Website Report 15-Jul-2017
Contents
PayPal Issue
There was a serious issue with PayPal which caused the NAWGFest 2017 payment page to have its PayPal option suspended. The facility was unavailable for over a month, during which time, a long-winded technical support dialogue too place via email. The conclusions were:
- It's almost impossible to sensibly diagnose problems. The only method available is trial-and-error, which is extremely time consuming.
- PayPal's own technical support staff didn't know what had gone wrong, despite the issue being due to changes at their end, of which they also seemed unaware.
- Item options, for both hosted and non-hosted buttons, are now limited to a maximum of ten. This change was never communicated and took us by surprise.
- The NAWGFest 2017 PayPal button was redesigned, redeveloped and redeployed. Lessons were learned along the way.
All in all it was an agonising experience, but hopefully it will not recur.
Projects and Progress ↑
There are big delays accumulating, particularly in the larger projects. Examples:
- Restricted areas: This is massively behind schedule. It was due to go live in late March this year, but there is still a lot of fundamental work to be done.
- Task lists & year planners: There has been zero progress with this project since the last meeting.
- Online forms for events, competitions, etc: Also zero progress.
There are many more projects that have stalled or have big delays.
The reasons for this can be attributed to:
- Barely keeping head above water with "incoming" things and regular tasks.
- Managing content and data for competitions, particularly the "100" competition.
- Managing content for larger/complex subjects such as NAWGFest.
- Content reorganisation/revamping jobs, such as the recent "advertising" one.
Content ↑
Here's a selection/summary of the content that's been added since the last report.
Categories:
- "Who Are NAWG?" was merged into "people".
- "Advertising" and "adverts" were created.
Side bar:
- The "recent articles" has stolen some of the vertical space from the "recent comments" widget. This was done because the articles are changing much more frequently than the comments.
- A "tags" widget was added, so that articles can be selected by their tags.
Competitions:
- The "open" and "Pam's People" competitions for 2017 were added.
- The page title prefixes for the 100 word mini-tales competition was changed from "MTC" to "100" to avoid confusion.
Biographies added:
- Hattie Grünewald,
- Kate Nash,
- Judith Stronach,
- Susan Clark.
Writers' resources added:
- Link to Think,
- Bare Bones Writing,
- Radio Play.
Software ↑
Version 2.7.10 of the website software was released on 5th June 2017.
Full details can be found in the release history.