Fifth Gear Out of a Rut: A Site Update

Published on by Josh Bray
via Initial D/Kodansha Ltd.

Well hel­lo nerdites! 

It’s been a while since I put vir­tu­al pen to pa­per as to up­date you all on what we are do­ing, or to even write any glo­ri­ous hot takes, news re­ports or re­views. We’ve been in a bit of a main­te­nance mode on SuperNerdLand the past year, but with rea­sons I’ll de­tail far­ther in.

The main thrust of this an­nounce­ment is to say that we are com­ing back in more a form like we were in our first cou­ple of years! Meaning we’ll be pub­lish­ing some­thing more than once every two months… laugh with me peo­ple. There we go. 

I do want to thank all of you that stuck around our so­cial me­dia, and even the new fans that we’ve got­ten de­spite be­ing high­ly in­ac­tive on our main site. You all are in for some good times com­ing up.

I try not to use anx­i­ety and de­pres­sion as an ex­cuse for things, but they can cer­tain­ly be point­ed to as a rea­son events may oc­cur. And that is a big rea­son I’ve per­son­al­ly been less ac­tive on the front end of SuperNerdLand. Between work­ing through my own men­tal health is­sues, and oth­er more house­hold con­cerns I’ve had re­cent­ly, pro­duc­ing con­tent end­ed up be­ing the last thing on my mind at times. Sad to say. 

Not to say noth­ing was go­ing on with us dur­ing the time I was bit more funky. 

I kept up work on the back end of things, and work­ing on projects like a more cost-effective (read: free) cus­tom stream­ing so­lu­tion. Not to men­tion that (quite in­ten­tion­al­ly) I al­ways split off the most pro­duc­tive cre­ators into their own ar­eas, and been help­ing the ab­solute­ly love­ly lads of OGChan.com and Graded Point Five, as well as help­ing the Adventures of Piper site get off the ground. Not to men­tion get­ting into video projects with the peren­ni­al @SuperiorEditMan, whose projects like Godzilla vs Gigan: Abridged and Club Penguin: Vietnam War are host­ed over on our video site.

Now that I’m done shilling those tal­ent­ed and love­ly folks, what are we do­ing over here?

Well I’m glad you asked. Or I asked? However that works.

We (read: me) are kick­ing into high­er gear and are go­ing to get back into steady pub­lish­ing and stream­ing. It’s amaz­ing how even some­thing like play­ing games with friends or stream­ing can be seem­ing­ly that much hard­er when men­tal health is­sues are knock­ing at your brain hard­er. But that di­gres­sion is for a dif­fer­ent piece.

I want to let you all know what we are go­ing to be do­ing in the up­com­ing weeks. 

Well, first thing first is that we are go­ing to head back into a magazine-esque pub­lish­ing sched­ule. We had test­ed this out back in 2016 (you can read the archives here), and it worked out fan­tas­ti­cal­ly well. It was a lot of fun get­ting cov­ers made, sched­ul­ing posts, giv­ing every­one enough time to get some­thing in if they want while also work­ing with­in dead­lines. Which that last part is im­por­tant when work­ing a site on a vol­un­teer ba­sis like we do. It’s easy to let things slide into idle­ness when you are need­ing to fo­cus on what will keep a roof over your head from week to week and work­ing through men­tal funks. 

But the mag­a­zine for­mat solved a lot of is­sues, and it was fun in­ter­nal­ly. It also fits us more into this “fanzine” im­age that I al­ways had for us. So yeah. Magazine is­sues com­ing back soon! Like, April soon. 

In fact, if I can get the is­sue out on April 1st… well that would just be per­fect. All things considered. 

Another thing I need to do very soon is re­fresh the look of the site. I don’t hate it, but it’s time for a fresh coat of paint. I’ve tried to do that every year or so any­way. It al­lows me to do some spring clean­ing a bit on the back end, and I can get into a theme that more fits the mag­a­zine fo­cus. This will come like­ly soon af­ter the mag­a­zine is­sue re­launch, be­cause I would rather get some con­tent out for you all first be­fore giv­ing the site a makeover.

The last big thing is that I want to start get­ting back into is hav­ing our own cus­tom stream­ing so­lu­tion again. We were work­ing with a 3rd par­ty con­trol pan­el soft­ware and open source stream­ing pro­gram com­bo (WMSPanel/Nimble Streamer for those in­ter­est­ed), and it worked great. But we need­ed to cut costs. And to be frank, we can cre­ate some­thing for free for our more lim­it­ed use cases. 

I’m just not a fan at all of any of the video host­ing and stream­ing sites out there, and I do not en­joy their cen­sor­ship or terms of ser­vice. So why not han­dle our own stream­ing if we have our own server. 

So get­ting back into our own self-hosted stream­ing is a big thing I want to get back up be­fore sum­mer. I might also take a look at op­ti­miza­tions to our video stream­ing site. I’m hap­py enough with how it is, but I do need to get it en­cod­ing dif­fer­ent­ly sized files so that peo­ple with low-bandwidth can still load video fine. Right now it takes what­ev­er we up­load to the site and just wraps a play­er around it with no pro­cess­ing. That has its pros and cons. I plan on writ­ing about it.

Sorry for let­ting the site col­lect a bit of dust, so to speak. Those on Twitter know we nev­er re­al­ly went away. We just got lazy! 

I will leave you all to your day, and I do hope it is a won­der­ful one. I’m go­ing to go edit and for­mat the pile of ar­ti­cles I’ve been sit­ting on for three months now so we can kick it into fifth gear as we are get­ting out of this rut. 

Stay frosty every­one, and re­mem­ber to be awe­some to one another. 

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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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