TNTable

Tag: Website

  • New Website: 2026 Edition

    New Website: 2026 Edition

    The most significant change is under the hood.

    Hello everyone, long time to chat. I hope everyone is doing well.

    The Minecraft servers have not seen all that much action over the last year. More on that coming in a Year in Review post coming soon. Yeah I know it is nearly 2027 already but better late than never. This is precisely the reason I chose to redo the website on WordPress instead of keeping it as it was. Keep reading to learn why.

    Changes

    First, let’s get the changes out of the way. There are a few though nothing major.

    • All content relating to past servers and anything that a player could contribute to has been moved to the wiki. This is to reduce the burden on my for editing and coming up with content, as well as allow players to contribute/modify/correct what is written.
    • All posts from the old (12 years ago) Blogspot site have been archived here. Feel free to check them out, or don’t. I was a little excited about it and posted a lot and not much of it was useful. Though I suppose it filled a need at the time.
    • Some modifications and tweaks to the website’s design elements and spacing around them.

    That is pretty much it, I have been building this for the past month or so and I am happy to finally get to publish it. There may still be some changes coming up; WordPress makes editing much easier.

    If anybody feels inclined to write content for the website let me know! I can set you up. It should at the very least be somewhat related to the TNTable community so keep that in mind.

    Why

    Now for the why. The previous website was running on Grav, an open source flat-file CMS. Read more about it here, when I redid the website last. I am now moving all the websites I help create and manage over to WordPress. I really struggled to fully adopt a different stack due to the lack of time available to dedicate to learning another framework properly. This lead to a lot of false-starts and decision paralysis in a way. I would never start any project because it was too large to tackle, and I would stop supporting the websites I currently had because upkeep took too much effort. So websites would be deployed and then decay. I wanted to replace them all before any became an emergency. Then I would really have a problem.

    So I am moving everything to WordPress. I like it, the editor is plenty powerful for what I need, and there are a number of plugins available for the extensions of functionality I wanted.

    The friction to begin a project on the website, or start writing a new post is gone. I will actually be able to write the year in review posts much closer to the conclusion of the year rather than 9-10 months and a website redesign later.

    The Wiki

    The wiki remains ever important. There was lots of content on the old website that did not need to be there, the information was sitting there dormant instead of being alive and available for anybody to edit, improve, and contribute to. Mainly the server descriptions, but also moderator biographies. The server pages have received a small overhaul on the wiki and no longer point to a blog post, instead there is a download link.

    The server archive on the website serves as more of a timeline now with links to the wiki, map, and world download as well.

    Anyways, that’s all for now, stay tuned for the year in review post, as well as an upcoming service launch that I am very excited for.

  • 2024 TNTable Website Update

    2024 TNTable Website Update

    Now built with Grav!

    This post is considered out of date. This may be for a number of reasons, for example: the information may be out of date, the topic may be irrelevant now, or simply that the post is quite old but I wanted to keep the history.

    A whole new look and new backend for the TNTable Website, built on Grav! A modern, flat-file CMS.

    Hello lovely people, it has been a long time since I have posted an update. I have exciting news today, as you can see, there is a brand new website! It is still a work in progress so things may change. The motivation for this change is to make it easier to create new posts on the website, as well as have complete control over the design. This comes with some drawbacks, things may not render correctly for everyone on every device for now. I will be working on that slowly. Let me know if anything looks funky for you so I can fix it.

    The design of this website has been built from the ground up by me, no templates or anything, just HTML, CSS and Twig with Grav.

    The nitty-gritty details

    For those interested in the details, I used to build this website with Hugo, it is a powerful static site generator, but it is overkill. I did not have enough time to learn how to use Hugo and make custom Hugo templates & themes unfortunately. I found myself spending more time fixing things rather than writing posts and updates that I wanted to create. I also tried WordPress but it was a little too heavy for this use, and very restrictive when it comes to post types. Then I tried 11ty, which is also a static site generator with an easier to use template and theme creation process. But I still wanted something that made it easier to create new content and that would let me do it from an interface online.

    Enter Grav: A flat-file CMS with an easy to learn, but super powerful template and theming language. It takes the best of a CMS, meaning content it easier to create online through an interface, and combines it with the ease of customization seen in 11ty.

    That is all for now about the website, now I have a little announcement about the SMP server.

    SMP Map Reset

    Yes, it is official! The SMP map is being reset after two and a half years it is time. With the additions in Minecraft 1.21 it only makes sense. There is going to be a post explaining all the changes coming to the server, as well as all the new things in Minecraft from the past few version so keep an eye out for that.

    That is all for now, looking forward to seeing all of you on the server, launching on July 31st 2024.

  • Update – December 2020

    Update – December 2020

    Exciting things on the horizon

    A new server, updated website backend, more map storage!

    Hello everyone, I have some exciting news, or at least it is exciting for me. This post is kind of a collection of smaller insignificant news bits all rolled into one, so enjoy.

    First of all, and most exciting; I am building a newer, more powerful server. I hope you all like the poorly drawn on image I have included. This is fantastic news as it means the Minecraft server will have more power, and I will be able to run many more game servers upon request. For those that like the nitty gritty of computers I will include a parts list below as well the internet connection information. However this does mean there will be some downtime over the holiday season. I will post to Discord when this can be anticipated and how long it is expected to last. Please keep an eye out for that.

    Second of all, the website’s backend has been updated. This may not mean much for any of you, but it means a lot for me. You may notice marginally improved performance but it is likely imperceptible. It mainly makes my life easier, and I have figured out automatic deployment of updates. Please note however that the night mode colours are still being tweaked so bear with me on that.

    Third of all, the maps are now all finally available for your viewing and nostalgic pleasure. For those interested I have moved them from a file server on a VPS into an Object Storage bucket on Linode. This does mean incurring a monthly cost but it allows me to have all the map renders available, and know that the data is safe, so it is worth it for me. Please check the past maps out and feel free to share screenshots of anything that you find. I plan on migrating the current server map over to Linode as well but that won’t get its own post.

    If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Have some server specs. These are subject to change and will be updated accordingly.

    Server Info

    Part List

    PartProduct
    CPUAMD Ryzen 7 3700X – 8 Cores 16 Threads @ 65W
    MotherboardASUS ROG STRIX B450-F GAMING
    RAMG.Skill Ripjaw 64GB (4x16GB) 3200Mhz CL16 (32GB available for games)
    StorageSamsung 970 EVO Plus 1TB NVMe SSD
    Additional Storage3x 6TB WD Red HDD (NAS)
    Casebe quiet PURE BASE 6 (Reusing an Old Case)
    PSUbe quiet PURE BASE 6 (Reusing an Old Case)
    UPSEaton 5S 1500VA 900W (Runtime to be estimated after build)

    Last Updated December 14th, 2020

    Uplink Info

    • Copper Coaxial Cable Connection (I wish it was fibre but oh well)
    • 1Gbps Down/30Mbps Up
    • Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet

  • New Website

    This post is considered out of date. This may be for a number of reasons, for example: the information may be out of date, the topic may be irrelevant now, or simply that the post is quite old but I wanted to keep the history.

    Welcome to the new TNTable Website. The new site focuses on onboarding new users and being faster and more efficient with server resources. All the information for the server will be found here including rules, advancement information and the additional QoL crafting recipes that were added.