Tuesday, June 16, 2009

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

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yeah! Congratulations!! :D

tashira said...

Congratulations jeni - it is good that the Stargate site will be in such great hands :))))

Thanks for the great candid of Joe too - that makeup was amazing!

Anonymous said...

Congratulations!

Elyse said...

Ooh, big congrats!! :) You definitely deserve thsi job :)

Anonymous said...

Congrats! It is certainly well deserved. Very happy to see you rewarded for all your hard work. Good for all the fans as we'll have someone caring and knowledgeable in charge. Way to go Jeni!

P.S. Thanks for the great Joe pic.
Awesome! Missed your special pics.

D

Anonymous said...

Congrads!

Also, thank you for the pic. That's the only pic I've seen of Joe in a makeup chair. ;P

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on the job!

Thank you for posting this photo of Joe Flanigan and Martin Wood!

Elyse said...

Anxiously awaiting your blog entry on the unveiling of the new MGM SG site (which is very cool, although I haven't figured out how to copy pics off the site (darned Flash). ;)