Change Log

August 7 (Tuesday)

• Carol noticed that the images were fuzzy and — between 4:00 p.m. and midnight last night — she fixed all 24 of the images and replaced them with super high-resolution crisp images. We can use these to create the 2x images as well.

• Wrote the fake audiences section.

• Fixed the front-page descriptions.

• Uploaded all of the new high-resolution 1x images.

August 6 (Monday)

• Aaron — Remember to replace the fuzzy images with the new images that Carol recreated for us. That was so awesome of her!

• Remember to talk with Mary Margaret about how we want people to cite individual pages. One possibility: At bottom of co-authored pages, list the primary author first. Bots page might say “Mary Margaret Herring and Aaron Delwiche.” Single-authored pages would just list the name of the person who wrote those pages. Advantage of this approach is the granularity. One disadvantage is that we have to do a tiny bit of coding to change the footer template depending upon the author, but this would only take a few hours to figure out. Another disadvantage is that this might undermine the unified voice of the site. A second possibility: On the about us page, we just tell people to cite the authors as Aaron Delwiche and Mary Margaret Herring.

• Fixed global navigation alignment. Currently, using the yellow color to draw attention to the site feedback form. After the feedback period has ended, I will remove that link and then use yellow to indicate the user’s currently active page.

• The site might be a bit slow. There is a caching plugin we can use that will generate static images of all the pages and then serve those up to users on the fly rather than regenerating the pages each time with WordPress templates. It doesn’t make sense to activate the plug-in yet because the pages are still in flux, but I think this will help with overall performance.

• If the cache plugin doesn’t do the trick, I might take the plunge and move to ‘managed WP hosting’ with a new host. Managed WP hosts are focused solely on improving WP performance, so sites tend to load much more quickly. They also have all sorts of perks like automatic backups and ongoing security updates.

• At some point next month, we might want to think about setting up some sort of Patreon link to help defray the ongoing hosting costs. Patreon $$$ could also be used to purchase more illustrations from Carol Lay down the road. But — for now — Patreon is putting the proverbial cart ahead of the horse. First, we need to have a fully functioning site! (We’re almost there!)

August 5 (Sunday)

• Figured out how to move the top bar *above* the logo. Now just trying to adjust typeface and alignment for our global navigation links.

• Wrote instructions for people who visit the site during the soft launch period.

• Substituted Open Sans Condensed for PT Narrow.

• Added previous/next links to ‘Cognitive Biases’ and ‘Decoding Propaganda’ sections.

August 4 (Saturday)

• Wrote site feedback survey form for distribution during soft launch. Created two versions of this form: a detailed feedback form and a one-field form for people in a hurry. (AAD)

• Wired up the form using WPForms and configured it to mail feedback to my Trinity account. (AAD)

• Finalized typeface decisions for the sidebar. (AAD)

August 3 (Friday)

• Wrote content for the Japanese relocation section.

• Backed up site.

• Adjusted top and bottom margins of header near top of screen.

• Decided on typeface colors and line spacing and typography.

August 2 (Thursday)

• • My goal today is to complete at least 10 pomodoro tomatoes before the end of the day.

  • Configured Google Analytics plugin for the site. Specifically, I used the child theme configuration tool and modified the page header to include the necessary code. Analytics is now reporting web visitors in real time. Can’t wait to review this information when the site is launched!

• We need to balance this out before launch, but I also want to make sure that it doesn’t look silly and that colors are matched to the rest of the image palette. We don’t need to go overboard, and it’s not necessary to directly map the ethnic breakdown of the US census, but it would be nice if people visiting the site could ‘see themselves’ in some of the images. (AAD)

• For future reference: ‘Latino’ (#d5a79f), ‘White’ (#fcd5cf and #ecc8c2 and close variations of this), ‘Black’ (#c3a598) and ‘Other’ (#fee0be). (AAD)

• We might also be able to pull some appropriate complexion colors from Carol’s work on Lay Lines on GoComics. The most recent work is most likely to be created in a similar style to our images. (AAD)

• Jotted down notes and quotes and links for “Fake it to make it” and “Bad news.” (AAD)

• Hmmmm. Just realized something minorly disappointing, but not show-stopping. When/if we remap the base directory for the site, we might need to manually change places in the navigation bar where we’ve hard-coded images inside the intelliwidget. For example, this is the link to the IPA image in ‘What is propaganda analysis?”  http://cs8.temp.domains/~propagc8/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/core-ipa.png <– If the base URL changes, the link will change, and I think we might need to *manually* update all of these. Not the end of the world; just something to remember. (AAD)

August 1 (Wednesday)

• OK. Today is technically the ‘soft launch’ date. We haven’t hit that target, but we are getting close! I’m still optimistic about finishing all of these tasks by end of the day on Saturday (August 4th). (AAD)

• Wrote up a blurb for the Duck and Cover page. Ended up writing more than I had expected because Wikipedia claims that this film isn’t propaganda, and it was necessary to explain why it *is* propaganda. (AAD)

• Implemented responsive design for our menus! On wider screens, the images only show up in the left sidebar. On narrower screens, an image shows up in a single-column design and is enlarged to fill the available space. At some point, I’ll need to figure out how to swap in higher quality images, but this seems good for now. (AAD)

• Was getting nervous about the limitations of built-in backup tools, so I downloaded a plugin called UpDraftPlus which seems to be a better way of backing things up.

