Staff Letters: Phil

...But we die hard!...

Woo! What a month! So much exciting stuff.

First, I spent 8 days in Italy. Rome is an amazing city. Italy's an amazing country. Of course that meant two more Metallica shows (that's 9 countries I've now seem the boys in)! I'll have reviews up at some point. I still haven't done my Germany and Austria reviews yet. Why? Because I'm busting my ass to get this redesign out the door!

Which brings me to the next thing. We're really close! I opened the new design to a few trusted IPOMers for the last two weeks to get some initial impressions. So far so good! They only got to see the general new look - not "cool new secret feature."

I want to give you all a little bit of info about this new redesign...

The most important thing to realize is that this is phase 1 of the redesign. Obviously there is a new look to the site. There's no frames, and you can link to whatever page you want easily and without screwing things up.

However, most of the work that's gone in is groundwork. Work to allow us to continue to easily work on and improve the site. There are many things we have not yet gotten to.

This redesign encompasses around 5000 lines of code change. That does not include HTML or text - just actual lines of code (in our case, for those of you who are techies, that's perl). If yoy were to include text and HTML it would be very difficult to give an accurate count - much of the static content is now in a database or dynamically generated, but if I had to hazard a guess, I'd put the number well over 10,000.

In addition to a new look, much of the concentration of this redesign is to make the site consistent. Over the years we'd tried various new things on IPOM trying to see what might work in a redesign. Unfortunately that led to an inconsistent experience across the site. There's now a consistent way of doing section titles, section menus, consistent colors and font usage, etc.

Small new enhancements are also scattered throughout - as we cleaned up code it was often easy to add a minor search feature here, or finish an unfinished feature there. These are mostly small, but hopefully they make the site as a whole better.

There are some things that we wanted to finish but have not. We could have put off releasing the new design for longer while we work on these things, but we decided it best to go ahead and release the work we've done. We're so excited about it, it wasn't fair to keep it ourselves.

So here's some things that we have not yet gotten to. New pictures: We have very few of these. Lana is no longer available to do graphics work and I'm not very good at it. We're looking for a graphics person, so if you know of one, let us know. Letters of the month: I have a plan to completely re-work this but haven't had time. Reference Update: Our reference section is extensive, but needs some updating. This is one of our top priorities once the redesign is out.

So its important to realize, as I said, this is phase 1 - we're actively working on more.

Finally, just having a new look isn't enough, of course. Our last redesign (10 years ago) came with Lyric Theories - to this day still one of our most popular sections. In keeping with tradition, we have a new feature coming with the redesign. I really believe it's unlike anything you've seen on a Metallica site, and I personally can't wait to see the reaction.

In addition to that, I got myself a 2007 Harley Davidson Sporster 883R. (For those of you Harley folks, the 883R is only available in Europe. It's the R version of the 1200 but applied to the 883). I'm really really happy with my new baby and I plan to head out to some upcoming bikefests! Since Zurich has good public transportation it's not that common for people to have cars (and in fact, it's quite difficult to have one in the city), so my bike is the first time I've had a vehicle in a year! The freedom is wonderful!

And finally, in addition to Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles being cancelled (which I knew last month), I found out a few days ago that Reaper is also being canceled! They're canceling all the best shows! Fuck!

Well, that's about all I got. The redesign should be coming to you soon! I hope you're ready!

Phil

GOOD

The redesign is close!
Italy
63 Metallica shows and counting!
My new Harley

BAD

T: TSCC canceled
Reaper canceled

BABES OF THE MONTH

Missy Peregrym

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