Greetings Aggressors!

It’s been just about a year since the last site ‘upgrade’ and all the fun that went along with it. Once it became clear that it would be better to rid ourselves of that mess, a decision was made and work began anew on a much cleaner, faster base that did not require over 20 plugins to function correctly. You might be asking, “What’s that mean for me?” and for that, dear aggressor, I’d like to break down all of the upgrades/fixes you’ll be getting.

Part I: Posting

Posting / Writing is the lifeblood of this site’s ability to generate views, so I thought it best to start here. You may have already noticed in the header image above, but all posts now have the ability to use animated gifs. Not only that, but your featured images don’t have any hard width and height requirements… the code behind the scenes will always attempt to fill the area and center the image. So in other words, if you want a spicy looking image, use something decently sized, otherwise it will still fill the area but will look slightly pixelated.

Moving on, you’ll note that your post header will have a link to what we’ll call your ‘author page’ where it will show the bio you entered in your admin account as well as the recent articles you’ve written. Once everyone has time to update their social media boxes, I can turn on icons that will lead users to your respective social platforms. Comments and page views are also re-enabled.

Now, as far as writing your article, all of the glitches you had in the previous platform should be gone. I’d still suggest writing the article in the ‘Text’ tab, but you definitely won’t be fighting weird code lines and resets this time around.

For images, you’ll eventually be able to use the new ‘Add Gallery’ and ‘Add Album’ buttons to make for some really nice galleries, but since Envira’s plugin refuses to function on the live site, I have to ask that you keep using the ‘Add Media’ button for awhile longer like I did for image to the left. Important reminder: If you’re using animated gifs anywhere, you must set the image to “full” in order to get the image to animate. Otherwise the image will be cropped.

For videos, you’ll finally get responsive videos without lots of pasting. It’s simply a small shortcode snippet + the youtube share link. You can look at this post or any of the video posts for the shortcode in use. See below:

[arve url=”https://youtu.be/C_ntBfIW_A0″]

Other shortcodes such as twitter should ‘just work’ but if you have any questions or suggestions, fire them my way.

Lastly, before moving on, two posting points have to be covered. 1) Make sure you choose a category and be aware that I’m in the middle of redoing our SEO with a firm who’s lending their assistance. Don’t freak out if I have to change a name or throw an article in a different bucket… there’s just a lot going on at once. 2) Tags are now 100% required and are used in our related articles area. Please remember to keep picking them going forward.

Part II: Galleries

We’ll edit this area when Envira is actually working ;_;

Part III: Videos

Right now, the only functional video set is Secret of the Booze. You can see a preview of what’s going to happen by checking out Secret of the Booze in the nav up top. Videos, in general, will continue video posts of all of our original content, but for now you’ll only see Booze. Each video area will have a subscribe link as well as links to full lists of our content. These are responsive, same as in posts. More will be updated here as I get more posted in the admin and make corrections.

Part IV: Closing

So in closing, this release is a bit more beta than I would have liked, but it’s up and I hope you enjoy it. If you find any issues, please let me know. (I am currently aware of a couple mobile sizing concerns) Once this is stabilized and galleries are functional, I’ll be asking Bill for assistance in merging the posts from the archive to here to stabilize our SEO. Thanks again and if you’re in the North East, enjoy the blizzard!