July 31 (Tuesday)

• Triage: Reviewed all site pages and listed everything that must be finished before soft launch. Updated tracking sheet is posted in shared team drive. (AAD)

• Backed up all site content and child theme settings. (AAD)

• Figured out how we can customize the video and game images for each title we’re highlighting. (AAD)

• It still needs work, but I’m excited about the new home page! (AAD)

• MMH, for now, I am holding off on contacting you about the site because you already have gone so far above and beyond on this project during the summer, and you totally deserve to spend time with your friends and family. As it is, I probably shouldn’t have asked you to do that Photoshop stuff the day after you got back home!  I’m pasting this comment here on 7/31, figuring that you won’t encounter it until you have a tiny bit of surplus time to do additional work on the site. I have ideas about different types of tasks you could do that would only require a small time commitment, but I am absolutely not expecting you to do anything more until school starts up again. I’ll wait to hear from you.  (AAD)

July 30 (Monday)

• Created a new main menu that has two levels of navigation because this is the only way, so far, that I’ve figured out how to make the responsive mobile menu work as an accordion. (AAD)

• Used flexbox to create a full-width layout for the home page. Still needs work, but the idea is that we will use images on the home page as ‘buttons’ that lead to site content. Still need to modify this design to also include a section for breaking news and updates. (AAD)

July 29 (Sunday)

• Made some decisions about the page layouts. If you look at the “Propaganda is Everywhere” layout, you will see that the image will be placed in the left sidebar area near bread crumbs and secondary navigation. We can also use some of the white space in the left sidebar for asides and links to relevant pages. (AAD)

• On smaller screens, there will be a one-column design with the image at the top of the page. (AAD)

• Last but not least, we can use accordions for secondary navigation on mobile phones. The responsive menu plugin should help with this. (AAD)

• As an experiment, I tried to export all of our pages and images and then import them into a fresh installation. From this, I’ve learned that such a process *can* work. It is possible for us to export from one installation and import on another. But… there is one big catch: There is probably around 3 to 5 hours of additional customization that we would have to do on a new installation. It’s nice to know that we have the option, but I’m hoping that we won’t have to migrate from this server at all. 🙂 (AAD)

July 28 (Saturday)

• Finished populating the site with our content and images. Configured secondary navigation menus. (AAD)

• Created an export of the site as of 4:30 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. (AAD)

• Modified some of Carol’s images for different scenarios. For example, we only had one image for the memory things, so I used her original image as the basis for these images for repetition and sleeper effect. (AAD)

July 27 (Friday)

• Added 1x images to the library (MMH)

• Added images into some of the first two sections, played with different color/type possibilities. Everything is still up in the air, but I really like the two color logo. (AAD)

• Figured out how to make the breadcrumb show up in the left navigation bar. (AAD)

• Got rid of the middle bar that had the breadcrumb and page title on it. Actually, I just told it to ‘display: none’, so we can always get it back later. (AAD) 

• Playing with possible responsive layout design. One possibility for laptops is that we can place the image in the left area, near the navigation bar and breadcrumbs rather than inside the content area. But for people on phones, it would show up inside the content area. (AAD) 

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July 26 (Thursday)

• Installed Child Theme Configurator Pro, IntelliWidget Pro, and Responsive Menu Plugin (AD)

• Activated free version of Jetpack to handle site caching and to contact AD when server goes down. (AD)

• Implemented potential solution to the problem of our hierarchy not working correctly on the breadcrumbs. As you know, the first sub-page of a category doesn’t usually have an interstitial page, so we’ve been going to the very first page of the subcategory of the menu. So, the link in the primary navigation bar for case studies points to Columbia Chemicals Plant. This works at first, but it screws up the breadcrumb hierarchy, showing that all child pages are inside Columbia Chemicals Plant, rather than showing that child pages (and CCP) are contained within case studies. There must be a better way to solve this, but the current solution does work. I’m using a redirection script so that interstitial pages automatically redirect to their first child! This fixes the breadcrumb problem. (AD)

• One catch with the above solution: I could only make redirection work with full URLs (e.g. http://cs8.temp.domains/~propagc8/columbia-chemicals), and the base URL will change when we point propagandacritic.com at the new site. So, we’ll just have to remember to manually update the site later afterward… ) (AD)

• Populated the first two sections of the site (core concepts and biases) and also added secondary navigation menu. Modified menu so current item is highlighted. This is not the final design; it’s just a test to make sure that the child theme templates are correctly targeting the currently active page. (AD)

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This is an experimental attempt to keep track of changes made to the site by recording everything in a hidden document on the server. We’ll see if it works!