The Second Half of the Story
2021 has been an odd year. It's had indications of returning to normal, but nothing in stone that would lead one to believe that is the case. In some aspects it has been a bit more normal, in others not so much. So that is to say that things were very weird and strange on all aspects of life, business, and leisure. That is certainly true here, and has driven the flow of the site since the pandemic struck in 2020. There have been a fair number of changes and modifications made, with more expected to come over the next few months as we return to the bitterly cold months that usually grace us (or curse us, in my case) in Winter.
Updates by Section
The biggest updates over the next few months will be the splitting of content from Facebook and reintroduction of more frequent updates to the site on the whole. By and large, many of these updates I anticipate will come thru in the way of fact sheets and retroactive tweaking of some old content to have new formatting implemented. This is especially true in some of the "zeroth" generation content which never really had a proper display presentation due to who it was originally designed for. I will probably prioritize those (items such as the Flying Crowbar, Nero Claudius, and Oda Nobunaga).
Due to the workload magnitude of these tasks, coupled with other things going on, this is all of the updates that will impact the main site.
Up thru recent, the ARCHangel program (or "Archangel") was maintained thru the "militaryarchivaldatabase" domain. We decided to merge this into this site back a few months ago for ease of documentation. At that time, I had already had a decent size of articles and materials collected and set aside, so I moved those into the Archangel directories and forked them out as part of that database. In the coming months, I am going to try to get some of the content we wanted uploaded into Archangel uploaded there.
In addition, I have pulled in an additional helper to work on updating some of the articles off-site. We should have a full collection of CMH and AFHD libraries by the end of the CY, but due to the sheer size, I'm not holding my breath. As for the rest of the material, we'll have to kind of wait and see how that all shakes out as the months go on.
Alter had been and continued to be largely abused by me, because while the subject seems to be the most popular by far for interactions off-site, on-site it is arguably the least popular. Alter's activity is the dominant subject matter for streams, and I generally have neglected it proper for this very reason. However, there is at least some form of a landing page for it now, along with some content splattered about. I'm hoping in the next few months as I get some projects closed out to expand this section if even just a little. I make no promises, however.
If things work out the way they should, CY22 should provide plenty of fodder for me to grow things on Alter a bit more, but I will have to see how the first quarter shake out before I can make that call with any authority.
I have formally handed the Facebook page over almost entirely to two minions who will handle posting content there. I withdrew the last of my Facebook content late on the 20th of November because I just found myself doing a lot of nothing there with plenty of data. The page will continue to be updated, but it just won't be done by me at all at this point. As for content elsewhere, you can still get general bits of things from me on Twitter, and as always on Twitch. I have a large number of ideas for how to approach things on Twitch in CY22, but this will be dependent on how things go in Q1. We'll see.
Elsewhere, YouTube for both Alter and the main site are fully in operation, so if you miss some of the streams from further back, they're all preserved there. You, of course, can find all of our history streams through the On-Air Archives on the site here.
Other Updates
There are some things that I do want to make sure get highlighted in the next suite of updates.
Social Media Back-Posting
Previously, when posts had gone to Facebook, I had back posted them to the site. When I gutted my Facebook page, it expired the key that the site used to pull content off of the site Facebook page. Therefore, I found myself needing to figure out a way to backport the posts from Facebook to the site. So to battle this, I'll be slowly going back thru posts and getting them all posted on a yearly post with images and the content. I don't have a timeline for this yet, but it will be happening sometime during the coverage of this update.
Part II of the Spiritual Connection
I received a lot of positive feedback on the Spiritual Connection post earlier this year. It is a similar concept to the Presenters Series streams that we did earlier in the year. Rather than doing a Part III of that stream, I am opting to do a multi-part series in writing that does the same thing but has a little more depth. We did Part I earlier, and Part II will be covering the Cold War from 1953 thru about 1976. I am hoping to have this posted sometime in January.
New Headers
Part of the updates from the Fall included the reshaping of headers on the site and a bit of rebranding. The new headers are a little bit slimmer and not quite so loud. Likewise, the site header was increased in resolution. These headers were designed for 1920x1080 screens, but should be stable up to a full 4K display.
Dark Mode
Yup. We have a dark mode now. It mostly works. That's all I need to say about it. Don't @ me.
Don't Forget
If you have something you want me to write on, or that you want me to post for you, or that you just want me to look at, you can feel free to contact me through the handy dandy contact link in the header. I do reply, although slow sometimes, to most messages. Or if you're a bit more tech savvy and not nearly as shy, you can come join us on our Discord.
With that, folks - I hope everyone has a happy Holiday season, and stays safe.
Until our next update in late February, folks!
