Letter from the Editor (June 2019)

Published on by Josh Bray

Hello again in­ter­ne­tari­nos! It’s that time of the month again! Wait, that could have been word­ed better…

Welcome to an­oth­er is­sue of SuperNerdLand Magazine!

So what is go­ing on around our parts, what’s new, and what are we up to? Glad you asked. And even if you did­n’t, I will tell you anyway.

I first want to give a hearty wel­come to a cou­ple of new ad­di­tions to the site! We are hap­py to add Robert Throne (@plasmarob on Twitter) and his wife to the ros­ter. Plasmarob comes to us as a con­trib­u­tor to the writ­ing side of the site, as well as bring­ing skills that could help shore up some of the back end as­pects of stuff as we go into the fu­ture. His wife, StormyDLoA, has joined on as an­oth­er ed­i­tor, hope­ful­ly be­ing able to catch the things that pass by me in the fu­ture! You can see her edit­ing work done on Plasmarob’s The Gaming Seed of Heroes piece in this issue.

You may have al­ready no­ticed by now that things are look­ing a bit dif­fer­ent around here! That’s right, I fi­nal­ly got to up­dat­ing the theme and look of the site. Massive shoutout to Themesaga for this theme. We’ve had to do our own cus­tomiza­tions, of course. But their Magazine Elite (we’re us­ing the free, not Pro) theme pro­vid­ed a fan­tas­tic base. I am still tweak­ing things here and there, es­pe­cial­ly with the added Night Mode tog­gle. Night Mode might still have an ob­ject or two that is a lit­tle too dark, but the meat and pota­toes of the site should be 100% view­able regardless.

Something that is get­ting mi­grat­ed due to the UI change are pod­casts and our LIVE page. After a lot of thought, it was ap­par­ent it would be bet­ter for me to put pod­casts and the live page on their sep­a­rate sub­do­mains. That way each bit of con­tent can be served in a man­ner that fits it specif­i­cal­ly (help­ful for the front and the back ends), and that way the mag­a­zine is­sue de­liv­ery can be fo­cused more. Currently, pod­casts are still avail­able on the main site via di­rect link, with their own pages com­ing soon!

Four Years of SuperNerdLand

The oth­er thing of note hap­pen­ing this month will be do­ing some of the fi­nal pol­ish­ing on our Fediverse so­cial net­work node, and it go­ing live for in­ter­nal pok­ing. Hopefully, pub­lic con­sump­tion by the end of June will be pos­si­ble! The only real thing I need to do is tweak some more of the CSS, be­cause bless their hearts but most pro­gram­mers for fe­di­verse soft­ware are not the best at UI/UX. Expect more word on that soon.

Another bit men­tioned in pre­vi­ous let­ters to you has been the PeerTube in­stall. I am go­ing to get to that soon, but it is still not a pri­ma­ry con­cern as we have our own self-hosted videos rock­ing al­ready. It would just be nice to test out how P2P de­liv­ery of video may help some of our users out there with poor­er in­ter­net, though. So I swear I am get­ting to that.

Something I do want to briefly men­tion be­fore let­ting you get on with the ar­ti­cle read­ing is our cus­tom stream­ing ser­vice and my se­ries on build-up said self-hosted stream­ing. Currently, I am go­ing through a very tight fi­nan­cial sit­u­a­tion, so the fee that would have gone to WMSPanel went to oth­er things and that is shut off for the next cou­ple of weeks. We’ll get that cranked back on ASAP, and in the July is­sue you will get part two of said se­ries on self-hosted streaming!

That is ac­tu­al­ly as good a segue as any into some­thing I am pret­ty bad at typ­i­cal­ly, which is pro­mot­ing the ways you can help sup­port SuperNerdLand! We have a Patreon and a Subscribestar up as op­tions to help SuperNerdLand pay the bills and grow. Believe me, the read­ing and shar­ing of our con­tent is first and fore­most to us. We are not go­ing any­where ei­ther way, but if you ever want­ed to help us in oth­er ways then know we ap­pre­ci­ate it from the bot­tom of our hearts.

I won’t keep you any­more, though. Click down be­low the au­thor box or over on the right and check out the fan­tas­tic con­tent our au­thors have for you this month!

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Josh Bray

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand
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