The Quebsite is Fucked, Soz
Dear readers,
I am here to notes app apologize for the fact the Quebsite is on the fritz. We understand that the website is an essential way that many Reedies, both past and present, keep up with the dear olde Quest. While the Quebsite has only been live since 2012, we have all come to expect the articles posted in a timely manner to the Quebsite for our reading and archival pleasure.
Understandably, many are confused why this is not currently the case, especially if we have a website that is seemingly live and bare-minimum functional. I am here to explain in extremely non-technical terms what the current qualms we have with our website are, which problems we are working to solve, and how we might go about solving them.
As for our ‘current’ website, which is hosted on WordPress, we’ve been having issues with the website functionality since this summer. Most obviously, the website is ugly. While we try not to be too superficial over at the Quest, an ugly website is an ugly website. The categories are fucked up, the font is terrible, and even the staff isn’t correct. No one is happy with this in the slightest, and since the original theme is no longer available (hence the ugly one), we’ve had an issue finding a suitable replacement. Also, with the current website, it’s necessary to have a dedicated webmaster to do all the technical crap that we don’t want to do as editors. Our job is already tedious enough. However, we don’t have the money to pay a webmaster, and we don’t want to have to consistently rely on the generosity of a Reedie to donate their time to work as a webmaster; we would rather have the ability to do it ourselves and bring in computer services or other resources on a PRN basis, so to speak.
We thought, great! We should change platforms. As one of our Queditors has a decent amount of experience with websites and Squarespace, not blaming anyone (cough, me, cough), we decided to move over to Squarespace. Initially, it went well. Quite a few technical issues cropped up that I was able to fix with only a couple of hours of messing around on the website, and all was going to plan. The biggest issue we thought we would face would be importing some 800-odd articles to the new platform, which would be, of course, tedious and awful. Thankfully, I found a way to move over the articles and everyone cheered. However, we realized there are two major issues: the articles have no attached authors, and they’re in an index that is not linked to the existing page.
Attaching authors is the easy part, even though the standing issue is that it will take a whole lot of time and effort to do. The actual difficult part is that the index is not linked to the existing page, and that there is no way to merge the two indexes. Basically, Squarespace is so easy to navigate for non-techy people that they kind of forgot to include a major feature, leaving no clear path of recourse. If we link the new index to the main pages, we will not have past articles linked, and that’s not particularly helpful either. Oops. Lol. In theory, there could be some sort of program that could automate the index merge process for us instead of doing it manually, but after some adventures in the Reed CS Discord, we have no takers. Fall break project, anyone?
Anyway, that’s my explanation for what’s going on. If anyone can help, you are free to email either me or the official quest@reed.edu email. If not, please just sit tight.
Much obliged,
Semi-but-not-irredeemably-disgraced-by-present-blunder-current-Queditor Piper S. McKeever
