Timing Updates

We will be running giveaways at midnight from now on. This means that giveaways will end at 11:59 PM Pacific, and that will make it easier for us to post new giveaways on-time. It also will help you know when to check back for a new giveaway (though, no promises… we’re understaffed and that means sometimes we may have to wait to post a new giveaway).

Also, I have an update on our planned transition to WordPress for the news. Unfortunately, our design team informed us that they will probably not make the December window for finishing the look. This means we cannot set a timeframe for switching to WordPress at this time. Ideally, we would like to deploy in the first week of January, but that may not be realistic. Further, we don’t have a lot of time in January, February, or March to deploy… and CTIA kicks off April.

This means it may be quite a long time before we deploy WordPress, sadly. It could be as late as June before everything gets migrated. I’ll let you know when things clear up as to when there’s a better timeframe to get it deployed. We want to be on WordPress as quickly as possible, but we aren’t going to rush it and break everything… and have a half-broken site for weeks. It’s not good for us (personally and professionally) nor is it good for you, the viewer.

Finally, an update on the Phone Encyclopedia. We are finishing it… though it has been slower than I (and the folks doing the data entry) had planned. I do not have an exact time window for it to be finished, but hopefully it will be finished shortly. We are targeting it to go out of Beta before the end of the year.

So, where does this leave us? Down, but certainly not out. We’ll be deploying several code and update improvements for Joomla, IP.Board, and MediaWiki. Our forums are getting a serious SEO expansion, and we’ll be giving a similar patch job to Joomla. Once the Encyclopedia is current on all the latest new and upcoming phones, we’ll be integrating that right onto the rest of the site.