Tag: upgrades

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We broke a lot of things and fixed most of them

We’ve been around for almost 14 years and our website had its last major overhaul towards the end of 2017. In internet time, that’s like a million years ago!

The technologies that power the site have developed quite a bit since then and we never quite kept up with refreshing them. To say the back-end of the site needed some attention would be an understatement!

Getting started

In February we started to look at what was needed to address this. Not so cleverly, we hit ‘update’ on a few server settings, and ‘upgrade’ on a few others, hit ‘refresh’ on the tab with the site open and everything looked fine… so we went away for a few days. It didn’t take long for messages to start coming in saying the site was down.

We were out of the office so couldn’t fix things ourselves… fortunately telephone tech support came to the rescue and they rolled back the changes we’d made.

Giving it another go

This week we tried it again. Rather than just click ‘update’ on this, or ‘upgrade’ on that and let the software do its thing automatically (which we now know results in a broken site) we went through things slowly and manually.

We broke things. We broke a lot of things. First we updated the php settings. That broke the site. Rollback, check site works again. Try a different php setting. Site broken. Rollback, check if we still have a website. Try again. It turned out the CMS we use wasn’t compatible with newer versions of php.

So we tried updating the CMS next. That… partially worked. A lot of the plug-ins and add-ons we have installed wouldn’t run without php being updated… but we couldn’t update that without breaking the CMS running the plug-ins. A true Catch 22 situation! Bit by bit, test by test, rollback after rollback we charted a path towards things working again.

It took us most of the night to make it work. In the end we had to disable all of our plug-ins (sorry if you tried to visit the site last night while all this was going on. It must have been frustrating having the site ping-pong between working, not working, and different parts being turned on or off all the time. We were definitely frustrated by it all!) to make any progress.

Progress

Once the CMS had been updated, we were able to update the php settings. Then came the task of updating the plug-ins before we could start switching add-ons and plug-ins back on, checking if they broke the site (or failed to work somehow). A lot of the plug-ins forgot their previous settings as part of the upgrade so we had to set various features and functions up again from scratch. Considering some of them haven’t been looked at since 2017, that was fun!

At this point, many hours into the process, we had a working site again… sort of. Some of the visuals for the site have changed a bit in ways we haven’t figured out yet and for reasons we don’t understand. Most of those changes have been fixed.

Along the way we also found a few links that pointed to dead pages so those have been updated.

Broken bits

We also discovered that some of the plug-ins we used won’t work anymore… one example is our payment processor for BitCoin. So for the time being we have removed that feature entirely. We want to support crypto currency payments long term… but that’s going back on the wishlist for a future tech upgrade. We removed a few other things too where the feature just isn’t relevant anymore.

Somewhere along the way we lost our cookie banner too. The updated version of the plug-in requires a key from a website we never signed up to for it to work. That one’s higher on our list of issues to fix as it’s a legal requirement to display and give people choices about cookies on websites.

There’s still quite a bit we’d like to improve about our website. Now that the CMS, the plug-ins, databases and php settings are all as current as they can be, it should be easier for us to tweak and build upon what the site does best. There’s a few technologies like switching images to webp format to reduce page size, and implementing caching options to improve website loading times that we’d like to explore.

Those will need to wait for another day though. Now, it’s time to enjoy the weekend!

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Talking about BitCoin

BitCoin doesn't really look like this... but it's a cool visual.

I know what you might be thinking, “BitCoin? I thought you were a publisher?!”

We are. Our focus is on producing (and selling) the best books, comics and graphic novels we can.

“Right… and how’s that related to BitCoin?”

BitCoin doesn't really look like this... but it's a cool visual.
BitCoin doesn’t really look like this… but it’s a cool visual.

We’ve found over the years that our audience tends to fall towards the geekier side of things. When you’re selling titles about sentient zombies, second world war occult terrors and crime-fighting dolphins that’s not too much of a surprise. Along with that, we like exploring new things and trying innovative technologies.

