SagaJET 2.0
One year ago today, SagaJET was officially launched. Back then, we were just a small group of people with a crazy idea of making a website to help JETs in Saga-ken communicate with each other and helping the rest of the world learn more about our prefecture (or at least helping them figure out we actually exist). That’s pretty much what we are one year later, only now we’re a small group of people with a shiny new website. This is SagaJET, version 2.0.
Don’t adjust your monitors
The first thing you’ll notice about the new SagaJET is the new design. Where the previous design was bold and flamingly orange, this look is meant to be subtly striking (it is “prime rib,” after all), usable and definitely not flamingly orange. There are a couple of points in the new design worth elaborating on.
First, if things look really weird, you might have to clear the cache of your web browser of choice to make sure you’re not seeing parts of the new site layered on top of the old site.
Second, this new look is based on a fixed width layout. That means that the content will always be 740 pixels wide rather than expanding and contracting to fit your screen like the old design did. Hopefully the switch to a fixed width design will improve readability; users with small screens won’t have to scroll horizontally to see content like they may have had to before, and users with large screens won’t have to move their eyes so far to get to the end of a line. Users with medium screens: things will look pretty much the same.
Finally, we’re still working out some kinks in the new version, so if you see anything that’s broken, please let us know and we’ll fix it.
Gone to the blogs
After you’ve gotten used to the new look of the site, you’ll start noticing several very blog-like features have crept onto SagaJET. In fact, SagaJET has always had one foot in the blogging world (new articles getting posted in certain categories in chronological order); we’ve plunged in head-first with the new version. SagaJET is now powered by WordPress, an excellent (and free) blog publishing tool, and that swtich has allowed us to do things we never could before. Highlights follow.
- SagaJET readers can now comment on any article on the site, just like on a blog. To make sure commenters are accountable for what they write, you have to be logged in to post a comment, but if you have an account on the message board, you can use that login information to post a comment. Also check out the comments policy if you’re curious about that sort of thing (the short story: don’t post anything illegal).
- Since all of our content now lives in one database rather than in hundreds of HTML files, we can do some pretty interesting things with it. The best example we’ve come up with so far: the name of the author of every article is now a link; follow that link to see a list of everything that author has written.
- Using a blogging system makes it much easier to post new articles, which will significantly reduce the time it takes to get new articles posted. So now you have even more incentive to submit an article for publication (if you’ve submitted one in the past few weeks and it hasn’t been posted, it will be soon; we’ve had our redesign blinders on for the past month or so).
Ready, go
There are many more features in the new version of SagaJET, but it’s pushing 1 a.m. as I write this, so talking about those will have to wait for another time. If you’re so inclined, leave a comment to let us know what you think about the new site and what you’d like to see in it.
And happy birthday, SagaJET.