Updates

Events and Celebrations Calendar Update!

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As the title very says, this is the Events and Celebrations Calendar Update!

I’m personally very, very excited for this update as it’s one of those ideas that’s been floating around my mind since the very first version of the site. On the front page of the first ever iteration of this site, we made this little announcement on our first holiday season officially together as “Rune.Academy”:

Magical Fae Yule Update Goals~


As the wondrous holiday season approaches, we here at Rune.Academy are doing our best to turn the dream of everything this website can become a reality. For the holiday season, we’re planning on releasing a reworking of the website mainframe and stability. New beta testing of the behind the scenes features will also begin. In the new year, one of the first new features will be a comprehensive, accessible, and fully functional calendar of magical holidays celebrated all around the globe.

-Rune.Academy (Holiday Season, 2017)

Oh, how naive, green, and full of hope were we to think that we’d be done with that entire checklist by the end of that holiday season. We had absolutely no idea what this dear endeavor had in store for us and just how much it would test our resolve to believe in it… Rune.Academy took us on an absolute roller coaster ride.

We were learning on our feet mastering disciplines we never before thought we’d need. (I personally had rebuild the entire site from almost scratch twice now.) It’s been annoying and insane… but completely and absolutely necessary. As if the powers that be wanted us to get real smart real fast! (Or as smart as we could get in the time allotted to us anyway.)

And now that almost all of the priority items on that list are well on being out of the way, this Events and Celebrations Calendar Update is one of the first non-priority updates that I was completely ecstatic to jump on.

I found an interesting calendar base that looked correct enough but was still missing a vast majority of the holidays we personally practice. I knew I could easily double check, correct, and then continue to heavily add to it and flesh it out. I’m currently in the process of still adding holidays, and likely will be for a long time, but it’ll also be a good place to keep track of group activities and events we’re planning on attending. Now I’m happy to be able to provide you all with a calendar that you all can follow along with at home… view it here!!

Massive Maintenance Mode Update

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Welcome to the Massive Maintenance Mode Update!! To explain this update, you first have to understand that most of Rune.Academy’s look and feel info as well as database info was lost in the crash, so we rebuilt whatever we could find and remember. We ended up completely moving providers, which I may have failed to mention in the previous updates, because the backups the previous one made only backed up the bare minimum and weren’t doing their job correctly in archiving everything they were supposed to be archiving (mainly databases… which means we lost basically all of our old updates posts unless they were archived by a third party, which is how we got back whatever we currently have back,). There’s still a few things left to remake, namely java-script interactives, but that’ll have to be done in later updates, as they’re currently a lot less pressing. This update is being posted for bookkeeping purposes and to update everyone on board while the website is still down in maintenance mode.

Everything was worked on at the same time, throughout the duration of a few months (with the site being in maintenance mode for close to a year now), so no dates will be given for any of these. But as of today, this is where everything stands regarding the rebuild:

  • All old pages have been reinstated, even if some are still blank, all old links are currently live again.
  • SSL Cert is back up again. New laws make it so those have to be manually redone every year now so that’s annoying. But the new SSL comes with a fancy-shmancy emblem that we placed at the footer of the site.
  • Suggestion box – don’t use it yet. Yikes.
  • Work in progress images were added to all side menus that are clearly still works in progress. The bookcase menu still clearly has to be taken a gander at with a second pair of eyeballs to reconfirm that it looks wonky.
  • All fonts work now! All site colors are all set and work now! There’s an odd berry purple that pops up in some places but it’s kind of pretty so I’m leaving it. It looks like the light purple of the above sweet treats.
  • New features like the lexicon and calendar have begun work!
  • The about-us section has been redone and more has been added in. It’ll have to be redone again because I’m actually waiting for some new valuable information to go through. (Currently at a 1/3 on that.) Will also be placed in the footer when that’s done.
  • Donation buttons are back up and functioning. They’ve also been placed in the footer. And the page is back.
  • The Art-Gallery is functional now! Yay! I placed all of the old website illustrations there for a nice nostalgia trip later on in years. Here’s a screenshot where you can also see the current footer. The emblems on the bottom are for gallery display. The text will be changed later.
  • The updates section has been completely fixed aside from the aforementioned sidebar. Might place a header image in there later but that’s not currently a priority.
  • FAQ was checked again even though there wasn’t really anything broken there.
  • The Homepage is still broken. updates won’t save. No idea why because the rest of the site is clearly being worked on and updated perfectly fine. I’m wondering if I should just make a completely new homepage and then delete the old one…
  • A LOT of features have been removed form the back-end to lessen clutter. They’ll be added back once we’re ready for them. There’s really no need for them to be sitting around back there without being used.
  • User login pages have been dismantled so that they can be made completely from scratch again. Yikes again.

Aside from that, March is the month that everyone is celebrating their birthdays here! So happy birthday to everyone and their mother! And happy birthday to me too soon! See you in the next update!