Wednesday, July 8, 2009

The monster lives!

After a very exciting and intense couple of months, the beast has finally been unleashed. Unfortunately today was _supposed_ to be a soft launch, but apparently marketing has never heard of that sort of thing before.

We have DNS cache problems here in the office, that always means it takes DAYS for our DNS to update. This is a major problem, when the CEO etc. are trying to look at the masterpiece. I had to do a kludge and do away with the CDN to actually go live when it was supposed to.

Sadly the site has received a LOT more traffic than we really could have hoped for. This means I've had servers crashing left, right and center. I have brought 4 new servers online during the afternoon, and am trying to keep on top of the crashes. I think when I eventually go home, I'll just switch on the CDN, and let the execs work out why we can't see our own site from the building.

Sorry I've been quiet here for a while, as you can imagine we've been putting in quite an effort to get things straight. What I hope is that you will all offer your feedback. Let me know about things that might be miss-tagged, typo'd, offer descriptions for just about anything you see lacking. With a team of 3 we've had a rough time getting it all ship shape, but I think it's pretty good anyway!

In advance, I would like to apologize to all our international fans. In order to avoid Hulu, don't play anything that says: Full Episode in front of it. We ARE going to start work on international version of the site soon, which means hopefully we can offer some of the content, but through other means.

I welcome your feedback.

Oh and:
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). ;)


You can download the pics! Click on them to expand into full screen, then at the bottom is a link: get full-size image. Agree to sign your life away (jk) and it should open the massive version in a new window.
Let me know if it doesn't work.. it's supposed to!

8 comments:

elyse said...

Oh cool, thanks very much for instructions for downloading pictues. Gotta admit, I do love to save pics to hard drive. ;) And sorry about the crashing. I must admit, I, er, uhm, did post the news of the revamped site, sorta, er, uh, on any SG forum I could think of (*ducks*) ;)

Unknown said...

Just wanted to say if you are in any way responsible for the SG1 blooper clips on the site...thank you and I love you! We have been *begging* for bloopers on the dvds for years, so to have them on the site is pure joy :-)

Anonymous said...

It great! It will take hours to go through! Congratulations to you and your team!

You asked for feedback and typos:

http://stargate.mgm.com/photosynth/index.html

"coridoor" instead of "corridor" in the Corridor Tour where the pop-up happens when you hover at the Main View icon. "Here you are looking straight down the chunnel coridoor."

One thing that I'm bummed about concerning the new site is that all of the old URLs don't work anymore. Lots and lots of these were incorporated in the wiki that I work on.

Other than that, I'm having a great time with it. It's a wonderful achievement!

never-at-home at LiveJournal

(I'm trying anonymous because I havent' been able to post with my LJ ID without a Blogger error since yesterday!)

Unknown said...

Thanks so much! The people who put together the draft of the synth spelled it wrong _everywhere_ I must have fixed dozens, and was afraid I'd missed one. Thanks for catching it BEFORE the big presentation today :D

Sorry about the links.. Since the site was a complete rewrite, I couldn't work out a way to keep the old style links with visible querystrings. I'll look at it again today, perhaps i can do something fancy with error redirecting.

Unknown said...

Oh and findo, I wish I could claim responsibility for the bloopers, but it was my boss pushing that got them approved to be included. TPTB didn't want them on the site, and we had a lot of them nixxed because of concerns they would portray people in the wrong light. The actors were great sports about it, I think they are a lot of fun! I wish we had some for SGA.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations on the new site! Great job!
The behind the scenes images for some of the Atlantis episodes point to vids. For example:
http://stargate.mgm.com/view/content/51/index.html
(should have behind the scenes pics for Search and Rescue)

Anonymous said...

Is there anything you can do about having captions for the deaf/hard of hearing added to the episodes on the site? I realize the videos are from Syfy so maybe you can't but hopefully being aware of the need will help.

Anonymous said...

Hey, Jeni! I'm glad you're back blogging.

I'm having trouble navigating the site. When I click on the Atlantis tab, I expected to find all stuff for Atlantis. Instead, just the banner changes but the SG-1 and SGU stuff underneath the banner remains. When I click on the banner, it changes to Atlantis stuff, but only for episode and character descriptions. To find Atlantis images, I have to click on the Images tab, which presents me with having to choose from all the Stargates. I then have to click on the Atlantis tab. I don't see a way to directly get to the Atlantis images from the Atlantis banner page.

On the Atlantis image page, I see Episodic Sn 5 ep 1, then Episodic Sn 4 ep 1. There are 2 blank spaces, then the episodes start going backward from Sn 5, ep 20. If you don't want to scroll thru the episodes, you have to guess what page the episode might be on.

The page bar at the bottom goes to page 10, which gets me back to Sn 4 Ep 4. Clicking the >> gets me to Sn 4 ep 1. There doesn't seem to be any images for season 1, 2, or 3. Clicking the season links at the top doesn't get me to any images for Season 1, 2, or 3.

I'd like a way to go directly to an episode, like the old site, instead of having to scroll thru all the episodes and trying to guess what page the episode might be on.

Using the Narrow Results drop down box while trying to find Images, there are no results for Gallery, Actor, Unit (what's that?) or Event.

Back to the Atlantis tab with the episode summaries and character links. Clicking on the actor name goes to the actor's character description. Clicking on the character name goes to the character description. I would have expected clicking on an actor name would go to the actor's bio. It looks like you can only get to the actor bio by clicking on a link on the character page.

Why are the Related Tags listed in the order they are listed? McKay, Caldwell and Weir would not have been the first 3 names I would think of for Atlantis. The order doesn't seem to change, but the font size does. I would expect the font size would get larger if the tag is clicked more often. Is this right?

Why do some episodes show an Image Not Available message? The Storm on Sheppard's page is an example.

Submersion is listed as a McKay episode. I thought it was more of a Teyla episode dealing with Teyla and her connection with the Wraith. Maybe the episode was meant to be Grace Under Pressure?

Brain Storm is listed as the first key episode under McKay. I would expect to see the earlier episodes listed first.

I going to stop here because maybe I'm missing something. There isn't a Help function or a Site Map. I'm finding it very hard to find the information I want on the new site without having to navigate thru a lot of pages, if I can find it at all.

Help!