Rebuilt from the ground up

It has been a longstanding goal of mine to get the sites to operate together on a single server, with a single point of sale for ads, and have everything in a nice, tidy package for users to enjoy.

Now I’m finally at a stopping point on what I’ve been calling Myrick Multimedia 2.0, going from staging environment on my network at home to a full-fledged site that has a lot of features I didn’t even anticipate building on my own.

All of this to say one thing: Infrastructure matters.

Yes, that’s right friends. Infrastructure – whether it is a short bridge across a creek dividing your town, all the way up to the massive data centers that run sites like Facebook and TikTok – it all matters. The machinery of the world ticks on folks who are making sure the gears are always oiled and that the engines don’t break down when we need them to be running, or the folks who are on the sides of freeways who are inspecting the bridges and overpasses we rely on to get where we are going in an expedient manner. ALL OF IT MATTERS.

The problem of course is that most folks don’t care and don’t want to know about these kinds of things. They see infrastructure and go “oh great, another construction project” or “why isn’t Facebook loading?” and never think about the underlying areas that need our attention on a constant basis for everything to run smoothly.

Admittedly, I was among that camp for a good while. My “investment” in the framework that makes sites like this and the others on the network was – at best – minimal, and at worst ignored completely over the past several years. A hard truth to have to swallow is that I probably could have spent the time earlier on the rebuild project for the sites and ultimately gotten further ahead in a variety of areas had I spent the months to make it all work right.

Then again, that is also the curse of hindsight. We can’t see in the moment how our decisions will impact us at a later date. No one ever expects the bridge to start collapsing as you drive over it, but that is what happens when government begins cutting in places it shouldn’t and causes greater havoc overall.

The machinery that makes contemporary life hum has a price tag and requires constant attention to get it to work just right. Don’t forget that when later you’re complaining about government spending and no one having anything anymore. You can’t run a a country as big as America on a shoestring, is my point.

You also can’t run a news website without ensuring that when people get on, the site just works like it should: no complaints, no excuses.

I’m hoping my efforts over these past months have been worth it, because Lordy this has been a stressful round of work to rebuild everything essentially from the ground up. But now Ads are consolidated onto a single platform to serve the rest of the network, the sites work independently of each other but can display each other’s items in a preview format for people to click, the subscription platform now actually has credit card processing as part of the system instead of having to go to PayPal to complete the order. What’s best of all? I’ve got games now too. Pick’ems for football, sports trivia, sudoku, word search and one of my own creation: SevenUp! I even punted the old events and classifieds system for a whole new network-wide system that distributes items to various pages as well, can display items on front pages and sidebars, and hopefully soon will provide some other functionality I hope to add in the near future.

Now that the final stages of the upgrade are complete as far as the main work goes, now it is just a matter of straightening out design issues and finding bugs where they live in the code. Much like those who go and inspect bridges after they are built, I’ll be shining lights in the coming days on all the stuff I’ve just done to make sure it stays working right for now and into the future.

Fortunately, I can take a short breather – but maybe only a day as now football season is right around that hard corner, and I won’t get to stop again until Christmas at this rate.

Whew. Finished. Thank goodness.

-KtE