Submitted by David Goodwin
The Editorial Team and I are pleased to announce a major upgrade and
redesign to the AppleVis website.
When I created AppleVis ten years ago, I built it quickly and with little
idea of where the site would go... and certainly no expectation that it
would become as popular, valuable, and successful as our community has made
it.
AppleVis has surpassed all of my hopes and expectations, and I truly thank
everybody in our community for this.
Over the past decade, the content management system that's at the core of
the site has served us well. But in the past few years it has begun to show
its age and present numerous challenges and restrictions.
Consequently, for the last several months I've been working on a ground up
rebuild of AppleVis.
My goal was to retain as much of the site user experience as possible to how
it was before, but to also make some accessibility and usability
enhancements. It is my hope that low vision users in particular will enjoy
an improved experience, most notably on mobile devices.
While I've made every effort to keep the new site compatible with the old
one, there will undoubtedly be some teething problems - there will be things
that I missed during development and testing; there will be unforeseen
issues that only surface now the site is being used; there are things which
simply could not be addressed until the site went live; and there are things
which I delayed for practical or technical reasons .
In the past, our routine site maintenance and upgrades have involved mainly
under-the-hood improvements; however, because there has been no 'in place'
upgrade path this time, the process has been significantly more
involved--and it has necessitated some changes to features and
functionality.
While I was able to rebuild a lot of the old website's functionality on the
new platform, some features were not able to be carried over because of
technical limitations with the available tools; one of these features is the
auto-posting of new content to our Twitter accounts. I realize the value
that these posts have to many in our community, and I am currently exploring
possible alternatives to automate this process. In the meantime, our plan is
to manually tweet links to blog posts, podcast, and trending topics on our
forum.
All of that to say that you should expect to notice fixes and further
enhancements in the coming days, weeks, and months. I ask that you please
bear with us during this transition period.
Later this month, AppleVis will celebrate its tenth birthday. Our community
would not be what it is today without the support of all of our users and
visitors, and it is my hope that this upgrade will place AppleVis on firm
technological ground for many years to come.
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