The Holidays Are Upon Us
In a season without updates, what is one supposed to do!
Well, I’ll get right out and say it, this is not the announcement for some exciting new features coming to MCCreations. I wish I had something more I could share with y’all but this next update is shaping up to be quite the overhaul. Instead, I want to focus on how far we’ve come and the incredible stuff we’ve managed to accomplish this year.
The Friends We Made Along the Way
This year, MCCreations Next went truly live for the first time in late March when I added submission, and what a project that was! Trying to design a functional, easy to use submission form with all the information the site needs to serve your creations is a tough challenge. I’m still not particularly happy about how it works right now and a lot of improvements have been made since then!
Just a month later in April I integrated Meilisearch for a significantly improved searching experience. No longer do you have to type the exact title to find what you’re looking for, hoorah. With this update I also launched the tagging system for maps, which helps creators really define what their creation is without being bound by the whole “category” thing on other sites.
In June I finally managed to bring over the rest of the content from the old Wix site when I integrated Datapacks and Resourcepacks. I am super regretting how I did that right now but maybe that’s a story for another time. Anyway, with that update it was time to say goodbye to the old Wix site. Is what I would say if I hadn’t kept the site running for basically another 3 months for who knows why. I blame it on the stress of graduating college and starting a full time job.
Although, even to my own surprise, that didn’t slow down updates at all, because in July I pushed out probably the single biggest update this year, translations. Converting every single line of text across every page to be translatable was a huge undertaking, but the excitement of being able to recognize the global-ness of the Minecraft Community pushed me through in record time! The fact that people have taken the time to translate the site into their own language is still one of the coolest things ever. Thank you all so much!
In August I finally actually decommissioned the old Wix site and launched a huge giveaway to go along with it. This was the first ever Minecraft Event I’ve run and it was so much fun (and also very stressful). I’m looking to do a more of these in the future, but I need to take a little break from all the extroverted advertising haha. You’ve already heard me harp on about how well the giveaway went so I won’t talk your ears off again besides to say thank you so much!
In the midst of the giveaway in September I launched leaderboards, I super neat effort to get MCCreations into providing some tooling for map creators. Admittedly, leaderboards have completely flopped and I had to scale back a lot of their functionality in the past couple of months but its also helped me learn how to properly scope dev time versus actual usefulness of a feature. Maybe.
Spooky season didn’t stop me from making cool stuff because in October I launched the new MCCreations profiles and browse pages! The new profiles have been an interesting dive into giving users probably way too much freedom to design their profile how they want. Because of some issues with responsive design though, the new profiles can be a bit tough to work with. I have some ideas for improvements on the backburner so hopefully I can get those out to y’all soon!
Finally, for the last update of the year, I managed to do some pretty neat stuff. Admittedly notifications were a bit of a push to try and get people to use the site more, but they were also a super cool exploration into tech that I had never used before. They also led me to explore how other “friends” related features like direct messages work so maybe you’ll see that on the site at some point ;)
Stunningly Statistic!
Whew, that was a fast overview of all the awesome stuff that’s happened this year! I’m not done yet though! For a final hurrah lets go over some stuffs for MCCreations this year just for fun!
This year we had
10,000 visitors
23,000 page views
8,856 errors
200 deployments
455 commits
124 maps created
31 datapacks created
15 resourcepacks created
30 comments posted
2,000 downloads
Man, those are some truly huge numbers. I’m serious, it may be a small fraction of the traffic that other sites get but this is a huge sign for our continued success into the next year and a look at the wonderful support the Minecraft Community can give.
Signing Off
I know this year has been tough for Minecraft Creators throughout the world. With the slow degradation of our most popular source of traffic it can sometimes seem hopeless. Like no one will ever find and enjoy your creations. It’s during times like these that we need to remember the true scale of the impact we have on people. Even just 10 downloads is an absolutely huge number. I mean like do you even know 10 people!?
All joking aside though, the the continued love and creativity of the Minecraft Community is what keeps me going, so get out there and keep making awesome stuff. Oh and also happy holidays I guess.