Walkthroughs
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Guess Who’s Back… Back Again… ZI’s Back… Tell a Friend!
December 30 2011 by Nathanial Rumphol-Janc
Hey folks. Zelda Informer has made it’s triumphant return roughly 48 hours earlier than expected. It’s been a long time has it not? First off, I want to thank all the fans that have been following us on Twitter and Facebook as we were keeping our communities alive. Also, the Official ZI Skype chat has been buzzing this whole time and we can’t thank the fans enough for sticking it out. More importantly, we hope you enjoyed our coverage that we sparingly provided over at our sister site, New Nintendo. All that timeline business was broken to the web there just as fast as it would of broken out here. We know it made an impact to, as we saw the traffic at New Nintendo steadily climb as our faithful kept close watch. We almost tipped 30k one day, which is a New Nintendo record.Of course, for the rest of the world that don’t follow us on twitter and facebook, it’s time we explain what happened and what exactly is about to happen again.
Why were we down?
Simple really. We were offline because of November’s extremely high server bill and our miscalculations on when we would receive advertising revenue. We were one month off. Now, we could of asked for donations and went that route - but as I tell even our staff: The time has come where we will simply suffer the consequences of not having the neccessary funding. In this case, it meant a near two week internet absence, one that likely killed off over half of our viewer base as they ran to competing sites for all their news.
So what now?
Essentially, ZI as you know it is about to undergo some severe changes. These are the biggest changes the site has arguably undergone since it’s inception in 2007. Even bigger than when I became joint owner and helped steer us to new heights. We’re talking, of course, about completely redoing ZI as we know it. It’s not simply a layout change, but rather the entire system.
If you recall, a month or two ago I had started a rather large donation drive to help fund a massive overhaul for the site. While many were confused and didn’t see a point in supporting the cause, we were determined to go ahead and push forward with it anyways. We took the money we had raised, along with some of the surplus (which, in hindsight, was a bad idea because we ended up being short causing downtime), and we are moving forward with it.
Now, everything we want done will not be functional out the gate. Forum user account to site integration, as an example, is put on the back burner. The main concentration right now is presenting our new look and making it function properly in our new backend system, and then porting everything over and making sure it all works as intended. That’s likely what we’ll be “relaunching” the site with on the 1st of January. Of course, we have other ideas and stuff that may or may not be working, such as site wide accounts (excluding the forums) that can do more than simply “comment” on a news post.
We have a lot of time and effort going into this initial overhaul, and I would hogging all the glory if I did not mention Damir’s efforts. Some of you may not like him and rightfully so, but he is the major catalyst of our present movement. He is doing, essentially, all of the code work. For free. He is porting the site. For Free. That’s how much he believes in what we are doing, what we all our doing, at ZI.
We hope on January first you all wake up from your hangovers to find ZI’s first step into a much brighter tomorrow. For now, welcome back. We will resume our regular posting on January 1st.
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