Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

The New Slope of Hope

By -

I will begin this important post with a quote from the movie Apollo 13:

apollo

That, better than anything else, summarizes the old Slope of Hope. It was built, piece by piece, step by step, with no particular plan in mind, over many years. It did its job well, but it lived well past its prime and, technologically, fell far behind the times. But it was a good ship.

I introduce you now to our new ship – the new Slope of Hope. This system was built new from the ground up. We started with a blank sheet of paper and blank hard drives and went from there.

The vast majority of improvements are invisible to the eye. I wanted to take this opportunity, however, to illustrate a few differences between the old and new Slope to get you acquainted with our new home. (more…)

Up and Running

By -

Well, so far, so good. I’ve been through enough product launches to get suitably nervous about them. Last night, things were going a bit off the rails (particularly when WordPress decided it would be a great idea to retweet notifications for every post I’ve ever made, which blew up some people’s cell phones).

After an early-morning push today, however, it seems like things are working more or less As God Intended. I’m still hunting every corner of the site for problems, and if  you see any, please email me (there is no guarantee I’ll notice your remark in comments). And please, no matter what, watch this quick two minute video which gives a spiffy overview:

A Final Warning

By -

I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll say it one final time: after the close on Friday, we’re going to throw the switch. The old site goes dark and the new site comes up. There are endless scenarios:

+ Best Case: everything runs perfectly, and the only change you see is a beautiful new site.

+ Worst Case: Slope is totally down, and you get a 404 error all weekend.

+ Probable Case: the site will be up, but there will be some snags, problems, and bugs we need to frantically fix (because, cough cough, so few people helped me test, although I begged endlessly…….)

Anyway, I just wanted to tell as many of you as possible. Good luck to us all!

Brace Yourselves

By -

It was almost a year ago that I got an email from a local developer who pointed out a variety of important ways Slope could be improved. Since then, particularly over the past few months, my team and I have been hard at work on the new Slope.

If all goes as planned, this Friday, May 4, we’ll shut down the old system and start up the new. I am deliberating doing this after the close on Friday, just in case we have some snags (or a complete disaster). I wanted to warn you well in advance that if things look totally different (best case) or if you get a 404 Page Not Found error (worst case), it’s because of what we’re doing. Remember the day!

may4 (more…)

Last Chance to Test

By -

The launch of the new Slope of Hope is, God willing, drawing close. After way more time and way more money than I ever expected, it is just about done, but I really want to make sure we get as many kinks out as possible before the launch. Please, for YOUR sake, test the site, because I will be far, far more attentive now to your weird-ass problem with your Firefox browser on a Commodore 64 than I will after we are live. I want to trace down oddities NOW, not once we’re in production. Please! With sugar on top.

The location of the new site is http://dev.slopeofhope.com. Go ahead and click that link to fire it up. Bang on it. Play with it. See what you can break.

homepage (more…)