New Website & What's To Come!

For those that have visited this website before last night, you may have noticed the website looks completely different now. This is because I made the decision to release the new rebuilt website publicly last night, September 2nd, 2023. Admittedly, there are still bugs I am finding and improvements to be made. However, I wanted to release the new website so that our revamped link structure has time to register with search engines such as Google for SEO optimization. I also believe the website is in a decent spot for initial release.

What Is Deaconn Now?

Before last night, Deaconn's website was a personal portfolio for Christian Deacon and ran an older website made with Django and Python. I've since then transformed Deaconn into a new community and future software developer with the goal to bring together and empower developers, and engineers. Additionally, Deaconn will most likely become a freelancing business in the future while also offering their own services.

There are still many unknowns for what services we'll be offering exclusively, but my end goal is to create services developers and engineers will find both useful and helpful to the technologies they're working with. This may range from applications such as monitoring and logging tools to frameworks and APIs. I will provide more details on this when the time comes and I find something we can create.

New Website Features

The rebuilt website ships with a few new features including the following and an overhauled blog system.

• A login system that supports signing in and/or creating accounts through GitHub, Google, and Discord.
• A general profile which includes an About Me section.
• The ability to showcase your own projects, experiences, and skills for others to see on your profile.
• A new services system for official services and projects under Deaconn.

One of my goals for the new website was to allow users to build a personalized portfolio. I was excited to utilize this new feature myself for my personal portfolio!

Our Current & Future Services

With the exception of Packet Batch, I now have five major, unfinished projects and services under my belt that I am working on which includes Deaconn, The Modding Community, Best Mods, Best Servers, and Gamecom. Additionally, The Modding Community has even more individual projects including a video game! Many of these project's development hasn't even started yet, sadly. However, I'm expecting to start working on them in the next few months.

Unfortunately, I haven't made as much progress as I would have liked in the past year since founding The Modding Community because of how highly I underestimated development for these projects which included learning completely new web frameworks such as Next.JS, TypeScript, React, and TailwindCSS, life complications, and burnouts. Thankfully, I had expectations of working on these projects in the long run, and I am still very motivated! I'm just making sure to take development slow to ensure I don't burn out as easily.

Another issue I've been facing is how to group these projects. Initially, Deaconn and The Modding Community were going to be completely separate entities and Best Mods, Best Servers, and Gamecom would become services under The Modding Community. However, after rethinking about it from a business standpoint, I would rather have The Modding Community and its services under Deaconn directly. Best Mods, Best Servers, and Gamecom are still going to be related to The Modding Community, but they will be officially under Deaconn as open source services.

As of right now, there are no services exclusive to just Deaconn, but I do have some ideas such as creating open source network monitoring software which I'll go more into detail about another time.

To be clear, our current services are the following.

1. Packet Batch
2. The Modding Community
3. Best Mods
4. Best Servers
5. Gamecom

What's Next?

There's a lot to do with many of Deaconn's different services, but in regards to Deaconn directly, I want to start utilizing the blog by creating informative articles on various subjects within technology along with provide updates on development and its services. Additionally, I have the following improvements planned for the website

• Creating an official banner for Deaconn to use as the website's embedded image and on social media accounts.
• Improving the overall design and image choices.
• Improving front-end error handling.
• Improving front-end flow.
• Allowing users to submit comments on articles.
• Finishing the About Us page, specifically the "Meet Our Team" and "Meet Our Partners" blocks.
• Allowing users to link multiple authentication providers to a single user.
• Implementing auto-save functionality so that your progress on content posts won't be lost on refresh.
• Saving contents of articles and services to a GitHub repository as backups since all content is written with Markdown syntax.

Conclusion

There is still a lot to be done, but I believe this new website release is a big stepping stone to Deaconn and its service's future. I've become a lot more efficient with the web frameworks I'm using as well. Therefore, I have confidence I'll be able to make a lot more progress in the next year and I am really excited!

It has been a while since I've written articles and updates on what I'm working on and technologies that would help others. However, I really want to get back into it! It has been difficult because I spend so much time programming and I just don't have the energy to then write long, informative articles on a blog.

Thank you for reading!