplish.
As for *continued* content updates, that depends entirely on the community – they’re the ones that generate the content.
=Smidge=