QUESTION · SATURDAY Q&A

I heard there is a countdown to a big launch today. Are you excited?

ASKED BY · Craig Macfarlane · BOSTON, MA · 31 OCT 2026 · ▶ 00:10:44

THE PANEL'S ANSWER
Craig Macfarlane

Expressed excitement about the website launch and announced a workshop 30 minutes after the show where community members will provide feedback on the new website.

Ronny Hofsøy

Detailed the final launch preparations, including verification tools, URL management for 8,000+ elements, and use of AI-driven automation and badges for gamification.

Summarised by AI from what the panel said. Watch the moment for the full answer.

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

From the transcript.

Machine-transcribed, so it may contain errors. Every timestamp opens the episode at that second.

10:43No comments on that? We'll just move on, I guess, then. I was just thinking we could talk openly about that, but we can circle back. All right. Craig McFarlane. I'm in question reader mode. Go ahead, Courtney. What do we got next? Well, Mr. Glad you pointed it out. Mr. Craig McFarlane, who's here on the panel this morning from Boston, Massachusetts. She says, I heard there is a countdown to a big launch today.

11:09Are you excited? Sounds like a Cochran. Go ahead, Craig. I'm certainly excited. I'm not wondering all the heavy lifting. Ronnie Hofstra here can speak to more of the details, but I'm excited to finally get to the final countdown. And we're going to do a workshop right after the show today, or 30 minutes after the show. where everybody can jump in and notice things.

11:38And with any launch like this, we need a whole bunch of set of eyes, diversity of how people look at things or interact with something to say, hey, that word you used there doesn't make me think I could click on it or whatever it is. We all see things slightly differently. So having a whole bunch of eyes on it would be really helpful.

12:01So Ronnie, I think you can probably explain sort of the final machinations of pulling the trigger, as it were? Yeah, so we're finalizing all the latest changes and we made some tools to make sure that we kind of catch every thing from the previous website and have that modified and and kind of verified and approved by community members that are going to be doing that during the workshop.

12:35And the goal is to have as much as possible finished later today. So we start 30 minutes after this show ends. And we just want as many as possible to get in there. And if you are going in there, you will also see one of the features on the new website, which is badges. badges and we have put some gamification into this to make it a little bit more interesting.

13:02And all that shows up for the workshop later today on after hours is getting that badge. And we're also planning to have more of these badges being put into work later on. And the big thing is that we've made a tool using AI to make sure that we manage all these these vast amount of URLs, content pieces that are going to be transformed into the

13:33new website. Some of them have their own URLs. We're also taking care of all the transitions. So we're depending on good documentation, for instance, for Google Search Console so that we have all the site maps in place and can control every part of the new site. We can even if there is an emergency, we can like the big rocket companies, we can shut

13:59it down for a minute or two and we can disable and enable stuff just like you do on a real big website. I think we have the recent count up is like we have around 8,000 elements that are going to be managed. Most of that is automatically handled. Some of them are thrown away, like the old kind of cards that came from the old site.

14:26So there's a lot of stuff coming from the old website. And one of the things I did was actually to create a plugin for the old site to export every possible URL that Search Engine could have been or was open to the public. public, and that is then being put into some manual lists and some do's and don'ts and merged together to a tool that we're going to use later today to manage all these changes.

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