New HG101 Site Preview

http://104.236.151.57/

I've linked this in the past for one or two articles, but I'm sending it out again, since we've made a bit of progress over the past few weeks. Here's a preview of the new HG101 site, just for you awesome Patreon folks. I'm anticipating it ready for sometime in September - it'll definitely take much longer to convert all of the old content but it'll be a decent start. Right now we have a little over 110 articles up, which is, maybe roughly about 5% of the current site. Probably a little less. I actually have only a vague idea about how games are covered on the site, and that's not including the content only published in books.

Anyway, there's a handful of articles on there that haven't been posted officially on the site and won't be until this new site goes live - these are in the featured carousel on the front page, plus more if you go digging a bit.

Even though Wordpress is generally user-friendly, I'm used to working with HTML and CSS, so if you want something done, you just...do it. Here, there's just things that are either impossible, outside of the realm of modern web development, or require some substantial under the hood tinkering. I'd originally wanted a layout like the old (current) site, with screens on the right side, but was told this was not possible. So instead, it just has a screenshot inserted every paragraph or so. It breaks up the text, plus it ensures that you're always looking at least one image on the screen.

Some current issues with the site that (I hope!) will be ironed out before it goes live, most of which are the same from when I originally posted the preview:

-Each article is tagged but the actual tag and info box doesn't show up. Neither does the full game name title.

-Each article is supposed to have a gallery of all of the screenshots (plus the ones not used in the body). This is also invisible. The reason for both of these is that the initial design had a left sidebar with a tiny gallery that displayed all of these. I decided it didn't look very good and just expanded the size of the text column, but now these two things are gone. Hmm.

-I'm still struggling with the "featured" image, because it acts as a header, as a thumbnail for the front page, and a thumbnail in the catalogue, all different sizes and dimensions, also based on your device's resolution. Plus, I was annoyed that it would upscale and completely mangle the low resolution images, an issue I fixed by manually resizing each header 3x using nearest neighbor, which Wordpress then decided to display correctly.

-I'm still not sure what to do about "comparison screenshot" galleries. Just getting two pictures next to each other is more of a pain than it should be, and it's broken on lower resolutions. Galleries won't work because they insist on resizing and filtering every image, and also ignoring the number of columns I specify.

-Most of the sidebar needs to be implemented. The ads don't work since this is a temp server. I'm curious about the algorithms used to pick the "related articles" pieces (which is randomized to some extent), which I imagine will work better with more articles in place, as some of the picks I'm still scratching my head over.

Anyway, enough complaining, enjoy the current draft of the site!