Dear friends,
On Saturday, Chip and her staff are unveiling two major upgrades to MFO. The ceremony takes place about 10:30 a.m. EST, Saturday, September 24.
We are moving to a more powerful, more secure server at a new host. While our experience with Green Geeks has been pretty positive, our current shared server is not a state-of-the-art piece of equipment and customer support is ... hmmm, clunky.
We are changing the layout of our monthly issue. Currently, we're one, 35-page long scroll. That's an artifact of our early days where the first cover essay I wrote for FundAlarm was 2.5 pages long. The new layout will function much more like a magazine with a table of contents that has the stories laid out in a grid and a separate homepage for each author, so folks interested in scanning everything that, say, Sam has written, will be easily able to do so. We know that some folks have grown fond of the scroll, so we'll maintain that option, too. On the right-hand side, you'll see a "view as continuous page" option for each issue.
The new style looks pretty nice and we think it will made it easier to navigate and use. With time we'll also offer a Kindle e-book version of each monthly essay as part of the ongoing effort to broaden our reach. The new layout will make that transition easier, too.
The appearance of the discussion board is not changing. The most radical thing we're contemplating for the discussion board is slightly widening the blue and green header since, on some monitors, it's only about half the width of the screen. Likewise, the rest of the site (about us, contact, search tools) won't be touched.
Chip and her guys intend to push the button around 10:30 a.m. Saturday, weather and the spirits of the internet permitting. Our new server will be online within 20 minutes or so. The hangup is that we need all of the backbone servers on the internet to notice that we've moved to a new I.P. (internet protocol, if you care) address. At the moment we switch servers, the team sets off a sort of cyber-flare that calls out "over here! Over here!" Some of the servers will notice us almost immediately and begin rerouting traffic to the new location; others might take a while. Folks whose "go to mutualfundobserver.com" requests get routed through those servers will see a static "we're moving, hit refresh or try back in a few minutes" sort of message.
Our
Premium Site will not be affected.
We've been working really hard behind the scenes on this one. I hope you like.
David
Comments
Thanks to David, Chip, and the MFO gang for an ongoing job well-done.
Speaking as someone who's been involved in this kind of stuff on many a mission-critical system, may the gremlins take the weekend off and your migration happen seamlessly and without problems!!! *fingers crossed*
Edit to add that I went back and looked at the blue vs. the green ribbon with my settings. The wrap inside the green seems related to the actual width of the blue ribbon. If so, widening the blue ribbon without changing the text might remove the wrap around inside the green ribbon. (i.e., I'd better stay out of this for now.)
Please let me know if you have any problems with it.
I did notice that the "Search MFO" does not seem to work from the new layout of the monthly issue.
@FundStudent I think we fixed the Search, too. It's not perfect, but it's working again.
Thanks for the feedback. It sure helps a lot.