Recent (Important) Upgrades to the MDN Website

MDN is please to announce the completion of improvements to our website. We began a journey last fall when Google (the 800-pound Internet gorilla) informed us that we needed to begin serving all of our webpages at an https (i.e. secure) address. That’s not to say there was anything inherently unsecure or bad about the way we were serving our webpages, but Google wanted it done. And what Google wants, Google gets. So we embarked on a path to both update the look and feel of the website and make our pages 100% secured. We launched our updated look and feel in early October, the first such update since the site began in 2009 (see MDN Launches Redesigned Web Site – We’d Like Your Feedback). The secure pages part took a bit longer that we expected. We finally got that part operating in early December (see Important Information About MDN Login). Since then we’ve been working (with a programmer) to iron out some of the issues that cropped up in switching to a new look and feel. It is those new elements that are now done, including (very importantly) a new mobile version of the site–making it easier to use on your smartphone, full excerpts on the home page, a return of the oil and gas price widgets, and the return of our Pinterest widget. We explain below…

Our mobile “theme” has been updated and should now reformat properly on your phone and tablet devices. Not that the previous version was bad–but this version is optimized to be fast and look better. Give it a look and let us know what you think.

Post excerpts were a thorn in our backside for months. MDN has always given away a generous amount of each article–everything up to the “more” link. When we upgraded the look and feel, something happened and only the headline showed for people not logged in. We were finally able to get the full post excerpt showing so that anybody, logged in or not, now sees it.

The commodity price widgets are back. In the new design they looked horrible. The widgets, which show the current price for West Texas Intermediate crude oil and the NYMEX (Henry Hub) price for natural gas are located along the right side of each page (lower down). They have been reformatted to look like they should look. Yipee!

Finally, our Pinterest widget is back, showing images of interest that we clip as we roam around the web each day. Click on the widget to view our Pinterest account and full size versions of the images we’ve clipped–each of them relevant to the Marcellus/Utica and/or the shale energy space in general.

We thank you for your patience as we’ve worked through this process. It took longer than we wanted.

If you spot something that you believe is not right, or if you have suggestions for how we can further improve the user experience, drop Jim a line at: [email protected].