I have done a few small updates to the site - the previous 1 column layput didnt work well so I reverted that and made that wider.

I also recently purchased a laptop with a poor quality screen. It helped show some colours were not visible on eg the forum page or the recent posts page. Using a darker shade of background colour now, though it looks garish.

On the bigger front, much closer to being able to move to a newer codebase (move from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 ) for the website should I choose to do so.

That leads to the question of whether there is any value for this place continuing to exist.

It is not being used, so its only purpose is as a historical archive - there are cheaper ways of managing that.

Well, the new year has started. Either less than 24 hours ago or more than a three of months ago depending on how we look at it.

The previous year was an eventful one, but it was also one where this website went from deep sleep to hibernation. or from hibernation to a comatose state.

Now the question is where we go from here. We can either stay where we are.

Or we can get new blood, new writers and release some new content.

I dont know about others but I would enjoy reading the following:

I am just putting down a few thoughts on future web development for this website.

Over the past year, there have been a number of changes and improvements:

1. Improved theme
2. Configurable theming options for a user's own blogs.
3. Improved front page - changed from a simple blog style to something more detailed in anticipation of changes bringing in more users and more regular content.
4. "Revival Digest" monthly email giving updates of new content on this site (on hold since 2/3 months because I want to automate the process, but new emails can be sent out when wanted.)
5. I have just revamped the "Tribune" chat interface to be more convenient on mobile platforms.

For the next year I plan for the improvements to continue.

Ok, after you put away your sunglasses, you will be able to take in the new colour scheme for The Revival website. (EDIT - ive changed it to more muted colours - nothing like the screenshot attached to this page.)

If you are reading this blog, this page may or may not be a different colour to the rest of the website.

Firstly, a new layer of paint has been applied to this website, making it all ... shiny. or radioactive.

On the plus side its big and bright, unlike the last iteration.

I have also added an option for members to choose from different colour schemes for their personal blog posts (and maybe in the future for other content too). To show off the feature I have chosen a non default colour scheme for my blog.

This site has moved to new servers.

There were a few problems on the day - for over 24 hours there wre login problems and then about an hour ago I managed to corrupt the database meaning that any posts in the 24 hours prior to this have been lost.

A few posts may be missing that were posted in the time between the previous backup and the database corruption.

Other than that I consider this to be a successful update to the server - it is way way way faster, and costs less.

On the bright side, I have set up automatic updates, so if anything happens we dont have to lose data all the way back to my last manual update (which this time was days, but in the past has been months).

In my ongoing saga to increase the performance of this site, I have tried a few new things now and hopefully things are now fast.

Let me know if we are fast yet.

Let me know if something/anything is acting weirdly

They're back.

for now.

I turned off a few features on the site a few days ago and since them the site seems to be performant.

(for the techy crowd, I turned off the nodejs integration. I think following an upgrade of nodejs, the site was experiencing some database locking which was then mushrooming into a more or less unusable site).

If you are still experiencing issues, please post them in comments.
 

People that visit this site regularly may have noticed that the fonts have recently been updated on here.

The main considerations for using fonts on this site are that they should:

In case you're wondering, the answer is 42.

That is the number of magazine items (excluding covers) I have now put back online. That is issues 1, 2 and 3. Go read them.