And so, the blog returns...
Come one, come all, to the brand new MCCreations blog! Be ready to receive updates of definite importance, learn about upcoming changes or, any other news. As you might have noticed, I’m not too much of a writer, but I still hope to provide the community with as much information about the goings on of the site as possible, so here we are.
Since we just launched the alpha of the new site and open sourced the frontend code, there’s quite a bit to talk about so lets dive right into it!
Goals
My goal with MCCreations has always been to provide the best place for Minecraft creators and Minecraft enjoyers to come together to share their experiences with the game we all love so much. That isn’t changing, and with the new site I should be able to get even closer to realizing that goal. However, that might sound a little bit contradictory considering I’ve been mostly radio silent this year, and to be entirely honest I don’t think that will change too much for now. My focus is entirely on building out this new site to be as awesome as it can be and that might mean some quiet time as I put my nose to the grindstone to get there. Once the site is at least feature complete with the old one is when I plan on really throwing my full force behind growing the awesome community here!
The Future
As I mentioned, there might be some quiet time here and there as I work to bring the new site all the way to 1.0. However, now that the cat is out of the bag so to speak I plan on being much more communicative about updates, upcoming changes and plans.
For now, my focus is going to be on getting the new site on par with the old one. Adding submissions, accounts, and things like that (this blog is part of that too!). Once those things are done, I have some plans for what new features I’d like to bring but I don’t want to share those until they’re a little more finalized. In the meantime, don’t hesitate to tell me things you’d like to see on MCCreations that you think would make your experience as a creator or player better.
Why Did This Take So Long
If you’re an awesome person, you might remember that I teased something about moving away from Wix and building a custom site all the way back in 2020! Obviously the version I teased way back then is not even close to what I launched last week, in fact they share literally 0% of the same code. The biggest reason for that huge delay was… I didn’t know what I was doing. Big surprise I’m sure. I started this project pretty much before I started college, and now I’m about to graduate. I’ve taken courses on web development, databases and security. I’ve learned new things, tried to remake the site, failed, learned new things again and tried to remake the site again. The ‘custom site’ idea has actually been through about 4-5 complete rewrites, and I mean complete. I switched languages, APIs, database softwares, hosts, pretty much anything you can think of. Every time I learned something new that I thought would be neat for MCCreations, I tried again. Until finally I knew enough to finish it. This current iteration of the site honestly only took about 6 months or so from when I started it and boy what a journey it’s been! I’m so happy with that I’ve managed to create and I hope you are too
Updates
Whew! Now that that’s out the way let’s talk about what’s new with MCCreations this week!
Typescript
The site frontend has been updated to Typescript! This means better error-checking and a much easier programming experience that should allow me to get more done faster. This is also a push to make the code more readable and easily understandable, which is something I will be working on over the coming weeks.
Mobile
Did you try and visit the alpha on your phone? You might have noticed it looked a bit horrible! I’ve been working on improving the site experience on mobile this week, and although it hasn’t been deployed yet I wanted to share some photos!
The featured slideshow has been altered to fit on mobile screens while still providing a good amount of information. Unfortunately the description had to go. You will be missed!
Playlists on the homepage now show 1.25 cards instead of 2.1. That means that the cards are much bigger and text is actually readable! Wahoo!
Cards on the maps page now take up the full width of the page, and their font size has been increased for even more readability. Although you can’t see it, the touch area has also been lengthened to the full width of the card, not just the length of the title
On mobile, the sidebar on the map page has been yote to the bottom of the description! Now you get a good amount of width and the same amount of information!
Well, that’s all for this week! I’ll see you all again soon!
-Ben Meier