Welcome to the new Hornets247.com


All may look pretty much the same around here, but I assure you that a lot done changed.

I’ll run through the newness for you in a second,  but first and foremost, like I mentioned on Thursday, you may need to re-register with the site since we were only able to transfer a handful of user accounts from the old system. If you have ever posted a Journal article, your account has been transferred and you should have received an e-mail from me this morning with your login details. If that doesn’t include you, please re-register here. Contact is via this page if you have any problems. And again, our apologies for the inconvenience.

Right, on to the highlights:

  1. We’ve gone ahead and added a forum! Yes, there’s already a great Hornets forum out there (what up, HR!), but you guys kept asking for a 247 discussion board and we had to shut you up somehow ;-). We’ll start small with this and see if it makes sense. The forum will be the place for  informal discussion, posting quick links, asking questions, throwing out rumors, etc. It’s all new to us, so let us know what you think and how we can improve it.
  2. We’ve kept the Journals section but changed up the submission process a little, feedback is welcome on that. Note that the Journals section is for anyone who wants to write blog-style articles and have them read by lots of people. We expect a high level of quality there. Check here for more info.
  3. We have a new comment system, complete with ratings and nested responses. As before, you can comment on practically every piece of content published on the site, from blog posts to journal articles to news items to upcoming events. Unfortunately, we were unable to transfer your old comments to the new system. Our sincerest apologies for that. You can blame me since the old system I built was pretty shoddy and wouldn’t play nice when it came to comment migration.
  4. We’ve combined the old News and Lagniappe sections into one big news section. If there’s an article worth reading about the Hornets online, we’ll find it fast and list it there. You’ll also see a list of the latest news headlines in the sidebar on the homepage.
  5. We now have a polling system. You should see our first poll question in the sidebar to the right. Go nuts.

All good methinks, but the best thing about this new system we’re running is that it affords us the flexibility to add many additional features down the road. We have some other things in the pipeline, and I’m sure you guys will continue to give us excellent ideas for improving the site.

A couple of other things to mention:

  • We’ve gotten rid of the on-site avatars and jumped aboard the Gravatar steamship. Head on over to Gravatar.com if you want to have an image associated with the e-mail address you registered with us. That image will show on your profile (example) and beside your postings on the site.
  • You might also want to double-check any of our RSS feeds you’ve been using. A few of them changed address. You can see the full listing of our feeds here.
  • Your first comment will be held for moderation. Once we approve it, you’ll be able to comment freely in future.

Let us know if you spot any bugs. Still a few kinks to be worked out. Get at us in the comments.


23 responses to “Welcome to the new Hornets247.com”

  1. This maybe just me, but when registering and replying to a post in the forum, when I submitted my reply it timed out several times.

    Happened again trying to post this.

    Otherwise the site looks fantastic.

  2. Thanks, Buzz. It looks like we’re still having some weird load problems, but methinks it’s getting better. Earlier I couldn’t access the site at all but Ryan could. It may just be some type of nameserver propagation thing, if that makes any sense.

    I’m keeping an eye on it.

  3. Niall- looks great love new features. One thing is that you can repeatedly vote on the poll once you reload home page… also had timed out error

  4. Is there a link for a ‘mobile’ view, like to view on a phone?

    Timeout thing is happening to me with this post.

    • No mobile view yet. We might add something like that in future. Now that we’re running WordPress we can take advantage of lots of great plugins. There’s surely one for creating a mobile version of a site.

    • Thanks for the timeout reports. I’m going to sit on it for the evening since it was doing the same for me earlier but has since improved.

      If anyone is still having problems in the morning, I’ll look deeper into it. Apologies for any inconvenience in the meantime.

  5. Great work guys, putting me to shame on the blogging. A forum? Wow well done guys!

    Here’s to a successful change for Hornets247 and the Hornets themselves, maybe both of you make the playoffs…

  6. Nice work Niall! although the background is the same, the interface looks smarter and the design of the windows look cleaner 😀 its going to be a fun year!! Geaux Hornets!

  7. Are there any plans to have the logged in page a list of latest updates like it used to be pre-update? I really liked the ability to quickly see if anything new, comments or post-wise, had occurred since my last login. For us addicts who check the site a couple dozen times a day, it would be nice to have some easy way like that to check for changes. Thanks for all the great work.

    • No immediate plans, but I would like to bring back the “Recent Activity” list at some point. The system we’re running is called WordPress, which allows us to do lots of things (like nested comments and polls) really easily, but compiling all recent posts to the site (blogs + comments + journals + news + events + forum posts) into one list proved a bit tricky. That’s something I’ll have to build from scratch myself, and it make take a while to figure it all out.

      • Thanks for the info. I know how coding site stuff can go, I look forward to seeing it added, but can certainly be patient with the development. Thanks again for all the work on the site.

  8. Good job Niall. The forum is a nice addition and the comment system is everything I’ve dreamed of. Are the links still going to say glorious, magnificent, and exceptional? And who are the official writers for the 2K10-11 season?

    • Thanks!

      The links won’t be saying those things anymore. I couldn’t figure out how to do that with WordPress. Maybe I’ll try again some day when I’m bored.

      And I believe the official writers are Ryan, Joe and Michael, though I’ve stepped away from the day-to-day operations of the site so I’m not the best source of info on that.

  9. just seeing if my comment went through really glad the site was redone ive been trying to join for months but could never get the site to accept my info really psyched for the season

  10. Everything is better with excessive moderation. Time-out thingy just hit me as well. Just like Niall to put me in time-out.

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