Icebergs, Ducks, Take Your Pick...

You know how the iceberg only shows <insert some bullshit/made up very low percentage here> of it above the surface and how a duck can look like it's floating around serenly when in actual fact it's legs underwater are about to reach the red-zone and hit their FTP.

Well that's the site (and me) the last week. All sorts of shit happening out of view and meanwhile on the surface...

But all is not as it seems from the outside. if I may explain...

This last few days has been all about helping me to help you. When I gave you guys access to the site. the bones were complete, all the really complex bits and pieces had been worked on and were functioning (or at least 98% of it was) but no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy and this was no different.

Things that I'd taken for granted and considered 100% working when I was developing things locally suddenly didn't work "IRL". Even having you guys on here helping me out caused a complication. I'd previously been sending data to a single place. Now if I wanted to test things properly on the foreplay site I had to send stuff to both the foreplay site and the main site (yes the main site is updating in the background when it properly launches there will be quite a bit of content on there right from the get go).

Why bother? Well, having real data on here allows me to test stuff properly and gives you guys a reason for being here, actual proper stories to read rather than fake data. if there's nothing here beign honest nearly all of you wouldn't be here and that makes it hard getting feedback or input or even having you guys create errors and break things.

And that's where a large part of the issue has been.

When I kicked things off I wanted to ensure that there was something for everyone to look at, at least to get a feel for the place. So I decided to use the story that's been at number 1 on the sub for quite some time. Brianna.

So i uploaded it. but I did it kinda old school. It wasn't entirely manual but it wasn't far off. Everything was created manually and I collected the files and uploaded them and then went form there. It worked, no problems at all. Story viewable and thus far no complaints about the stories that are there.

But that was part of the problem and was the MAIN problem with narratophile. it worked great was awesome to read the stories on, looked good,easy to get around. all great, but it was a PITA to get things uploaded.

I definitely didn't want that for here. I'd designed things with automation at the forefront, but to post the first story i wasn't able to use it. A few critical steps hadn't made the leap from local to live. i was about to patch it up and move on but I knew if I did that then the "patch" would likely never be properly fixed and then later on when I wanted to add some cool new feature i wouldn't be able to because that might break the patch. So I wouldn't add that, then I'd get sad because i couldn't add the cool new feature and there'd be ice cream involved and it'd be a thing...

So I stripped it all back to it's bones and worked out how I could make it work PROPERLY. In the end I rebuilt two and a half major systems but it's in an immeasurably better state now. Not to mention I started being smart and focussing on making things maintainable and workable for the future rather than doing the cool new things. In fact I ended up with 3 seaparate documents for site improvements that in years past I would have got stuck halfway through implementing. But instead I sat down wrote a shtload of notes for it and they are now sitting in an improvements folder waiting for some time to work a big new feature (and a couple of them are VERY big) (one will be insane if I can get it to work).  

As an exmaple, the week before I allowed you guys access I was working hard to get stuff finished. I made just over 300 commits (code changes) to the git repo in that week. In the last week since I opened up access I'm closing in on 700. granted there's a lot more smaller just change one line and commit type stuff going on, but there's plenty of bigger stuff too.

This afternoons plan is to polish off a few things in the admin workflow and then get to provising you guys some reading material. I'm hoping there aren't too many issues with that and we should be good to go from there.

If you guys have any feeedback comments or questions please feel free to fire the in the patreon Subscibers chat I try to check there regularly and answer anything that comes up. And if you haven't added your discord account to patreon do so now so you can get access.

I'll leave it there so I can get this out.

Until Next Time,

Kosh.