A few years ago we experimented with a service called Pay With A Tweet; its purpose was fairly simple: to increase visibility of a product through social sharing. We decided to trial it because at the time we were giving away a free sample of an upcoming title as a way of promoting the finished product – but that alone doesn’t bring much traffic to a website. If nobody knows you have something cool available then no one will come seeking it out. What we liked about Pay With A Tweet was that we still got to give away that free sample, but in return each person that downloaded it was prompted to share a message to their followers on Twitter letting them know that they too could see the freebie.

Trying new things

Our hope with it was that – like today’s viral marketing – it would lead to huge amounts of organic traffic (for those of you that don’t read advertising blogs… that means getting visitors to your site without having to pay for advertising). To an extent, it worked. We didn’t get tens of millions of people downloading the freebie sample… but enough saw it that when the book came out we were more than happy with how it sold.

Bringing things back to BitCoin… it’s a technology that we’ve followed on and off for a few years, and which has recently exploded into the mainstream. BitCoin is a “decentralised virtual currency”; it has no tangible representation like pound coins or dollar bills, and isn’t issued by any one nation. Think of it as being a bit like money in a PayPal account – you can still earn it, spend it, exchange it for other currencies etc. And by now you might be guessing where we’re going with this…

That’s right: Deadstar Publishing can now accept payment in BitCoins using BitPay as a payment processor. It’s something we considered as far back as 2015, but our old e-commerce setup didn’t support it, and at the time it was possibly too niche an idea for even our geeky (and non-geeky) fans to use over other choices. Now though, it’s widely enough used that it would be foolish not to try it out.

Is BitCoin the future?

On that front, we have no idea. At the moment though, BitCoin is growing in popularity (and with that, it’s growing in value) and – as you might expect – we want to make it as easy as possible for people to buy cool things from us. To that end, you can consider this our next experiment!

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Website redesign in progress

Working from a small team can be tough at times – critical tasks with impending deadlines get prioritised over everything else… and once in a while you get a break where you sit down and realise, “That thing I meant to do… I meant to do it three years ago.”

We had one of those moments recently in regards to this website. Our website has grown over time, with bits being added as we had time to work on them but it’s never really felt ‘complete’. Looking at the internal files, we’re on version 0.18 of the website since we swapped over from the Wix hosted flash site in 2011 and most of the updates since 2013 have been bugfixes. The site hasn’t really had a proper overhaul in a very long time. As a result, bits have been tinkered with but never fully implemented… and other bits have been broken along the way (like the theme for the blog and shop) – not to mention, some of the information is now long out of date.

While we could recode the site from scratch using skills from within the team that’s not really the best use of our time and resources right now… and it doesn’t play to our strengths either. Instead, we’ve asked a third party to take a look for us and preliminary design work has already started. Some of the improvements we expect to see include reduced page load times, easier ways to update information on different pages (and even the ability to easily add new pages!), as well as a complete overhaul of site content bringing everything up to date and ensuring consistency throughout.

We’re quite excited by all this as it means we’ll be able to give you more access to better information in a clearer fashion and will open the way for us to expand our web presence – this is where your feedback comes in; if there’s something you’d like to see on our site, now’s the time to email us and let us know.

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Site upgrades

Hi all, it’s been a while since we’ve posted a blog. If you subscribe to our newsletter then you may already know some of the reasons behind this. If not, I’m planning on writing a bit more about next week.

In the meantime though: site upgrades!

There are a number of things that we wanted to change or improve with the site since we last spoke about improvements. Not least of these were a number of bugs and gremlins in the store. We believe all the issues with the store have now been resolved (and you are very welcome to test that statement with a purchase!) so the next thing to do is finish off ironing out a few niggles on the main site.

Pretty much all the code is now in place but we ran out of time yesterday and couldn’t test for bugs. As a result we decided not to deploy the newest version of the site. That will now appear on Sunday 19th August.

We think you will like the upgrades – and they make it easier for us to update things too, so soon we’ll be expanding both our resources and our freebies sections. The shop is also now capable of supplying ebooks so we’ll be debuting those soon.

That’s it for now, enjoy the day (and the new and improved store)!