For lack of anyone better

I have been appointed team leader for the MGM Stargate Site! I was very afraid they were going to give the work to someone who didn't know the franchise (again) and had voiced my fears to our departing project manager. Turns out he agreed, and convinced my boss to give the work to me instead of someone with more time (and less passion).

This means that in addition to managing all MGM's domains, web servers (when I wear my sys admin hat), provide support for vendors who host movie microsites on my (MGM's) web servers, Database admin for Oracle and MySQL, doing all PHP code for all our sites... I get to approve content to go up on the site, and generally manage the direction of the site (of course always having to deal with requests/mandates from TPTB).

I'm very excited.. I think not only is it a good step forward for me (I was getting tired of being the one and only tech person who did everything, but couldn't advance because I was too "valuable") but I'm going to try and implement a lot more user generated content on the site.

Looks like the launch will happen July 9th, as they wanted it before comic con, but my parents are visiting and we're going out of town for the week of the 13th through 17th, so my boss moved the launch date from the 14th to the 9th.

We're going to try very hard to implement the first user generated feature we call "suggest a tag". Will explain more about that another day, we have to hash out the details, and see if we can get it properly coded and tested in the coming weeks.



Oh I almost forget, from yesterday's comments:

At present we can access the site by show (i.e. I have the link http://stargate.mgm.com/atlantis/ in my bookmarks. This works great for me, because Atlantis is the only Stargate show I'm interested in). Do you know if it'll be possible to browse by show in the new site as well? If not, any chance it'll be possible in the future?

Yes indeed. Pretty much everything in the site (characters, video, images) can be sorted by series, and we have a "filter grid" on content heavy pages where you can go by season, and episode, also narrow by type (behind the scenes, episodic etc).

Right now I'm trying to get that exact URL to still work, so it will redirect users to the new location.

BFN

Site launch delayed..

I had a feeling it was going to happen mid last week when the panic seemed to stop. We were told late Friday that our launch would be delayed until the San Diego Comic Con.

I can't say I'm not bummed, as we're been going full blast on the new site since March, and I was really hoping to get it out there for people to see and use.

The project manager is now finished, as is the other programmer we had for the development cycle. This brings us back to a team of 3, and I hope they let us iron out the wrinkles and add a couple extra features instead of moving us onto different projects right away.



BFN

Been a while but...

As soon as Monday the 15th June we may be launching the new version of MGM's Stargate site! It's been a very busy couple months, but we've been working very long hours and had our internal launch last week. We got some great feedback, but of course the most important feedback is going to come from the fans.

I only ask one thing.. I had to personally tag and upload thousands and thousands of images. I know I made some mistakes.. be gentle! We want to implement a "suggest a tag" and "flag a tag" features soon, perhaps by August, but until then feel free to let me know here which ones I messed up on. I was going cross eyed one night.. and tagged a whole bunch of images with Teal'C instead of Teyla (yes I know they don't look alike.. but their names are right next to each other in the list). I am pretty sure I caught them all, but you know how that stuff goes!



I loved this photo, looks like he's not sure if he should be happy or not!

BFN